On a warm afternoon in Offida, a dry clicking comes out of every second doorway, dozens of small wooden knocks at once, landing like rain on a tin roof. The noise is bobbins, moving between the fingers of women working lace on a cushion propped in their laps, out in the open where the light is good.
The village sits on a spur of land between the Tesino and the Tronto, at about 960 feet, some fifteen miles from Ascoli Piceno – and roughly the same from the Adriatic – and it holds around forty-five hundred people.
