AN era has come to an end Tadeo is going back home to Poland, for good. For the uninitiated, "Tadeo" (real name Tadeusz) is a carpenter who arrived in our village four years ago when the east west economic migration into Italy was at its height. Now he is on his way back to his young wife Eva and child Christian, mission accomplished, money in his pocket and debts back home in Poland all paid up.
Tadeo's story is probably not that unusual. He is 31 years old, the eldest of seven and was born into a farming family near the small town of Zamosc, close to the Russian border and just 60km down the road from Lublin in whose university Pope John Paul II once occupied the chair of ethics.
Tadeo trained to become a carpenter and shortly after leaving school set up his own carpentry business, at one time employing four other workers. Towards the end of the 1980s, he wished expand so he borrowed approximately £4,000 from the state bank. The money was intended to purchase equipment saws, drills and a machine for making parquet floor blocks.
It was no small sum for a Polish carpenter but Tadeo is a skilled craftsman and his business was going well, guaranteeing him monthly earnings of approximately £400 (a lot for the time). Thus, he had no worries when borrowing the money at an interest rate of 8.5 per cent.
His calculations, however, did not reckon with history. He had borrowed his money in early 1989, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, before the downfall of east bloc communism and just at the beginning of Poland's painful conversion from state run to market economy.
The cost of money began to rise, finally reaching a staggering 66 per cent interest rate. Five men in Tadeo's village, caught in the same trap of spiralling interest rates, committed suicide.
Tadeo opted for less drastic action and travelled west. He says now that he had never intended to follow the life of an economic migrant. He came from a relatively well off family where homegrown, good quality food was always plentiful while he himself had his apparently durable craft, self employed at that.
The crippling weight of 66 per cent interest on repayments changed those ideas. He knew friends who had travelled to Rome looking for work and he contacted them before making his way to the Eternal City.
Germany is closer for Poles but Germany is much harder to enter as an illegal immigrant and, once entered, it also proves much harder to stay on. Italy remains one of the favourite destinations for Poles as indeed for all manner of east Europeans and North and sub Sahara Africans.
Tadeo was among the lucky ones. He brought a craft with him. Other less skilled illegal immigrants end up struggling, doing menial jobs or worse, becoming caught up in either criminal activities or prostitution. Recent estimates suggest there are nearly 40,000 African or east European prostitutes currently working the streets and roads of Italy.
Tadeo moved out from Rome to Trevignano and soon found himself a job with a carpenter in the next village around the lake, Anguillara. He worked hard for his new employer, Rino, by day and then continued to work hard, doing nixers by night.
For most of the last four years, he has lived in a modest flat which he has largely furnished with tables, chairs, washing machines and even a kitchen sink which were either presents or rescued from the local dump and then carefully repaired.
For most of those last four years, too, he has kept a full house, putting up a seemingly ceaseless flow of brothers, family friends and other compatriots, nearly all of them young men like himself trying to earn a few bob.
On one occasion, two summers ago, he swapped his modest accommodation with his local doctor from back home. Tadeo introduced us to the doctor, so that he would know someone in the village should he need any help. The doctor came round to have a drink with us and proved to be the most polite man in Mitteleuropa, kissing all the ladies' hands as a matter of normal greeting.
The doctor and his wife had also taken a bank loan and were also caught up in heavy repayments but, unlike Tadeo, felt that they could not emigrate with two small children. When the doctor and wife returned home at the end of their holiday, we helped load them into the bus for Poland, complete with newly purchased mountain bikes and much else besides.
Tadeo goes back to Poland next week, his debts all paid oft, glad to be returning to his own place and hopeful about the economic climate in his country.
Good luck to him and to those like him.