My Story by Anna Alma-Tadema

Posted on September 29, 2017 by Francis

“It’s the fourth year of the war, 1943, and I don’t think that I shall survive to live it out. My name is Anna. I’m 76 years old and my beloved sister Lawrence (or Lorenza in Italian) died at my same age three years ago.

(Me when little, painted by my father. My sister is in the background.)

We both come from an artistic family. My sister was a writer, novelist and poet. Nobody reads her works today. Who’s heard of the novel ‘Love’s Martyr’ for example? Yet ‘Lori’ also contributed to that famous publication, the Yellow Book, and some of her plays were produced in Germany. She was also a great supporter of Polish independence and a friend (in fact some people say more than a friend) of Paderewski, the great pianist who became Poland’s first prime minister.

I followed my father’s career as an artist and won several prizes and was frequently exhibited at the Royal Academy. Like my sister I was also strongly committed to women’s rights.

Regrettably our later lives have been conducted in poverty and people more or less forgot about us as they did our father, Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

And what about our mother? She was French and her name was Marie-Pauline and for six years it was married bliss between them until she suddenly died of smallpox in 1869 aged just 32.

My father never talked about Marie-Pauline; he was so grief-stricken. Yet it was with her that he discovered the glorious Mediterranean world of ancient Greece and Rome and became the foremost painter of classical scenes when he explored the ruins of Rome and Pompeii.

It was then that my father’s paintings changed from a characteristic Neo-Dutch style reminiscent of Vermeer and DeHooch to a completely different world where languorous women in flowing Roman draperies lent over marble seats and looked into the bluest of the Mediterranean, where togaed citizens queued up to go to a play by Terentius and where intimate conversations took place in the exedra of a country villa.

Happily my father met another girl shortly after the death of his wife. Her name was Laura Teresa Epps. She was just seventeen at the time and it was truly love at first sight.

It was about this time that due to the Franco-Prussian War my father moved from Belgium to England and it was really from 1870 onwards that his career as a famous artist began.

My stepmother Laura also became a very good artist as my father began to teach her how to paint. Laura also acted as a model for many of his paintings of classical women. She was so beautiful!

My father bought a house in the Holland Park area of London already well populated by artists. For example, Frederic Leighton lived just down the road from us and the two became good friends.

My father turned his house into a veritable Neo-Roman Villa, rich with nymphaea, marble balustrades and ionic columns. I remember such wonderful evenings spent in the company of the creme de la creme of London society. My father was a brilliant host, an amusing raconteur with a great sense of humour. How I miss those times! They were truly another world in a belle epoque where misery had no place and beauty was truth.

My father painted over three hundred paintings and many of them took years to finish and a few of them were never finished at all.

He was a master of the juxtaposition of beautiful ladies, with the most colourful flowers and of the most exquisite marble textures. In fact quips called my father ‘the most marbleous artist’ they knew!

Lawrence’s paintings in my opinion (but I am his daughter) have never been equalled for their exquisite texture, their transcendent light and their informed ability to transport us into a different epoch.

Sadly after Lawrence’s death in 1912 tastes changed rapidly and what was thought wonderful in the nineteenth century was considered near chocolate boxy in the next.

Indeed, one of my father’s finest pictures painted towards the end of his life, ‘The finding of Moses’ failed to get a buyer at an auction and was picked up by a cafe owner who stuck it above one of his tables.

1200px-Sir_Lawrence_Alma-Tadem

I’m living in a very difficult age.

Both of us sisters remained unmarried with no children, and our stepmother was also childless.

Goodness knows what will happen to our father’s pictures let alone his reputation…only time can tell.”

***

Twenty years later Victorian painters like Alma-Tadema began to be revalued and prices started to shoot up so much so that the painting of the finding of Moses was sold just a few years ago for 35 million pounds!

Lawrence Alma-Tadema is now recognised as the great painter he was. Not only that; he is seen as a major inspiration for all films dealing with the classical past from the earliest silent films like ‘Quo Vadis’ right down to Ridley Scott’s ‘Gladiator’ where the director consulted Alma-Tadema’s pictures, both for his interior scenes and for exterior ambiences like the Colosseum.

