At Fiesole, Above the Smog of Florence

Fiesole is a hill town eight kilometres north of Florence where the familia Medici used to weekend away from the vengeful Savonarola and the smelly proletariat. Driving up the wide curves of the Via San Domenico past stately houses in terraced grounds I can feel the air clearing and see clarity emerging as the sunlight penetrates the thinning filter of Florence’s air. It gets prettier: the sloping green fields on either side silvered and shimmering with olive groves. Fiesole is older than Florence. It was founded by the Etruscans, who seem to me to have had it all over the Romans but don’t get quite as positive a historical spin.

In the plane-bordered, sun-beaten, sloping square there is one of the nicest statues I’ve yet seen of the much memorialized Garibaldi. On horseback in this 1906 monument he’s in expansive mood, greeting and meeting King Victor Emmanuel II at Teano, north of Naples, in 1860. They’re a genial pair, it must have been a great encounter for them: Garibaldi had conquered Sicily and Naples and presented Vittorio Emanuele with half of the kingdom which would come fully into being in 1870 when Italy, ending fifty years of risorgimento, became unified.

In the Zona Archeológica are the excavations of the Roman theatre where a guide tries to summon up the past to a group of visitors seated on the auditorium’s curved stones. I wonder how much history seeps up through their bottoms from the grey granite that must have supported thousands of others in its time? Beyond are the Roman baths and earlier, Etruscan, remains of a third century BC temple. Notwithstanding the age of the remnants I feel no ghosts here, just a pleasant park to walk in; but I’m grateful for Fiesole, it lifts my spirits after the miasma of Florence.

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
.

They Still Ring Church Bells In Italy

They still ring church bells in Italy; their changes float from belfries up and down the Serchio Valley. I try to rest in the sun in Chiesetta’s soothing garden. I read a little but then remember the raspberry bushes that grow on one of the terraces at the far end of the garden. They are loaded with fruit, fat, pubescent, pink and subtly flavoured. They’re ready to come off the canes but the first one I pull sets off a convulsive rustling in the bush. I jump back wary of a viper but it was probably one of the lizards that wriggle in the garden. The raspberries are morish and abundant; I make a pig of myself.

Later, some of us go to Castelvecchio Pascoli, a hamlet north of Barga, to inspect the house of Giovanni Pascoli a poet of renown. He lived with his sister, Maria, at Casa Pascoli from 1895 until he died in 1912 (they’re both buried here) during which he wrote much of his most important work. The house is now a museum very much as he left it. 

Three old ladies in black, ravens sunning themselves on a bench in the gravel forecourt, point to a concealed bell-push. The door is opened by a lugubrious, overweight, uniformed, pasty-faced ‘guard’ who admits us, charges us ten Euros each, insists that I leave my camera bag in his cubby hole (but I’m allowed the camera and tripod) and then gives us a conducted tour around gloomy, mouldy smelling rooms with high, frescoed ceilings. There are six thousand books and carefully indexed archives. Pascoli obviously rates in Italian literature but one suspects that he is given additional status to enhance tourist income. In one of the rooms are his desk with his quill pens and other objects in situ. The walls are covered with photographs, drawings and paintings: Pascoli and family, prominenti - including Garibaldi with Pascoli - and local scenes.

Apart from a sunny, collonaded balcony on the first floor, from which we can see Barga, the gardens of the house, and the river valley, I find it cold and uninspiring; I wonder what his poetry was like? Indeed, I wonder what was his relationship with his sister for there’s a hint of illicit propinquity about their connecting bedrooms…

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
.