A  photographic exhibition documenting local life under Covid-19 and organised by the L’Ora Blu’ (the blue hour), continues near the Borghesi restaurant in Bagni di Lucca Villa’s high street, Viale Umberto.

The ‘Blue hour’ is a phrase used in photography to indicate those particular moments just before dawn and twilight which allow particular contrast effects not otherwise obtainable as light is here characterized by a colder temperature and lower energy level, resulting in subjects with numerous shadows, and de-saturated colours.

The L’Ora Blu photographic group, which is curated by Marco Barsanti, was born after the first photography course organized by the Michel De Montaigne Foundation of Bagni di Lucca. Sharing a common passion has stimulated meetings to talk about photography and improve technique and composition.

We now live in a masked, socially distanced society. It’s surely gone on too long (like a Wagner opera, as one wit proclaimed), and the pictures taken by a group of local photographers amply illustrate this fact:  the especially vulnerable elderly who after a life that has experienced the ravages of war and deprivation have now to face another trial:

And the park benches neatly laid out with socially distancing X’s telling people not to sit there as if they were musical chairs :

With several other photographs the exhibition develops the contemporary theme, that strange refrain of our time which few of us would have foreseen, accustomed as we have been to other threats like global warming and Islamism terrorism.

Now the danger comes from an invisible enemy about which little is known but which can affect anyone of any age, of any status and of any provenance with equal force.

In the midst of this pandemic there remain several people I know who place the real danger in the fear of catching the virus rather than the virus itself. True, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. However, we all know what happened to those heads of state who shrugged off the fear, underestimating it and advised the nation to ‘take it on the chin’, while shaking hands with Covid-19 infected patients.

The fact is that it is easy to hypothesise that the pandemic is merely an increasingly totalitarian government’s ploy to place all its citizens under their control. There appears to be not too much difference between Orwellian thought-crime and the supposed conspiracy theorists.

So again another ideology steps in to divide us from erstwhile friends. Those who have not yet been lost to the brexitian cult are now in danger of being swept up in yet another dubious theory: that relating to Covid-19. No, of course, they will say all the figures are incorrect. This person did not die from the virus but from something else; the scenes in hospital intensive care departments have been greatly exaggerated, and if people actually believe that the virus exists then it must have been produced artificially by a frankensteinian laboratory, a certain person’s ‘chinese virus’. Meanwhile, the second wave lurks like a winter tsunami

However, I too, have been now touched by the death of a friend or relative victim of the horror: a school-mate, fellow scout and musician lost to the imperceptible menace. At least I have the memory of his stay with us in Longoio, the time we spent in each other’s company and the places we visited (including the re-opening of Puccini’s birth-house in Lucca) to treasure. How many more memories must we gather prematurely before this thing is finally defeated?

Like the Black Death, the Great Plague of Italy of 1630, London’s of 1665, and the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century something positive may come out of all this. Perhaps will it be a book like Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’, an immortal collection of stories related to each other by a group of young noble Florentines quarantined in a country villa away from the plague afflicting their home town at the time. Perhaps it will be like Albert Camus’ ‘The Plague’ based on similar experiences when living in Algeria. Or perhaps it may reflect those terrifying pages in one of Italy’s greatest writers, Alessandro Manzoni’s, novel ‘I Promessi Sposi’, (The betrothed) when describing the great plague that afflicted Milan and northern Italy in much the same way as the present peril is still continuing to menace.

On Italian television statistics relating to the ‘crisi corona’ are spewed out on a daily basis much like the weather forecast. New regulations are introduced to control the spikes. When will we ever return to normalcy I wonder?  At least the British Museum will shortly re-open thanks in large part to the sterling cleaning efforts of its Italian heritage preventative conservator and dust expert Fabiana Portoni. Now there’s some hope!

Meanwhile the ‘Ora Blu’ photographic course, which should have started in September, has had to be postponed because of the health emergency. For further details about when it will start please email

gruppofotografico.lorablu@gmail.com

or contact Isabella on 339 2982359.