The case of the mysterious Tirrenian sound…

by Pete

Thursday January 4 2007

As anyone who has been following our tour diary would know, when we are in Italy, the small Tuscan seaside town of Tirrenia is our sanctuary. Usually a summer town, it is full of ‘Bagni’ – private beaches where you pay for the pleasure, and in return get a plot of sand to park yourself on and access to refreshments and amusements (I spell it out for the benefit of fellow Aussies who would no doubt also find the concept quite bizarre) – and the usual assortment of designer clothes shops and fancy hotels that people who can afford summer holidays probably require. It is a family summer house where we stay, and without this place to return to in between our jaunts throughout Europe, we would definitely be emotionally and financially exhausted very quickly.
Since our first night in the house back at the beginning of November, we have noticed a strange, recurrent noise. The best way to describe it is as a tone, rather than a beep or a whirr or anything overly mechanical (somewhere in the vicinity of a A above middle C in case you have a piano handy). It sounds for about 4 or 5 seconds and then peters out, sometimes faintly stopping and starting towards the very end.
Preliminary application of the scientific method revealed that the noise occurs every 40 minutes – on the hour, then on 40, 20 and so on. But not so precisely that one could conclude it was on a digital timer or anything like that as it is always a couple of minutes early or late.
It has been difficult to pick the direction that this sound is coming from, or from exactly how far. It seems to be from towards the front of the house, and my feeling was that its source was 50 to 100 metres away, but I could have easily believed that its source was kilometres away.
On the road between Tirrenia and Pisa is the US Army base ‘Camp Darby’. An unfortunate and continuing relic of Italy’s loss in the second world war, this limb of the shameful war machine houses one of the US’s largest ammunition stores outside the US, and apparently is the only European one with access to the sea, making it quite significant. It occupies a huge amount of land, and almost daily we drive along its razor wired boundary. I am naturally very suspicious of this type of thing, and couldn’t help but wonder if the persistent noise was coming from this base just a few kilometres away.
For a couple of days about two weeks ago, when the weather really took a turn and the nights became much colder, the frequency of the occurrence noise went haywire, compared to its usual relative precision. That led me to think that perhaps it was something to do with a heating system… perhaps a pressure release valve or something like that.
So last night I set out of the slightly daunting task of tracking it down. Waiting for 40 minute intervals is quite inconvenient. Not really enough time to do anything significant in between, but too long to just be standing on the street. I also found myself getting quite spooked walking around the streets of this deserted town, with just the incessant dog barking and the thought of me disappearing without a trace at the hands of US secret agents to keep me company.
My plan was to start a few blocks away in the direction I suspected it was coming from, and then to assess the direction and intensity from there so I could narrow in on it. I planned a few errands to pass the time in between each sounding of the tone - such as taking the rubbish to the bins (they don’t do rubbish collection in Italy), and a trip to the postbox with some postcards that I had been carrying around for about a month. I ended up starting out a bit more conservatively than I had planned – just at the end of the block, perhaps 80 metres away. 9:40pm came and went in silence which left me to choose between a few possibilities – that for the first time the tone hadn’t sounded on schedule, that ‘they’ know I am listening and am about to unravel some incredible mystery so are messing with my head (I was secretly hoping to find a billionaire who had been waiting for years to finally reward someone with sufficient curiosity to track him and his noise making device down), or that the sound is actually much quieter than I had previously thought.
I posted my postcards and returned to the house, and then unwittingly proceeded to doze on the couch, only to be awoken by the tone at 10:20pm. I scrambled outside to catch only its final moments, but for the first time noticed another sound coming from the same direction – a puttering much like the sound of a fridge motor which continued for another 10 or 20 seconds, only to fizzle out in a similar fashion.
At 11:00pm it was clear that the sound which had been taunting me all these weeks wasn’t coming from the US Army Base a couple of kilometres down the road, nor some industrial heating system a few blocks away, but actually originated from over the fence just next door. My guess is that it is some kind of compressor, perhaps running a fridge, and the tone is the sound of a belt rubbing on something as it gathers speed. Not quite the answer I was looking for, and certainly no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but at least we all now know.