How things change! How proud both Anna and Lawrence, the two daughters of Alma-Tadema would be of their father today when a major exhibition is on show at his friend’s house which is now a museum, Leighton House.

How glad also would the sisters have been that their father’s house, after having been split up as flats, has now been bought and restored into that splendid vision that he had of classical times. For, unlike Lord Leighton , Alma-Tadema was essentially a studio painter and the spaces, the light, the texture of his paintings are reflected in the house built for and by himself.

Be there if you can

Posted on September 22, 2017 by Francis

Earlier this month I organized a March against Brexit in Bagni di Lucca. It was well advertised both locally and in Facebook. The protest consisted of a gathering in the square in front of the forestieri in Bagni villa and a stroll down to bar Italia.

Those who turned up to make their views known about the most ridiculous political decision a British government has taken since Ethelred the Unready’s foreign policy (don’t worry if you can’t remember what it was just, as people today forget what the poll tax was all about) were a mere handful and they were all concerned British residents of Lucca who’d come specially for the occasion. There was no one present from Bagni di Lucca at all (apart from me)!

In the end the rally turned out to be more of a meeting between aquaintances and the proposed march was called off in favour of shopping in the local market.

I clearly overestimated the political know-how of the worthy band of British immigrants and visitors of our comune and their reliance on fake news (and fake foreign secretaries too).

Just on the matter of holidaymakers to Bagni di Lucca, figures already show that the numbers are encouragingly up on those from last year but that the increase is largely from non-brits. It’s the Dutch, the Germans, the Scandinavians and the French who are now the majority of European visitors to our area. People from the uk are down nearly 30%. What’s more alarming is the fact that uk citizens with holiday homes here have not been able to afford to come to stay in them.

These are facts not just drawn by a straw poll but by figures drawn from local statistics. Bagni di Lucca is littered with empty houses bought by hopeful inhabitants of the British isles who now have an albatross tied round their necks.

It’s the increasing downfall spiralling of the uk pound against the euro (parity between the two currencies is expected by Christmas) that is the main reason for these phenomena. Banks do not like uncertainty and the continuing floundering of an inept band of amateurs and buffoons at the palace of Westminster is not helping.

Regrettably, I will not be able to join the sensible people who will give the forthcoming guest of the old Dominican convent of Santa Maria di Novella in Florence the reception she may truly merit today.

On the other hand, the long tradition of cultural and economic interchange between London and Florence may make the beleaguered head of a minority government, increasingly threatened by rising inflation, decrease in the value of the pound, souring community relationships, higher food prices, anxiety among all those non-UK workers who have kept the orchards of Britain still producing, the hospitals still managing to heal and the caterers still able to present edible food, could make her government see some light at the end of a tunnel which now seems much longer than the one underneath the channel.

Hope is an ever stronger anchor….

Fishing in Florence

Posted on September 21, 2017 by Francis

Tomorrow, ‘fish Friday’, as the UK ‘s supermarkets proudly proclaim, there will be another kind of fishing taking place in Florence. Indeed, there will be another instance in the space of less than a week when protestant meets Catholic.

I have recently described the wondrous appearance of perhaps the finest of Anglican choirs at the throne of Saint Peter’s Rome. A less miraculous apparition will take place this Friday in the glorious half gothic, half Alberti renaissance church of Santa Maria Novella, whose apse frescoes, among others by Giotto, greets the traveller when stepping out of the aptly named SMN station of Florence.

This apparition will, in fact, be that of the British prime minister who will, undoubtedly be misspelt ‘Teresa’ in the Italian press. She will be part of a triumvirate including Hammond, the painting of the martyrdom of whose original namesake is among the rich art treasures enshrined in this noblest of Dominican monasteries.

Now will the spirits of the fresco in the church’s chapter house of the ‘Domenici cani’, the ‘dogs of the Dominicans’ tear to pieces the present incarnation of Santa Teresa, whose intensely erotic statue by Bernini I saw earlier this week in Rome, or will she weave them into a political extasy by her pronouncements?

Fishing for the souls of a European state which, among so many other things kicked off the renaissance and modern banking (perhaps the two depended on each other?) will be difficult, especially as Florence is still owed sums of money, now running into billions of Euros with accrued compound interest, which it foolishly lent the British state during the fifteenth century.

