Bound to happen

Giovanni our lovely neighbour returned to Rome about the same time we arrived here.  He’s away for almost 2 weeks.  He messaged us to say he’s been feeding a cat and 2 kittens, he’d left them 3 dishes of biscuits and hoped they’d come down to our house and we would feed them. I think it was around midday on Thursday that the kittens pitched up and by early evening the mother, still a kitten herself, arrived.

Luckily we had a few tins of cat food in the cupboard so we were able to feed them.

All 3 cats are in good condition, clean, friendly and very sweet.  They soon discovered the delights of the hotel Splendido on the terrace, the comfy pizza oven and the cat apartment, not to mention the sofas and dining chairs.  The little ones are playful and the mother almost brave enough to climb onto my knee.  There has been a lot of purring.

But what’s going to happen in November when we leave.  Mario was enraged when he saw the cats here and told us not to feed them.  He’s giving me the message he doesn’t want to feed them while we were away, as he did when we had Vincenzo.  When I tackled him last year about this he said of course he’d feed the cat and not for the money we pay him, he does it from his heart.  A week after we left he took the cat, the food we’d provided, dishes and our cat carrier to his house, we got none of them back.  

It’s a dilemma.  Even if the cats go back to Giovanni next week we know he won’t make any provision for them over the winter.  I hate this cruel Italian attitude towards animals. I have mentioned before that our Comune sent out a directive banning the feeding of stray animals. Fortunately an animal welfare organisation stepped in and put a stop to it. The Comune should educate people how to care for pets and promote a sterilisation programme that would reduce numbers but almost all the Italian men I know think this is wrong, that’s a surprise not.

We love having cat company again but we are setting ourselves up for more stress and heartbreak.