Capo di Tutti Polizia di Castelnuovo di Garfagnana?

Mounted on a wall across the piazza of Castelnuovo a fat, street-stained, bronze cherub gazes benignly over the shoppers. Ideally, to photograph him, I should have the camera on the tripod but that’s impossible with the amount of passing traffic so I walk out to where the pedestrians end and the traffic begins and as I raise the camera a small blue Alfa-Romeo with ‘Polizia’ on its side stops beside me, blocking the traffic. I lower the camera and look at the driver, a young policeman who gives me a knowing half smile as, from the passenger’s seat, a stout officer emerges. He is gorgeous; a cockerel in blue with scarlet trim adorned by shiny buttons, medal ribbons and embroidered badges. In one hand he carries a pair of white kid gloves which he slaps across the palm of the other as he approaches.

‘Buon giorno’, I greet him brightly and wanting to get in first. ‘Parle Inglese? No parlo bene Italia…’

‘No parlo Inglese.’ he shakes his head, but he extends a hand to me and vigorously pumps mine. There ensues a bizarre exchange in my execrable Italian and a mutual waving of hands.

I point at the statue and wave my camera: ‘Cherubini. Statua. I photograph…’

‘Si - bella, bella.’

He wants to know where I am from.

‘La Nuova Zelanda?’ he muses, his perfectly trimmed eyebrows raised in slight surprise: then he nods knowledgeably. I get the impression he has no idea where New Zealand is.

‘Not English: non Inglesi,’ I say pointing to myself, ‘In la Nuova Zelanda per multo anni, many years. Da Londra a la Nuova Zelanda in 1960…’

I’m conscious that my word endings are all over the show but he seems to understand, even though I have do 1960 in the air with a finger.

He is so splendid that I feel I should throw a question back at him. Pointing at him I say, ‘Capo di tutti polizia di Castelnuovo di Garfagnana?’ (Which I think may come out as ‘Are you the chief of police..?’).
His chest expands a little more, the shoulders are squarer, he confirms that he is, indeed, the head man. I take a step back and bow my head in deference whereupon he raises me from my humble position by shoving his hand in mine yet again and shaking madly.

Meanwhile the traffic is held up in a line that stretches across the square and around the walls of the castle and I can see cars all the way up the hill in the other direction. Not a horn has been sounded. He is either oblivious to the traffic or enjoying his power for he continues the conversation to ask where I am staying. I manage to get across that my wife (mi moglie) and I are staying with ‘la sorella di mi moglie’ (the sister of my wife - I can’t do ‘sister-in-law’ in Italian) at Barga.

He wants to know where in Barga.

‘Gragnana.’

‘Ah, si, Gragnana.’ He asks with whom.

‘Signor e signora Testa.’ At ‘Testa’ he assumes they are Italian.

‘No - Inglesi, da Londra,’ and I throw in ‘Cockfosters… Barnet’ just for the hell of it.

‘Gragnana … Cockfesters … Barrrrnet.’ Again his nods importantly as if all three locations were within his manor.

Some of the vehicles having now turned off their engines, and the crowd is becoming restless as if the arrest is long overdue, but he shakes my hand for the last time, beams broadly, wishes me ‘Buona fortuna, signor Don’, climbs into the Alfa, wiggles a finger in a circle in the air and points ahead like a cavalry officer, ‘Andiamo’, upon which they advance.

I return to the side of the square to appraising stares: who is this straniero that he has so much influence with the capo di tutti polizia di Castelnuovo di Garfagnana?

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
.

Tuscany: Castiglione di Garfagnana

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
. 

The Hit Man

At a leather goods stall in Castelnuovo di Garfagnana a small, faded-yet-attractive woman in a shabby pin-striped costume suit is picking over the handbags and keeping up an incredibly fast running commentary to a couple of companions. She has hennaed hair, stiletto-pointed scarlet fingernails and a cigarette which she either waves like a baton, dropping ash on the merchandise, or shoves between her lips where it flies up and down as she speaks unceasingly and blinks away the smoke.

A small boy, whom I take to be her son, leaves the stone step where he has been waiting patiently under a women’s underwear display, walks over to her, tugs at her skirt and whines pleadingly. She mostly ignores him, but every now and then she gives him a smack on the head - not viciously, more like swatting a fly. I watch fascinated. Each time she swats him he glares at her with distaste. Finally, she having cuffed him for the umpteenth time, he raises the plastic space gun which has been hanging loosely from his right hand by its trigger guard, points it at the small of her back, squeezes the trigger and makes a plosive pout with his lips. Then he looks at me in passing, his big brown eyes amoral and impassive.

I realize that I have just seen a mafia hit man in the making and that he has wasted his mother.


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
.