Reading the headline of the now converted ‘Evening Standard’ (not to Catholicism I hasten to add but to a more pro-European stance) I read ‘Brexit Britain in the slow lane’.

My general feel on this whole farce, which is even more ridiculous and time and money wasting than the Forest Hill atmospheric railway of the nineteenth century, is that the only people (at least in London) who still believe in Brexshit are those who are intellectually challenged, illiterate or just plain daft.

Whatever happens in the wonderful ambience of Santa Maria Novella is anybody’s guess. I, as a hopeless idealist, still believe in a miracle. Either a fresco will be commissioned on the subject of the conversion of Theresa (this time spelled correctly) or more groats or ‘fiorini’ (florins, as named after the city of the Lily) will be added to the huge debt Britain owes Europe and especially Italy, whose economic growth now is leaving the inhabitants of islands, first civilized by another triumvirate, this time from the capitoline hill, well on the way to economic misery and, maybe, even mayhem…

A Green Thought in a Green Shade: Part Two

Posted on September 20, 2017 by Francis

‘A Green thought in a green shade’, the title of the twelfth international conference held at Bagni di Lucca from the 8^th to the 10^th of this month, concluded with Marzia Minutelli’s talk on Umberto Saba’s thoughts about the relationship between the ‘civilization’ of man and the world of nature, with particular reference to his poem on his wife.

I would judge this conference one of the most enjoyable I’ve been too but then that naturally depends on one’s interests and several of mine turned up during these three days. Bareham’s talk, contrasting the sensuous qualities of Andrew Marvell’s garden with the pompous formality of Timon’s esplanade in Pope’s poem ‘on taste’, however did not take in the fact that both Timon, alias the first Duke of Chandos, and Burlington (who Pope regarded as the epitome of good taste) were friends and that Chandos, too, was a considerable connoisseur and patron, not only commissioning paintings by such artists as Bellucci but even employing the young Handel as his court musician from 1717 to 1719, during which period the exquisite Chandos anthems were composed.

The emphasis on Marvell (from which , of course, the title of the conference derives)was continued by Laura Giovanelli with her talk on ethics and the philosophy of ‘greenness’, particular relevance being given to the point that farming enclosures were to cast a massive change on the English countryside.

Emanuela Morelli’s exploration of the English garden as seen through the eyes of Jane Austen, extensively through ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (where the garden described still exists today in Kent) was most evocative.

Saturday’s opening talk by Martin Priestman had to be cancelled because of illness so we went directly into Paolo Bugliani’s exposition Tomas Browne’s ‘Garden of Cyrus’. At this stage everyone present must have realised how the garden becomes part of one’s sub-conscious and is, thus, differently interpreted by writers with a medical background, like Browne, or those with neo-classical pretensions like Pope: a pity more was not said about Pope’s famous grotto which still exists – in part – in Twickenham.

I looked forward with particular interest to Simona Beccone’s exposition of the importance of plants and flowers in Keats’ poetry. Indeed, in such poems as ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, plants are included and combined precisely because of their medical properties and, here too, this hearkens back to Keats’ original beginnings as a medical student at Guy’s hospital. Of all romantic poets Keats must surely be the one whose mention of plants and flowers is not only the most bountiful but also, in terms of medical cures, the most knowledgeable. It seem, therefore, so sad, that he was unable to use them to stave off the terrible TB which terminated his all-to-short life. (Shelley’s ‘The sensitive plant’ was also mentioned, although here I feel the use of nature by the poet carries a more transcendent meaning. I would have liked a mention of ‘Epipsychidion’ in which the exquisite Narcissus Poeticus of the Prato Fiorito, which the poet loved so much, caused him to fall into a swoon through its perfume.)

Elisabetta d’Erme nicely compared musical settings of Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ by Balfe and Somervell respectively.

Alessandra Calanchi’s talk on eco-studies and the red planet was riveting. She compared the three literary stages in which Mars was seen respectively as a Utopia, a (pseudo-communist) menace and a useful place to colonize when the earth is finally depleted. Calanchi concentrated largely on the first thought-stage prevalent in the nineteenth century where Mars became a location where women could find equality and freedom. Indeed, the list of now-forgotten novels mentioned included one in which the author actually drew and gave names to the imagined flora she’d come across on the red planet.

