On the 6th of March 2013 I published my first blog post. It’s here if you want to look at it:

https://longoio.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/a-mornings-work-in-lucca/

Seven years on I’m still carrying on blogging.  Indeed, writing a blog has almost become a compulsion and I feel somewhat lacking if I don’t scribble something down on a daily basis.

Of course, throughout the centuries people have kept blogs, or rather diaries, as off-line blogs are best called. The only difference today is that a blog crosses that delicate line between what is best kept to oneself and what may be considered to be of interest to others. Did diarists like Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn really expect their diaries to be published? Thankfully, their intimate thoughts were not consigned to the flames but found their way into the annals of English literature and social history. Others were not so lucky: for example, the diaries of the great Victorian traveller and sex-liberator, Richard Burton, were burnt on his death by his prudish wife. Certainly one of our greatest losses in this field are the destroyed diaries of Byron. Some diaries, however, were clearly meant to be published at the outset: for example, those of Alan Clark.

I do know, however, of at least one living diary writer who has given clear instructions that their scribbling should be destroyed if anyone finds them (in the attic).

When my mother-in-law died last year my wife made a touching discovery: she found that her mother had written, not so much a diary, but a series of intimate and revealing vignettes covering her life and some of its crucial moments, especially of her early married life. This was an unexpected and moving moment for both of us and we cherished reading this unintended testimony of a remarkable woman. (I just wonder what she would have made of the current pandemic times). I know of other persons who have unfurled war-time diaries of deceased family members and are using the present age to transcribe and perhaps even publish them. Of course, the most famous war-time diary is that of Anne Frank which has only relatively recently been published in full.

I am sure that there will be a new generation of ‘war-time’ diaries, this time dealing with the on-going covid-19 pandemic. Certainly there are several fine ‘lock-down’ diaries being written. An entry from one of them (Kerry Bell’s) can be read in the current issue of Lucca’s ‘Grapevine’ magazine at:

http://www.luccagrapevine.com/

For it’s the present crisis that has drawn so many of us to cherishing our time upon this earth even more and to reflect and realize how many tasks we have never properly carried out because we thought we had too little time in which to carry them out – whether they be attending to house and garden, or starting that unwritten novel which one is supposed to harbor within one’s inmost recesses, or beginning a new hobby, or reading those novelists known only to us by their book covers, or saturating oneself in meditation.

Should I edit my two-thousand plus posts into a more manageable volume? For the time being I don’t think so. My blogs are so full of cross-references and links that they stand best in their present form. There are many other examples which read well as blogs and would lose a lot if they were transcribed into a strictly linear form. I still have the printout of a blog on birds by my late-lamented school contemporary Ian McCormick (alias McDonald) who became an authority on such diverse subjects as Shostakovich and The Beatles. He wanted it precisely in blog form.

What I might do, however, is to go back from that first blogging year of 2013 to those times in which Italy was first incalculably imprinted on my affinities. Because of my half-Italian origins these go right back to the day was born. Intensified by my marriage to a London girl of Italian background, Italy became even more central to my life when I bought my first Italian home in 2003. In 2005 I effected a radical life-style change when I decided to work in Italy instead of merely using the country as a holiday resort. Looking at the photographs from this epoch I realize how much has changed sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Gone is that early enthusiasm of having shaken off the shackles of an Inner London teaching post in a college of further education, and instead discovering the natural and cultural beauties of a captivating part of ‘Il Bel Paese’, engaging in new activities and new friendships. I may be more sober in my opinions now but I am also wiser.

Anyway here are a few snapshots of some of my earliest times in Italy: the two holidays I spent in Caspoggio, an alpine village in the Valtellina valley of the Lombardy Alps, an area, I hope, safe from the turmoil the rest of this province is experiencing.

It is a centre for excursions to the Rifugio Marinelli:

And to the Pizzo Scalino:

And to the high Bernina summits (something my mother had achieved when a young girl but which eluded me).

I wonder how many others of you will be spending this enforced seclusion, at a time of plague and uncertainty, to muse upon your own lives. I think most of you.