Sunday morning in Gallinaro, my village in Italy, is a time to see and be seen. People who live in the townland, but not in the village proper, come to the centre either for mass, the market, or just to go to the bar. By ten o'clock the centre is buzzing, parking places are hard to find and the Bar del Centro is packed with men. The women, of course, are cooking. At midday the town begins to empty and at ten past it is deserted. Everyone has gone home to that great institution, Sunday lunch. The roads still have cars on them up to about one o'clock, but after that every car has turned into a house or restaurant and the Italian nation eats.
I have just been looking at a photograph; it was taken at my cousin's house in Italy a month ago at Sunday lunch. We were eating indoors to be out of the heat, the shutters were closed and a few shafts of sunlights burst in through the cracks. The effect is like a Caravaggio, light and shade on the many faces around a large and groaning table. It's a picture of a very typical Italian Sunday; four generations of Tullios sharing a meal in famiglia. A huge bowl of steaming rigatoni sits centre stage, bottles of local wine and mineral water in clumps along the length of the table. What the photograph fails to capture is, of course, the noise. The conversation is loud - everyone wants to be heard; the children shout, the adults talk simultaneously, outside the shrill song of the cicadas.

Liliana, my cousin's wife serves the rigatoni - a large cut pasta typical of Lazio - onto plastic plates. We all have plastic cups, but the cutlery is steel. This is increasingly common in Italy during the summer since everyone is on holiday and no one feels like doing the washing up. Gigino, my cousin, opens two bottles of red and two of white and leaves them on the table before sitting and starting his rigatoni. I pour some red. It's slightly fizzy - petillant - and smells strongly of grapes. It's made entirely from cabernet franc and is almost purple-black. Unpasteurized and unfiltered this is just fermented grape juice - no stabilisers, no additives, no nothing. Gigino adds Gassosa, a bit like 7Up, to his. The sound level abates as forks start to convey pasta to mouths. Liliana looks around the table. We all nod: the pasta is good. She relaxes and immediately offers seconds. Gigino says he shouldn't as he's trying to lose weight - he accepts only one more plateful and so do I. Now we start to tear at the bread and mop up the sugo from the bottom of the plate. More wine to wash it down.

I look around the table. All the men are at one end, the women and children at the other. No one seems to find this odd. The women put the plates into refuse sacks and Liliana arrives with a large platter of roasts; chicken and rabbit. The chicken is good, but the rabbit is spectacular. I shout across the table to Liliana - I want to know how she did this. She shouts back: "Piece it first, put it in a pressure cooker with some water, garlic and rosemary. No salt. After ten minutes throw away the water, add salt, garlic and rosemary again and some more water. Cook for an hour, then brown the pieces in a frying pan with olive oil or roast in an oven till brown."

I pick another piece off the platter with my fingers and put it on my plate. What looks like an eye stares at me. Sure enough, I've picked up half a beautifully roasted rabbit head. I may be a carnivore but my sensibilities don't run to this. I stare at it. Gigino picks it off my plate. "Take another bit, this is the head, it's for the dog." He throws it outside onto the terrazza for Noelle. I eat some chicken. Chicken in our village have long thin legs; they walk about and forage, lay eggs that taste wonderful and taste good when cooked. Roasted peppers and aubergines are on the table, a large salad with rocket, marrow flowers dipped in batter and fried, and roast potatoes.

Plain ice-cream follows, but Liliana pours wild strawberry liqueur over it, tiny wild strawberries forming a pile on top of the ice-cream, while the pink liqueur runs into the plate. We finish with fresh figs, coffee and nocino, a walnut digestive liqueur. As the leaden Atlantic skies presage months of winter, memories such as this keep the summer sunshine alive.