Sunday started off with Vera Alexander, a young Dutch academic with an excellent knowledge of Italian, describing the multifarious psychological relationships garden writers have had with their subject. These could range from absolute love, almost identification with their creation to real conflicts with their time consuming bits of greenery. I would, however, have liked to have had Vita Sackville-West, the creator of Sissinghurst, mentioned in this context.

Giovanni Bassi, a student of the Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa, brought into the picture the flowers of Swinburne. I’d never given much thought to Swinburne before this talk but back at home downloaded the incredibly cheaply priced full works of the poet onto my Kindle and am now enjoying reading someone I’d always thought as pallid and diffuse. Quite the opposite in fact: Swinburne’s word-music and his use of flowers are quite ineffable!

Nicoletta Brazzelli’s explanation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s ‘The Secret Garden’ revealed, as it should do to anyone who fully understand this beautiful book which may be enjoyed at all ages, the healing power of a garden. The garden’s secret restores two traumatised children and, indeed, serves as a metaphor for paradise itself.

The point that there could be more than one paradise was brought to the fore by Simon Gatrell’s exploration of Ursula le Guin’s Environmental Imagination. In particular, the novella in which a giant spaceship is heading with four thousand on board for an earth-like planet (so far away that it requires several generations before the destination is reached). Everything is bliss on board since all religions are banned and pure happiness encouraged, with all desires on tap. However, dissent breaks out when the destined planet is reached. There are those travellers who wish to land on the new planet, and who of course, have to lay down new rules to regulate the novel environment they have reached. On the other hand, however, there are those who are perfectly happy to continue the journey since for them paradise is the journey on the spacecraft and not the new planet. This actually fits into my own philosophy in which the journey is everything and the destination often a disappointment because the ending stands for my destiny which, frankly, I don’t’ want to know too much about.

To sum up: it’s a truly marvellous occasion when thee conferences turn up every year after the summer has cooled down. Disappointment after the sensations of a holiday spent in beautiful environments, whether in Italy or in foreign parts, whether by the sea or in the mountains, whether with friends or in one’s meditative solitude, can easily set in. What better way to make sense of one’s existence, to hear intelligent thoughts and opinions, the results of often passionate research, within the eminent confines of Bagni di Lucca’s ex ‘Tempio degli Inglesi’ (as the old duke of Lucca liked to call it), now better known as the ‘Biblioteca comunale’.

It’s just so sad that, despite excellent publicity, few ‘forestieri’ and even locals make it to these events. Do they really think that food for thoughts consists just of eating pizza and that mental refreshment is just swilling down gallons of wine?

As always, thanks are due to those who organise these events, which surely are the high point of our town’s intellectual thermometer. In particular, however, the final word of thanks and gratitude must go the Fondazione Montaigne under the inspired directorship of Prof Marcello Cherubini without whose presence these events would never have taken off.

Onwards then, to the thirteenth international conference next year! And please remember that thirteen is a lucky number in Italy. Which subject shall be chosen for next year? How could it possibly equal the charm of this year’s theme? But I’m sure it will be every bit as interesting as it has been this year.

Here are some photos from the international conference:

Caput Mundi

Posted on September 19, 2017 by Francis

I knew when I had reached my destination without even having to look at the station‘s name.

An invitation to come to ‘la città eterna’ was not to be resisted. Rome has been part of my heart ever since I first visited it as a schoolkid and this city of cities has recurred constantly in my life ever since. The last time I was in Rome was when our Ghivizzano choir sang there in 2014 (see my post at https://longoio.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/our-choir-sings-at-romes-and-the-worlds-greatest-church/ ).

This time the choir of Cambridge’s King’s College Chapel (my old university) was to sing in a concert at one of the four great Roman basilicas, Santa Maria Maggiore (in my opinion the most beautiful) and also assist at High Mass in Saint Peter’s basilica the following day.

I truly believe that music can unite the world and the possibility of experiencing the vocal fusion of two such different religio-cultural worlds: that of the Counter Reformation’s high baroque lushness of the centre of Roman Catholicism with that of the Anglican limpidness of one of the greatest of all late gothic buildings was just too irresistible.

