We didn't expect there to be so much snow, though perhaps we should have guessed when our new neighbours talked to us enthusiastically about the attractions of the village festa, held each year in early August, and the only time that the church opens its doors to celebrate our village Madonna. The festa celebrates the Madonna of the Snows.

Snow we've had, in skipfuls. We hibernated for about three days and then, when there was no sign of the deep white stuff disappearing, enlisted the help of good neighbours Franco, with his snow shovel, and then Gianni, with his snow-blower, to dig us out. A snow-blower! Now there's a boy's toy worth having. Both Franco and Gianni are smallholders, and they've assured us as we dug and blew that snow this deep is an unusual occurrence around here. So why has Gianni got a snow blower then? Ah, he used to be a train driver; and he's got the biggest tractor around here too.

Here, is a small hamlet situated 1500’ above sea level in the Marche region of Italy. We’re near the top of a small mountain in the foothills of the Apennines and we look out towards the Adriatic Sea in one direction and towards some seriously high and sublime mountains in the other. The seriously high mountains are still covered in snow, but as I write this in late February, the snow has just about gone from all parts of our garden, though it still lingers in the hedgerows that don’t get any sun.

We've moved from a five acre garden in North Cumbria to a precipitous jungle of about an acre. We've swapped full-time working in big organisations for doing the work that we want to do. We've swapped Wordsworth and Coleridge for Petrarch and Dante. Quite literally, because our bathroom window faces the glorious Monte Catria, said to be the model for Dante's 'hump' in The Divine Comedy.

Today, now that we can move about again, we’re clearing weed trees so that we can make an orto. Not all trees are good – and few of ours seem to be any good at all. This jungle was impenetrable throughout the late summer and autumn of last year when we first moved into the house; but now, with all the brambles, nettles and other stuff that scratches and clings lovingly to my legs as I try to get through it to find some trees that we might actually want to keep, we can, with the help of machete, loppers, wire-cutters and bow-saw, start to see what sort of garden we’ve got and what we can do about making our orto.

So what's an orto? It's a vegetable garden. It's the place where we intend to grow everything that wants to grow so that we can eat it. In Cumbria we kept peafowl, guineafowl and chickens that reverted to jungle fowl over several generations and our vegetable gardens were a battlefield where we never won. Here, we'll keep no animals ourselves, but we'll need to keep an eye on the deer, porcupine and wild boar who all subscribe the 'what's yours is mine' principle.

It's a bit early yet to consider what we're going to grow, though we're already having fantasies about all the red, yellow, purple and green stuff that's going to be dropping into our hands and leaping into our arms in about three or four months time. Besides, we've got to return to Cumbria in March for the Words by the Water literature festival, so actions now are all about ground clearance so that we can dig, prepare and then plant when we return.

Though not so well-known as our northern regional neighbour Emilia Romagna, Le Marche is renowned in Italy for its food and its wines, especially the subtle and crisp white Verdicchio and the powerful and full-bodied red Conero (supposedly drunk by Hannibal's men and elephants on their way to victories over Rome). High quality cheeses, fruit, olives and olive oil, vegetables and meat are all passionately produced and argued about in the markets, the kitchens and over tables. Especially renowned immediately around our comune are the fungi and truffles and all the local towns have a sagra del tartufo in the autumn where the prices of walnut sized white truffles and the readiness of local people to buy them make our jaws drop. We were honoured by Gianni last month who gave us a jam jar containing three black truffles he'd hunted and Franco, appearing with a wicker basket filled with more than twenty different types of mushroom, has promised to teach us to collect fungi ourselves in the woods higher up the mountain next year.

Our new neighbours are already asking about our intentions for the garden and we'll do our best to build on their advice and experience of the local terre and meteo. Everybody in the village seems to be a smallholder and nearly all of them make enough of their own wine to keep them going through the year. The local towns and markets showcase the produce of local artisan growers and just around the mountain from us is a farm where they proclaim on the sign at their gate that 'everything we produce is bio'.

I needed Cynthia to translate that because my Italian's not good enough yet. Cynthia? She's the other half of 'we'. A hard-working, creative, sensible and funny woman who is now known as Cinzia because none of our new neighbours and friends can pronounce 'th'; so her name is pronounced the Italian way with a long, long ‘Chin’  and a ‘zia’ that rhymes with dear, and it’s a very popular and sexy name around here. Just right.

We have now been told that after months spent trying to get approval from the comune for the restoration work and the changes we want to make to our house, the building work may start next week. So we have to clear the cantina (a store like a pantry, in our case the entire ground floor, once the home of animals - and before that, nuns!) and the first floor rooms we're going to consolidate into a big open space of all the 'stuff' that filled eighteen rooms, outhouses and a bank barn in Cumbria. I think we're going to be living in one room for a little while to come while every other room that's not going to be made-over is piled floor to ceiling with the too many beds and sofas and junk we've brought with us.

The tumble-down sheds at the end of the house look as though they're going to be really quite useful. Cinzia has swept them out and they are dry and can now house the bikes, other stuff that's too big to have in the house and all the tools. The chicken coop has become the wood shed. Cinzia's already talking about it becoming our bread oven.