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

Bagni di Lucca: A Place of Torture

No. 2 Via Della Chiesa is an unusual four-storeyed triangular building in Bagni di Lucca. The façade at the sharpest point of its triangle is comprised of three wedding cake tiers of pompous Corinthian columns topped by an open, eagle’s nest balcony adorned with plant pots of scarlet and pink geraniums. Once washed a mustard orange-yellow it’s now peeling with neglect and is filthy from diesel fumes. Two grimy marble plaques are inset into its walls. The first, installed in September 1974, commemorates the imprisonment and torture here of patriots by ‘Nazi Fascists’ during the second world war. One comes up short imagining the screams that would once have emanated from the shuttered basement windows…

Pause for reflection

I am intrigued by the words ‘Nazi Fascists’. European union demands that old enmities be set aside and that those who were once oppressed by Germany should avoid direct criticism of the German people. So, on war memorials, ‘Nazi’ is the politically correct word that describes the oppressors, neatly avoiding giving offence while leaving older Germans to decide whether or not any blame attaches to them for past atrocities. I first came across this form of tombstone diplomacy at Echternach, a small border town in Luxembourg, separated from Germany by a narrow river. German tanks had rolled across Echternach’s mediaeval stone bridge to invade Luxembourg early in the war and the town’s subsequent liberation ‘from the Nazi invaders’ by American forces in 1945 is recorded on a memorial plaque in the town. Clearly the Italians as well as the Luxembourgeois have taken the polite route when it comes to memorial texts.

… the second tablet records that in this building lived ‘Ouida’, Louise de la Ramée, ‘scrittrice Inglesi amante del’ Italia, amica degli animali qui dimoro negli anni 1904-1905’ which, I think, means that she was an English writer, lover of Italy and friend to animals.

Marie Louise de la Ramée was known as ‘Ouida’ because that was how she pronounced ‘Louise’ when she was a child. She wrote forty-five novels and was sixty-six when she died in 1908. I wonder what life was like here for those English litterati some of whom finished up in the neglected English cemetery up the road? I think the Italians took them to their hearts - otherwise why would they record ‘Ouida’s’ stay in their town with as much prominence as the torture of patriots by the ‘Nazi Fascists’?

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
.

At Bagni di Lucca

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
.