My BnB was strategically situated just between St Peter’s and the Castle of Sant’Angelo in a characteristic 19^th century block of flats built around a courtyard. I received a great welcome and my accommodation was neat, clean and simple, just as I like it.

I itched again to tread on the sanpietrini – those little lava paving cubes so characteristic of this wondrous city but which play havoc to anyone not wearing well-soled and padded shoes and cause big blisters after just two days.

My trainers were good enough and I headed to see the most beautiful example of ancient Roman sculpture – the emperor Augustus’ Ara Pacis – the altar of peace. In his wisdom Augustus proclaimed a new goddess of Peace which would unite the empire into a dawn of harmony and beauty. The historian Gibbon described this era as perhaps’ that time during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous”.

The altar of peace once formed part of a great ritual area in ancient Rome which also included Augustus’ own mausoleum, now being finally restored.

Through the centuries the altar was torn apart, bits broken off and sold to collectors and all but lost to the world. (I sadly regret that this barbarity has continued today with a middle-eastern terrorist state, now hopefully in its last throes, but not before having destroyed so much beauty, and so much of it from the Roman era…)

Eventually, by the end of the nineteenth century archaeologists discovered that the scattered fragments did constitute part of a great altar and, eventually, the Ara was pieced together in a somewhat hurried fashion in time to celebrate the emperor Augustus’s two thousand’s anniversary which occurred during the fascist era.

The building which housed the reconstructed altar was not satisfactory and many will argue that the new one by Meier, and inaugurated in 2006, is equally unsatisfactory. I did not find it so. I loved the natural light the controversial building plays on the exquisite floral and human figures of this most delicate, most moving example of ancient Roman art at its best. I missed out on the evening show which must be quite spectacular as the monument is displayed with lights showing its originally vividly coloured marble statues. (All classical statues were painted once – as, indeed, mediaeval tombs were).

‘Una vita non basta’ – one lifetime is not enough to see Rome as the saying goes. Apart from espousing reincarnation, which is a risky business (unless you are born a cat with nine lives) what else can one do?

I had a check-list of must-sees and the cats (Rome remains famous for its feline colonies) was one of them together with the lush splendour of the Palazzo Barberini. How lucky to be a cat living in Rome’s most splendid palace! I was glad to see that the cats of Rome, after a period of being described as vermin, are now being well-looked after and loved again.

If a house without cats is lifeless how more so is Rome! (Incidentally my BnB hostess kept eleven of them – not where I stayed, I hasten to add but in her other place at Ciampino).

Bagni di Lucca’s Poet Laureate

Posted on September 9, 2017 by Francis

If Bagni di Lucca continues to be a place of inspiration for painters and, especially, poets, it is due to very large extent to a person I consider to be perhaps its most distinguished citizen.

This person was born 92 years ago. His educational background was in science. He was a tennis champion and won many cups for his skill in this sport. He was mayor of Bagni di Lucca for ten years. He twinned our town with Longarone after the disastrous collapse of the dam in that north Italian town in which almost two thousand people died. This man gave shelter to those Longarone children who’d lost their parents for as long as they needed – not in tents but in fully equipped houses. He started writing and publishing poems quite by chance at the suggestion of friends and now has twenty four volumes to his credit, each one fully worthy of his extraordinary genius at finding the right word for everything and never wasting one of them, of being able to express so distinctly and so succinctly thoughts which for many of us lie too deep for words.

I am, of course talking of Mario Lena. Only a couple of days ago I was privileged to meet him near his home between Villa and Ponte. I presented him with my latest book of poems (which has both the English text and an Italian translation) and Mario was most pleased to accept. Indeed, Mario invited me to his house where we chatted and visited a place which is truly a poet’s house. Outside the building looks quite humble – indeed it was once a shepherd’s hut. Inside it is full of the civilized atmosphere which only a true poet can impart – a true Wordsworthian inspiration! (And, of course, it’s full of books!).

The house has a sweet little cottage garden which spreads along the river Lima giving a fresh breeze even in the height of the torrid summer we’ve been passing through.

Mario also loves cats who clearly adore him too.

