When I married I moved back to London. Clearly my main priority was to get a job promptly and I found it with the London Tourist Board. Among my duties were answering face-to-face tourist enquiries at three main locations: the Tower of London, Harrods, Victoria station (mainly hotel bookings) and in a phone pool at the tourist board’s main office.

Let’s remember that the internet had then not reached us yet. We were given personal folders of essential information ranging from places to visit, to transport, accommodation, restaurants and other issues facing travellers to the UK. In the main office the shelves were filled with guidebooks, leaflets and maps.

It’s incredible to think that today all one has to do is to google what one needs to know….or is that all one has to do?

There is nothing to replace a friendly human face who can sympathetically help a bewildered traveller. There is nothing to replace a table laid out with current leaflets relating to events and places to stay. Indeed, there is nothing to replace a tourist office, a travel agent, or even just an information point.

It’s now several weeks since Bagni di Lucca’s tourist information centre and internet point has been closed by mayor Michelini in order to save money, mainly by firing its one devoted and efficient staff – and the effects are already being felt all around.

With an economy largely dependent on tourism the mayor’s decision is a crass example of self-injury to the whole community. There are few comuni in our part of the world that don’t have an information point; Borgo a Mozzano even has two, one in the centre of town and the other on the approach road.

Can it be that Bagni di Lucca doesn’t want tourists to visit it? Certainly, in the case of some Italian cities, Venice in particular, there is clearly a surfeit of visitors? But Bagni di Lucca? Just look at Villa’s high street and note the number of closed down shops and bars.

It’s all so sad and short-sighted and will badly affect the future of Bagni, already in increasingly dire straits.

Things came to a head last week when a troupe of English Morris dancers, who had been scheduled by the tourist office to perform in Bagni’s main square, found themselves trying to dance in a square with cars constantly interrupting them with their parking manoeuvres because, with the demise of the tourism executive, there was no-one to organize the event properly. Indeed, there was not even any noticeable publicity.

So the local Italians never got a proper chance to see the very first example of traditional Morris dancing to take place in Bagni’s history.

I wonder how many other events will take this format during our town’s summer season?

Inadequate publicity and risible organization are not confined to Bagni di Lucca, however. For several years I was English editor and occasional article writer for the Luccamusica magazine which, under the aegis of Francesco Cipriano, provided a very complete panorama of music events in and around our province. Regrettably, the magazine was later reduced to an on-line presence only when funding was withdrawn but it still provided a wonderful picture of the intensity of musical activity in Lucca province. As I wrote somewhere, with regard to the two towns’ former historically independent status, with their own court orchestras and famed composers, if Salzburg is the Lucca north of the Alps then Lucca is certainly the Salzburg south of that mountain range.

Worse was to follow when Francesco sold the magazine and its web site to a noted Lucca Puccini festival conductor and organizer at the end of 2018. The web site is still there but no current events are listed; indeed the old panel’s names (including my own) have still not been changed.

It’s truly boring now to have people telling me ‘if only I’d known that concert was on!’ The only solutions are:

1. To take photos of any poster of interest one sees.
2. To regularly visit those tourist offices that still exist.
3. To browse through the web sites of places one knows have things happening. e.g. Lucca, Viareggio etc.
4. To be a subscriber to that excellent monthly magazine ‘Lucca Grapevine’ with its pull-out events section. (It’s both on paper and on-line).
5. To pick up a free copy of Lucca.news (if you can find one – try the local bars). This publication is particularly good on local sagre and festivals and has some excellent articles ranging from history to recipes (in Italian, however).

I just hope the publicity situation improves soon in our part of the world. It certainly can’t get worse.