From Castelnuovo di Garfagnana a highway strikes directly north to climb the Apennines, crossing from Tuscany into Emilia Romagna to Modena, where that delicious balsamic vinegar comes from. From the map it’s obvious that in the old days, when life was just one long series of punch-ups between neighbouring tribes, it provided access to coveted territories. It doesn’t take much to imagine the fear and misery that the peasants would have suffered as the ebb and flow of piddling but murderous conflict regularly wrecked their lives. Their crops would have been raided after harvest (bastards who fought mediaeval wars always waited until the harvest was in), their goats and cattle slaughtered to feed mercenary task forces and their daughters - and a few sons no doubt - raped in the name of some scrofulous duke or count bent on adding his coloured pins to the European map.
The fortified town of Castiglione di Garfagnana lies a few kilometres north of Castelnuovo high on the Modena road which climbs steeply in linen-folds to the walls of the town. It would have been difficult to assail from the south, there’s no cover, attackers would be in view over a long distance and the garrison would have had ample time to brew up vats of boiling oil ready to be poured through the macchicolations - the gaps below the battlements specially built for that purpose. The 12th century pentagon of curtain walls which surrounds the town is remarkably intact. Its longest stretch includes the main gate, the Porta Principale, whose stained tower has a white clock face with delightfully naive Arabic numerals painted on it; they look as if they’ve been lettered by amateurs but fit very nicely into the slender tower which has a strange, pyramidal metal canopy, painted a rusty pink; something from Disneyland or towered Camelot.
In the 15th century Castiglione was capital town of the Garfagnana but none of the meagre histories I’ve checked gives it an origin more precise than as a settlement of the ‘Liguri-Apuan’ folk who, in time, were rolled over by the Romans. The first dated historical documents mention the founding of the church and monastery of San Pietro in 723 AD by Longobard brothers Aurimand and Gudifrid. The Lombards were Germans from over the alps, a bunch of prototypical lager louts who spread themselves around northern Italy putting the boot into what was left of the Roman Empire. They must have started the love affair Italians have with Germans that still goes on to this day…
Aurimund and Gudifrid couldn’t have been that bad because the church of San Pietro is still standing, tucked hard up against - and looking in better shape than - the later fortified wall. After the Lombards (Longobards = ‘long beards’: at least they weren’t skinheads) the town was kicked around by all and sundry - Pisans, Florentines and the Lucchese from down the valley who flattened the place in 1227 and so impressed the townsfolk that it became a devoted outpost of Lucca until, in the 19th century, it passed to the Duchy of Modena.
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
.
Bagni di Lucca in Tuscany’s middle Serchio valley, moulded by the confining, forested hills either side of the Lima River is a town of gracious villas, spas, hotels and slab sided houses three or four storeys high whose walls plunge like pastel cliffs to the stony river bed.
‘The Baths of Lucca’ where mineral-rich hot springs well out of the rock, have been used for therapy and luxury since Roman times. Emperor Frederick I praised the town in 1245, I guess he wallowed in one of the pools for the gout or poxy pustules that had been wished upon him by Pope Gregory IX to go with his excommunication. He must have been a bit of a lad, Fred, because he not only became Emperor of the Germans at age two, and King of Sicily at three, he also managed, in his fifty-six years (during which he earned the title ‘Stupor Mundi’ - Wonder of the World) to get himself crowned King of Jerusalem and throw all Italy into turmoil when he made war on a couple of popes. He lost, and his family, the Hohenstaufens, went into an irretrievable decline.
When Fred took the waters in the thirteenth century the road up the Serchio Valley was probably just a mule track so I guess the hot pools were mostly used by the locals; but Napoleon’s sister, who also liked a wallow, had a decent road made from Lucca in 1805 and started the town’s tourist boom.
In a shaft of sunlight that illuminates the soup plate leaves of the plane trees we see four young nuns walking briskly, in step, two by two, jolly, waving their arms in conversation like something out of ‘The Sound of Music’. You don’t see nuns much these days, let alone young ones. They look beautiful; pink, virginal faces trapped in black and white frames. I wish I could stop the car and photograph them - but I’d never ask, I’d make a terrible paparrazzo!
There’s always a key shot to illustrate an article; as Bagni di Lucca is a river town it’s a view upstream from the main traffic bridge, Ponte di Castruccio. Nearby there’s a café, where Pat says she’ll be happy to sit under a sun umbrella and drink cappuccino while I go over to the bridge and set up the camera and tripod. Just as I frame the picture the sun shuts off so I have to wait. I hear a warbly whistling and looking below and to one side I see on the balcony of one of the houses an ugly looking fellow with a wall eye and tattoos trying to attract my attention. Behind him an old, black-clad woman sits in a rocking chair, her eyes closed like a basking cat. Whistler’s mother.
He shouts to me but I can’t hear him for the noise of traffic over the bridge. I shout back ‘No parlo bene, Italiano. Sono da la Nuova Zelande’ but he goes on chattering away, mostly inaudibly, and making gestures, then he asks me if I’m German.
‘Tedesco?’
‘No. No No. Nuova Zelande.’
‘Americano?’
‘Nuova Zelande. New Zealand!’
‘Australiano?’
‘Si, Australiano.’ That’ll do, thank God for Sydney Harbour Bridge.
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
.
