Leaves From My Sketchbooks. 42. San Giovanni, Lucca

Sometimes you can work too fast! The girls had gone shopping but I'd no sooner opened my watercolour box than they were back again ready to catch the train home to Barga-Gallicano.

Dab, dab, dab and then I was walking along the strada waving the sketch book around to dry the paint. Rough, but it captures a moment and fixes a memory.

© DON DONOVAN.     donovan@ihug.co.nz 
www. don-donovan.blogspot.co.nz
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Fazzoletti - Special Kinds of Handkerchiefs from Italy

These are a few of the colourful handkerchiefs I bought in Italy some years ago. They're almost worn out and as it's impossible to buy such magnificent fazzoletti in New Zealand I thought I should never get the opportunity to replace them.

I chanced to mention them to a friend who is going to Italy and he kindly said that he will try to buy some for me in May 2012. My old ones came from either Florence (a shop near the Ponte Vecchio) or Lucca.

He's not going to Florence but he is to visit Lucca where, I suggested, he might come across some fazzoletti in that serpentine street the Via Fillungo. I sent him a 100 Euro banknote.

Here's hoping he comes home with a pile of hankies that might see me out. I hope he doesn't shop too hard, though, I wouldn't want to erode his holiday.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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My Books: Antipasto

 

I have recently published this book which is a collection of random samplings from various writings, watercolours and photographs made over a few years of visits to Italy - particularly Tuscany. Among many other things, it touches upon Florence, Lucca, Barga and the hill villages of the Garfagnana, that area between the Apuane Alps and the Apennines that is drained by the Serchio River.

It also includes visits to Umbria: Carsulae, Terni and San Gemini.

The book is available from Blurb.com. Go to: www.blurb.com, enter 'Don Donovan' in the search box and my book will appear.

donovan@ihug.co.nz

The Bicycles of Lucca

Having forsaken the fountains of Rome, the palazzi of Florence and that teetering Pisan tower I spent a happy hour in Lucca, sitting in a kerb-side café, sipping espresso and nibbling una brioche while I watched the cyclists go by. At last I was face to face with real Italy at street level. Two things about this charming Etruscan city in northern Tuscany make it a bicycle town: its narrow streets and the complete absence of hills. It’s as flat as a slab of Carrara marble.

It didn’t take me long to realize that here there is no better form of everyday transport than the bike. Unless you’re sight-seeing, walking is too slow; motorists and bus drivers suffer stop-go misery in Lucca’s pinched and writhing one-way system, and the elsewhere ubiquitous three-wheeled two-strokes with their blue smoke and noise are plainly unwelcome in these airless alleys.

As I watched, it struck me that no matter whether old or young, large or small, Lucca’s citizens are bred to the bicycle: it fits them like part of their anatomy. They negotiate the cobbled thoroughfares and flag-stoned piazzas effortlessly and with complete disregard of the one-way signs. There’s an air of tranquility and confidence about them and a readiness to call a buon giorno to friends and strangers alike. They fear not neither do they give way to larger vehicles and their only concessions are to pedestrians, lesser beings for whom they tinkle their bells more as entertainment than as warnings.

Observing the passing ‘cycle-cade’ I could see that in Lucca the bike is no guide to socio-economic standing. There are no two-wheeled status symbols, no Ferraris or V6 Alfas. These machines are modest, neutral, purely practical. Well-dressed matrons flashing diamonds lost no dignity as they pushed their pedals, they looked as elegant in the saddle as on foot. Bankers, priests, businessmen suffered no loss of prestige in trouser clips. In handle-bar baskets, small dogs travelled contentedly in company with Florentine leather handbags. Two lovers met, wheel to wheel, and managed, while still astride their bikes, to touch hungrily and with an unashamed passion. A pair of toddlers passed trustfully poised on custom-made saddles on the cross-bar of grand-dad’s bike avoiding a gaggle of small boys who tilted at danger, taking that extra risk by standing upright on the parcel tray as they and their friends, sometimes three to a machine, bounced and rattled over the mediaeval granite stones.