Mario was gracious enough to recite to me a poem he keeps in the guest’s bedroom – a poem which, although reflecting the poet’s stance against organised religion (he has been a firm and true socialist all his life) was considered a prayer by our local parish priest Don Claudio when he visited Mario in order to bless his house:

There is also this very beautiful poem by Mario, inscribed on a plaque outside his house, donated by some of his admiring friends of which he has many. Some of Mario’s poems have even been translated into Arabic. Mario truly loved his wife who sadly died just over ten years ago.

When I sit in our house

I feel I’m in heaven

When I’ll be in heaven

I’ll think I’ll be in our house

By your side.

Mario, you are truly a living soul of poetry in Bagni di Lucca, indeed in the world but, above all, you are a great person whose company is so unique and so enjoyable. Thank you for sharing some of your time with me…

A Green Thought in a Green Shade

Posted on September 8, 2017 by Francis

It’s just been the first morning of a fabulous three day conference entitled ‘A Green Thought in a Green shade’. The theme is the relationship between literature and the natural environment – something which I’m sure will not just fascinate me but anyone else who loves reading and who loves nature.

This is the full programme:

Already this morning there were enthralling talks by Mariella Zoppo on Elisa Baiocchi, princess of Lucca and Napoleon’s sister on her great civil works during her rule over the city: aqueducts, tree planting, the Piazza Grande (where the summer festival takes place) and many other works.

Paolo Tomei talked about Georg Christoph Martini eighteenth century travel diary where he noted in some detail the flora of the time. Amazingly there were no umbrella pines on the coast – they were a nineteenth century importation and several plants described no longer exist.

Filippo Pizzoni’s lecture on the labyrinth was a tour de force taking in everything from prehistory, through Cretan civilization, to the carved rocks of our local mountains, to the knot gardens of the renaissance and to the present rebirth of the labyrinth (only one word in Italian – Labirinto – where English also uses the word ‘maze’. Pizzoni packed in the three main types of maze unicursal (one solution to the centre) multicurstal (several solutions to the centre) and net (no particular situation to the centre. He compared these to the three main phases of our civilization, archaic, renaissance and contemporary through their mental processes. The big question now is perhaps ‘where does the maze start?

Massimo Betti provided massive evidence of his knowledge of the local environment stretching to hallucinogenic mushrooms and even toads. (Is this why fairy tale princesses kiss a toad and then see a prince charming?).

Tommaso Maria Rossi’s Analysis on ‘Ricordi e Fantasie) a rare volume of poems on Bagni di Lucca by nineteenth century author Gregorio de Filippis Delfico concluded a highly stimulating and entertaining morning of this truly unmissable conference.

If you are around Bagni di Lucca don’t miss it. By looking at the programme you can also see there are speakers in English participating too, though the programme has excellent resumes of talks delivered in Italian.

I’m truly looking forwards to the next two days. See you there?

Memories of Barbuda

Posted on September 8, 2017 by Francis

As hurricane Irma continues its devastation in the Caribbean, laying flat so much of Antigua, Barbuda, Saint Marten, Saba and so many other islands, and is now continuing its vengeance towards the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba before reaching Florida, our thoughts and hearts go to the people of these beautiful places, especially as we have passed some of our happiest times there.

The first Caribbean island we visited was Antigua back in 1995. In those days digital cameras weren’t current but video recorders were. So the majority of our holidays are on tape (which we must digitise before it’s too late).

However, from 1995 I’ve managed to digitise several photos:

Barbuda was an especially fascinating island. We arrived during the frigate bird nesting season.

I wrote this on these amazing birds.

FRIGATE BIRD

Our yacht sails through a mirror sea

towards the unseen isle,

sharp reefs defending its pink shores

with palms born to beguile.

Landing at the tumble-down pier

the headman drives us to

an enormous brackish lagoon

which the outboard skims through

to reach a half-submerged forest,

nest of the frigate bird.

Its vast wings span every tree,

anyhow its mews heard.

The little ones have not yet fled:

a big-throated courtship

has blossomed like deep red orchid

in life’s thalassic trip.

Motor silenced, the boat is pushed

through knee-deep rivulet,

children’s laughter on board mingled

with nature’s salt roulette.

Magnificent bird, sky’s corsair

uncontested you glide

across the southern ocean vasts,

steal my heart to your side.

We returned in 1998 and our visit included St. Marten, St Lucia and Saba.

