March 8th is the “Festa Della Donna”, AKA” International women’s day”, celebrated with sprigs of mimosa since that tree flowers at this time. It has become a very special fixture in Bagni di Lucca’s annual calendar of events.

At the casinò at Ponte a Serraglio the week celebrating international women, ‘Omaggio alla Donna’, will be inaugurated on the 8th of March at 8.30 pm:

This is the week’s programme:

This year the programme is particularly exciting with the appearances of top-class guests speaking on a wide variety of subjects ranging from violence to women to suffragette movements (appropriate for the hundredth anniversary of the first votes given to women in the UK) and no less than two concerts.

Both as an incurable romantic and as a true realist I believe that the male principle cannot be fully realised in its potential fulfilment without female energy. Mythology, folklore and cosmology reaffirm this axiom without exception.

As I wrote some years ago:

I wake up to Venus from a soft dream
and sleep in Hesperus’ beam, still and bright
and yet the twin stars are not what they seem:
both are the same planet with the same light.

You are my morning and evening star
within preternatural light aureoled:
both cold and hot, light and dark, near and far –
ever shining in a blizzard-swept world

No matter the years relentlessly run
and our end closes like prison shades;
our fragile lives shall not be undone
though the shortened breath within us fades.

Within us too is that which lives beyond
these days, like rays in forest’s golden pond.

Below are references to all my reviews of International women’s day, as celebrated at Bagni di Lucca from 2013 onwards. Re-reading them and looking at the pictures I can only admire Morena Guarnaschelli’s indefatigability in creating an event which, for its creative output, its brilliant occasions and its talented artists can only increasingly place Bagni di Lucca on the international map.

https://longoio.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/16/

https://longoio.wordpress.com/2014/03/09/la-festa-della-donna-2014/

https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2015/03/10/international-women-at-bagni-di-lucca/

https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/23450/

https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/magic-moments-at-bagni-di-luccas-casino/