I reflected that the transport needs of the historical centre of Lucca (that portion of the city which lies within the 4.2 kilometres of its third fortified wall, dating from 1645) would have been satisfied without the invention of the internal combustion engine and goods would have been carried just as effectively by horse drawn carts as they are today. The great leap forward would have been the bicycle and that’s where technology might comfortably have ended.


Lucca, in common with the rest of the world, traded horse manure for exhaust fumes but the bicicletta is above reproach and perhaps it is the confidence that they derive from their innate understanding of the appropriateness of the bicycle that made observing the endless stream of Lucchese cyclists such a source of enjoyment for this tourist.

From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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Shopping in Lucca

 

A Typical Street Stall

By mid-morning Pat is shopping for suede in Lucca’s Via Fillungo.

Italy is famous for leather goods, and the pelleteria with its narrow doorway flanked by seductive display windows is a typical leather shop. We are the only customers and receive the limited attention of two girls, both brown-eyed and slender with lustrous dark hair falling to below their shoulders. They speak no English. Out come the phrase books and Pat starts work on buying waistcoats for our girls and something for herself. The shop girls move slowly as if reluctant to disturb some fragile part of themselves. Each time they go to a rack to get something they catch sight of themselves in the full length mirror. While one of them ‘sells’, the other one stations herself before the mirror to flutter her eyes and make moues as if seducing some imaginary Adonis. She is like candy floss, all promise and no substance: give me older women!

At length, a Mastercard docket laboriously hand written, we have two waistcoats (panciotti) and a jacket for Pat. With barely controlled impatience the girls see us out and immediately bolt the door behind us. It’s one o’clock: siesta.

***

Next day: Pat’s suede jacket has a small hole in it. She wants to change it or get a refund. Oh dear! Another trip to the pelleteria. The vacuous girls are still making love to the mirrors, but today there’s a man, too, a lean character with hairy ears and hairier nostrils, in charge like a pimp is in charge: the girls are nobodies. He looks at the jacket and jabbers hard in Italian. I tell him ‘No parlamo bene Italiano’ but he rabbits on anyway, raising the volume (I thought only the British did that).

He doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with the jacket. Pat points to the small hole. He pokes at it with his finger tip, trying to push its edges together in the hope that it will magically fill in. Pat says she wants a replacement. The silent sirens pull all sorts of jackets from the racks but none of them is the right shape or colour. The man prods Pat here and there trying to make the jackets fit and waving his long, bony fingers over them like Mickey Mouse’s wizard in ‘Fantasia’, as if to make them change hue. The girls, expressions beatific, look vaguely sympathetic towards us but he’s not having any of it. In the end Pat flourishes her Mastercard chit and says she wants a refund.

‘No. No. No’. He flings his arms in the air: he cannot refund Mastercard; not possible. Plumbing the very depths of my Italian and waving my Berlitz phrase book like an evangelist, I tell him you can; you simply write out a refund docket.

‘Not in Italy.’ he shouts, triumphantly.

I tell Pat we’re not going to win; she’ll either have to keep the old jacket (which he has been treating with something from a tube) or take a replacement.

‘I don’t want a replacement; I want my money back.’

The girls have gone out of focus by now; they look like Jersey cows ruminating.

In the end - after ages during which nobody else has entered the shop - we leave with a replacement. Lesson learned; examine the goods industriously. Which is exactly what Pat does when we get to the shoe shop. Shoes everywhere. It’s hot and I hate shopping. Fortunately it’s siesta time again and we leave the shop with some nice black shoes and find a little place for lunch, a few tables under a cool, blue and white striped canopy fenced from the street by little boxes of shrubs.

Alan later tells me that Italians are all hospitality except when it comes to money; at that point they often find themselves in the unbreakable grip of parsimony.


From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
.