We visited Cuba. And back again to Antigua in 2004. But those amazing stories will have to wait another time.

We all know there is a hurricane season in the Caribbean when September steps in but this, to all accounts, is the worst one that has happened in living memory with winds in excess of 200 miles per hour. The only hurricanes I’ve experienced, have, fortunately been outside the Caribbean. They include the notorious UK great storm of October 1987 and the equally terrifying great storm which hit the Val di Lima in March 2015. In both cases I was terrified most by the noise. It seemed as if I was inside a powerful jet engine which, in fact is a close analogy to the dynamics of a hurricane.

May God be close to these wonderful people who gave us so much happiness and joy during those ineffable summers and may Irma remember the true meaning of her name which signifies ‘whole’ or ‘universal’ and is closely allied to another name, ‘Emma’.

Fornoli’s Fleas are Jumping

Posted on September 6, 2017 by Francis

A new event for Fornoli took place last Saturday. It was the mercato delle pulci, otherwise known in English as the flea market. The brainwave of the indefatigable Marco Nicoli, journalist of ‘La Nazione’ and events impresario, the market got off to a good start in excellent weather now that the climate has become so much more bearable after the hottest summer spell we’ve had for almost fifteen years.

Marco promises the market will take place the first Saturday of September and I wish his venture all the best of luck. Certainly there was a goodly variety of items for sale from all ages and for all ages.

Of Mediaeval Festivals

Posted on September 5, 2017 by Francis

How many of you knew that there is a masterpiece of Florentine architecture only a half-an-hour’s drive from Lucca? Brunelleschi, famous for designing and building Florence cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore’s cupola, also projected the imposing fortress at Vicopisano just on the other side of the Pisan Mountain. This fortress was built in 1434 after the surrounding Pisan territory had been conquered by the Florentines and has an unique feature – a “rescue” wall descending from the main keep walls down to the river Arno (or where the river used to be as it was diverted to its present course in 1560). This wall enabled the castle to be supplied with food and armaments if besieged or, alternatively provided an escape route for its defenders if the opponents’ siege was successful. The main feature of the fortress is the mastio (or keep) which can be accessed via an aerial staircase – (not suitable for vertigo sufferers!). The views from the top are transcendent.

Vicopisano is also an excellent scenario for its Mediaeval Festa.

With all our once local Val di Lima mediaeval feste gone (there was a time when Casoli, Lucchio and Gombereto all held their own events – Gombereto’s is the last to have disappeared and this year there was no Festa medievale there) one has to go further afield for the experience of seeing mediaeval combat, traditional games falconry displays, fireworks, noble lords and ladies in all their finery, ancient crafts and pastimes and all the other delights of a medieval fair.

The main ones we’ve been to are at:

Nozzano

Volterra – the best so far

Coreglia Antelminelli

Castiglione Garfagnana

All, except Volterra, are within an hour’s drive of Bagni di Lucca and all are promised again during next summer. Of course, further afield there will be magnificent pageants at Arezzo (Giostra Del Saraceno), Siena (Palio), Gubbio (corsa dei ceri) and so forth.

We did enjoy the Vicopisano festa very much and attended it on its best day, last Sunday. The big Saturday evening pageant was washed out because of heavy rain. It must have been so disappointing for all concerned.

To get to Vicopisano is easy. There are two routes. The one via Altopascio takes you across a flat almost fen-like plain (were it not for the sunflowers) . The clouds (as in the fenland) were particularly impressive.

The other route takes one closer to the Pisan Mountain and crosses a delightful area called il Compitese where there is one beautiful village after another. Here are some photos of Castelvecchio perched high on a ridge overlooking the plain formerly occupied by lake Bientina, of which only a small part now remains after drainage. The views of the Apuan mountains from here are pretty impressive too.

Regrettably we weren’t able to stay until the evening so we couldn’t see all the pageants and firework displays. On the other hand, when we were leaving, so many visitor cars were entering the environs of beautiful Vicopisano that we were a little glad we weren’t caught up in the rush. Truly, the high spot of this festa (about one and a half hour’s drive from BDL is in the evening). Anyway, here are a few corners of the festa including the incredibly good English-language speaking Châtelaine of the castle-fortress of Vicopisano: