The poet Wilfred Owen, killed in the last days of the Great War, famously said ‘my subject is war and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.’
Fornoli’s War Memorial
I wonder how many great literary works will come out of this other type of war: the war against disease and the Covid -19 pandemic? There is pity here too and there will also be sadness in recollecting these very strange and very hard-to-take times.
For example, look at the children’s playground in front of Fornoli’s electrical shop. I can hardly bear to pass this place now; a place where in normal times parents congregate with their small children and supervise them playing on the swings, the roundabout and the little spring horse. I can hardly bear to see this place now deserted, its fixture rendered out-of-bounds with red and white bunting. It shows a complete reversal of the most essential human qualities of sociability which are learnt from an early age through play, like any other species on this planet. All these precautions may be necessary but they’re just not fair!
This bench, once a meeting place, is now reduced to accommodating only one person.
That red and white bunting seems to be everywhere here. In Eurospin’s store at Fornaci for instance it has been put up to distinguish things one can buy, like food, and clothes, which one can’t. Crazy – I think clothes are almost as essential!
Another year, indeed another day, may become ever more important to us the older we get but let’s think of children’s youngest days when so much changes in so short a time and so much is being learnt.
I just hope, like all of us, that this bloody pandemic will be over as soon as possible. If we had to learn quickly to adapt to the virus’ presence it will be rather more difficult to re-adapt ourselves back to the life we regarded as normal before all this happened. May the voices of children soon return to our locked down playgrounds!
I’ve mentioned Dante in several of my posts. This year commemorates the seven hundredth anniversary of his death and it may be useful to list below those posts involving the ‘sommo poeta’.
You will find several castles where Dante stayed, a walled town where Francesca da Rimini and Paolo conducted their doomed love affair, townspeople declaiming the poet’s lines by heart during a mediaeval festa and much else. Enjoy!
I remember some Italian friends telling me of an English couple holidaying at a seaside resort on the Ligurian coast with whom they struck up a friendship. The friends were invited by the couple to spend time with them in England. They took up the invitation and were very happy with their stay. Only one thing shocked them, however: the English couple did not know who Dante was. Dante – a member of that supreme trinity of European poets which includes Shakespeare and Goethe – the founder of the modern Italian language, the writer of that most wonderful poem of Italy and Europe, the Divine Comedy. How could their English friends not know about him?
I have not yet come across an Italian who did not know who Shakespeare was and which country he came from. Italians also expect that most foreigners should know who Dante is. This is, unfortunately, not always the case even if this week it’s the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death on 25th March 1321, shortly after he completed his greatest work. It’s a day celebrated throughout the peninsula.
I’m sure my readers will know who Dante was. Whether they have read the Divine Comedy or know what it’s about may, however, be another matter. Dante’s Comedy (and it’s called a comedy not because it’s funny – although there are some very funny bits in it – but because it is written for the people in the vernacular Italian language and not for ecclesiastical intellectuals in the language of Latin ) is a long allegorical poem in three parts: hell or the Inferno, purgatory or the Purgatorio and heaven or the Paradiso. An allegorical poem represents much broader issues than seem to appear in the characters and scenarios it unfolds. For example, the well-known opening where the poet, midway through his life, finds himself lost in a dark wood also means that he finds himself aged thirty-five (halfway through the traditional biblical seventy years of human life) not knowing what to do and unable to get out of the existential darkness in which he finds himself.
The passage from the darkness of human ignorance and misery towards the light of God and the liberation of the soul is the central theme of the poem. Hell is the world of sin where transgressors are punished, purgatory represents the reparation of the soul and heaven displays liberation in a western equivalent of the Hindu Nirvana. Dante is accompanied on this journey by his admired ancient Roman poet, Virgil, in the Inferno and Purgatory and by his supreme lady-love, Beatrice, in Paradise. It is, indeed, a true pilgrim’s progress.
Dante has special relevance to our part of the world at Bagni di Lucca. The commune’s highest village Montefegatesi has at its summit a bust of the poet.
It looks towards the wild landscape of the Apennines and its Orrido di Botri, the awesome gorge which inspired the poet in his description of the infernal gates where all hope is lost to those who enter there.
The majestic Pania Della Croce also makes its appearance in the poem (Inferno Canto 32)
There is a tradition here of memorising the Divine Comedy. I have attended an evening performance at Fornoli’s church where a person recited by heart the canto mentioning Paolo and Francesca’s passionate love affair. It was amazing!
Italians are lucky in having a poet writing in the 13th and 14th centuries that they can still read without too much difficulty. At school, I remember that reading Chaucer and Langland, both mediaeval writers, in English was not such an easy task! Is this because the English language has changed so much more in these eight hundred years than Italian? I suppose so.
Anyway, why should we read Dante today whether in Italian or in translation (there’s a very good recent one by Clive James)? It’s because this divine poem has even more relevance in our disturbing age of plague, war, global warming and social anomie. We are, indeed, in a second mediaeval, evil age and our concerns are very close to those that affected Dante.
I’m not going to tell you what parts of the Divine Comedy to read: just start at the beginning and carry on with that extraordinary journey until the end – Dante’s is such a wonderful poem that it will change your life forever if you haven’t read it before…or even if you read it again.
Each part consists of thirty-three cantos rhymed in terza rima ie ABA BCB CDC. Indeed the number three is fundamental to the poem as moves towards Dante’s vision of the mysterious Trinitarian God himself. Each part ends with the word ‘stelle’, stars, with the final line of this sublime creation ending thus:
‘L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.’ (Love that moves the sun and the other stars).
May we too come out of our present darkness to see the stars again!
(William Blake’s illustration to the gates of Hell)
A considerable part of Bagni di Lucca’s high street is increasingly presenting a forlorn panorama of closed-up shops. This is especially so in the section leading from the Piazzetta, with its now-shuttered bar where we would once enjoy live music, to the post office. Gone is Daddo’s shoe store. The Aesthetic Butterfly beauty centre has flown off and the gardening store has long since stopped blossoming. The hardware shop expired forever when its owner died. Even the elegant coffee bar has ceased refreshing its customers with the best pastries in town.
However, all is not utterly lost. Walking to Boldi’s garage yesterday I noticed on the street’s left-hand side a shop front displaying a collection of photographs. Finding the door open I entered into a fascinating exhibition.
Behind one of the easels the photographer Marco Pistolozzi appeared.
Marco explained to me that felt he should use the emptiness of the shop to display his work. What a good idea to brighten up a dilapidating high street! Here is a selection of what I saw. Some you will recognise the Galgani smithy, the Orrido di Botri and at least one of the girls.
The photographer is particularly good at using drones and has made some fascinating aerial videos of Bagni di Lucca from the air. See https://youtu.be/PgDOJLp7Rgg
More people like Marco should be around to help save the High Street and turn it into something more lively. I remember a similar thing happening during the series of exhibitions held during those glorious summer years from 2013 to 2015 when Bagni di Lucca’s Arts Festival was celebrated in the otherwise, boarded-up shops at Ponte di Serraglio. I just hope that something can be done when this blasted pandemic is over. As-near-as-normal social life has to be restored soon before we all become hermits and waste our lives away in a societal desert like saint Simon Stylites who spent most of his life on top of a column.
Learning a language means much more than mastering its grammar and vocabulary. It is understanding a nation’s culture and values. Federico Fellini realised this when he said “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
I’ve always been interested in languages ever since I realized I was bilingual speaking the English of my father and the Italian of my mother. I was late, however, and didn’t utter a word in either language until I was four. I then retained speech impediment, a stammer, until well into my teens.
At school, I was able to use my knowledge of Italian to learn another romance language, French. However, with the root of these languages, Latin, I failed miserably. I don’t quite know why but perhaps it’s because I only want to learn languages that are spoken today. I wished to do German at school but my parents encouraged me to take up ancient Greek but, again, I didn’t take to it at all and left the class after only one term.
I added a further language when I spent two years in India in my early twenties. I enjoyed Hindi with its logically laid out alphabet and its Devanagari script.
In 1990 I began learning Welsh at an evening class at London’s City Lit as we looked after a holiday cottage in Powys at the time. My wife and I also attended courses in Welsh at Nant Gwrtheyrn, the centre for endangered languages in Gwynneth and Gregynog, the University of Wales gorgeous country retreat. I remain always amazed at the number of Welsh words that are so close to Italian that it cannot be a coincidence. For example, Welsh-Italian-English: credu=credi=believe, pont=ponte=bridge, the days of the week Wednesday=Mercoledi=Mercher etc.
Languages must be regularly used if they are to be remembered and a few years ago I realised that while my knowledge of Italian was increasing, because I now lived in that country, my Hindi was deteriorating and my Welsh was veering towards an utter blank. Without unduly advertising it, however, I latched onto Duolingo. Of course, such a language app can only help if one also uses textbooks and has a person one can talk to in the language. Textbooks in Hindi and Welsh I do have but it’s been more difficult to find their speakers. Luckily I’ve found at least one Hindi speaker and neighbours from Wales who among their visitors have a Welsh language teacher.
Learning a language means finding the time to learn it and a proper routine. My timetable now is as follows. Sunday French. Monday German. Tuesday Hindi Wednesday Latin. Saturday Welsh. What about Thursday and Friday? Add another language? My wife who is an interpreter by profession had started studying Russian and as for me it was from the beginning I decided to reserve two days for Russian. So this Slavonic language now has Thursday and Friday devoted to it.
When do I have my language lessons? In the morning usually in bed before I get up. In that way, there are fewer distractions and less chance of throwing away my 375 days uninterrupted streak. Now it would be terrible if that happened! Above all the most important reason for learning a language is to keep the brain cells active. Chess might do, even Sudoku. but languages are a much more practical and useful way to spend one’s free time: learning another language really does expand one’s universe and is like becoming another person.
Yesterday was Italy’s first national commemoration day in memory of its covid dead and Bagni Di Lucca was no exception in remembering this sad occasion with its own twenty nine positive cases, four of which are in intensive care and its fifty quarantined families.
One year to the day when the shocking train of army trucks bearing the bodies of Bergamo Covid victims was shown on TV I passed the melancholy ruined shell of the former plague church of San Rocco located at the junction between the main Controneria road and the turn-off to the village of Vetteglia. San Rocco had been open for services until the 1970s when the Lucca bishopric declared the church redundant. It was soon looted of its fitments and the weather did the rest.
I noticed this sign stuck on the facade:
Translated this notice, placed there by persons unknown last month, means.
“In this building which is no longer a church, why not make it into a meeting place for young people to be together and exchanges ideas and plans. From this more initiatives arise. If there are people who would like this to happen. let’s do it and invite local associations to join in. Covid will end. Life continues.”
Interestingly I’d thought about a similar use for this despoiled building when last year I wrote:
“I at least would feel inclined that to give thanks to the Almighty for eventually delivering us from the pandemic we could have the former church of San Rocco outside nearby Vetteglia and now in a ruinous condition memoralizing this event and restored as a refreshment and information point for modern-day pilgrims to the extraordinarily beautiful area of the Controneria.”
I do hope something on this line can be done when things get back to as normal as I’m sure they will be before too long.
PS. In case you didn’t know San Rocco was invoked against the plague and, judging by the number of churches dedicated to him, was particularly venerated. Born in a noble family the saint gave his wealth to the poor and became a mendicant pilgrim. During his travels the town of Acquapendente became badly affected by the Black Death; Saint Roch stopped there and healed its victims by making the sign of the cross over them. He cured the sick of several other plague-ridden towns without catching the disease himself. However, when the saint reached Piacenza in northern Italy he fell victim and a fetid ulcer developed in his leg. So rank was its smell that people kept well away from him. Luckily a dog befriended Roch and brought him some food daily and even licked his ulcer clean. Hence St. Roch has also become the patron saint of dogs. So let’s have a refreshment point here for dog walkers and their pets too!
The lovely avenue of limes joining Fornoli with Bagni di Lucca is going in for some heavy pruning and also some severe criticism. Certainly, the appearance of these trees reminds me a little of those devastated battlefield landscapes of the First World War and I have also received expressions of disappointment from persons living there. In particular, there is some traffic inconvenience with one route diverted through a car park to avoid the hazard of falling branches.
I remain confident however that this work is all for the best in conserving these splendid trees which welcome all who enter our comune. After all, the same arboreal operation took place there ten years ago and the trees returned without difficulty in their stately forms.
But this is one job I would carry out with difficulty in our garden. As Sybil Fawlty remarked about her husband Basil I had the idea of becoming a tree surgeon but didn’t because I couldn’t stand the sight of sap…
Let us look forwards to the clothing of leaves on these stark trunks.
Meanwhile, the magnolias planted in Bagni’s public gardens are flowering, as compensation, to their full glory.
The mimosa’s flowering is a reminder that this lovely blossom is a symbol of International Women’s Day on March 8th celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day is also a time for action in accelerating women’s equality.
This equality is not only to be achieved in terms of women’s participation in the world’s affairs but also, as has recently been so sadly demonstrated in the murder of Sarah Everard (and the quite unacceptable behaviour of the police in reacting to the vigil in her memory at London’s Clapham Common) in the right of women to be able to walk home at any time of day free from sexual harassment, intimidation and abuse.
Italy, with one of the highest feminicide in Europe, is not a particularly wonderful place to be a woman although machoism attitudes have been tempered a little since female bottom-pinching and catcalling was considered de rigeur by most males.
Bagni di Lucca has been foremost in the celebration of international women’s day in the Lucchesia for many years now. Regrettably, this year, the exhibition of arts and crafts with the concerts and conferences at Ponte di Serraglio’s Casino’ have had to be cancelled because of the ongoing pandemic.
I feel privileged to have covered this marvellous local event in my blog since 2013. Unable to do the same for 2021 I can only present the following link index to those previous occasions.
I hope that you (and especially those who have participated in Bagni di Lucca’s ‘Settimana Della Donna’) will enjoy reading through these accounts with the earnest hope that next year this event will return with its characteristic flair.
Italy is again having a tough time regarding this damned covid as a third wave is now imminent. So many red zones have been imposed and even Rome has had to shut its sights and museums. The only safe place to be in Italy is the island of Sardinia, its only white zone.
I was so lucky to have visited Florence last month, a visit I shall always treasure in the enchanted deserted spaces of this cradle of the renaissance and a Uffizi all to myself as if it were my private gallery. Let’s hope it won’t be too long before my next visit there.
We are, indeed, under siege by the micro-monster. Lucca again has the R factor above 1. However, in our mountain area north of the city the battle seems to have equalled out and we remain in the orange zone. It is so unfortunate for families especially those living in cramped city flats, but here in these still leafless Apennine woodlands, we can be surrounded by a nature that is rapidly shaking off its winter blanket and entering into the joyous season of spring.
Sadly, so many events at Bagni di Lucca have had to be cancelled; events that mark the year’s social and religious calendar in such a significant way. No Befana, that good witch which concludes the Christmas festivities. No international women’s day with those inspiring events and exhibitions at Ponte’s Casino. And clearly, no Easter celebrations like the awesome living crucifixion procession at Castiglione Della Garfagnana.
Events, some of which date back to time immemorial, have had to be cancelled to safeguard us from the invisible enemy. Let’s fervently hope that they will return soon.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to be with my wife for over four months now because of cancelled flights. No Christmas together in forty-four years of married life. No New Year clinking of glasses. Not even Sandra’s birthday… Only that virtual presence that Skype and WhatsApp manage to give – I can’t wait for the next generation of smartphones to supply us with holograms of our loved ones!
One thing which hasn’t been cancelled yet is nature’s annual cycle of rebirth. Just doing a bit of gardening can awaken the senses and make one realise the beauty of the earth and its living forms.
So let’s enjoy earth’s resurgence and let it give us strength through its infinite wonders to see us through these rather trying times and help us appreciate ever more fully, through enforced absence, all those things and lives we hold most dear.
The sequence of pleasant spring-like days has ended damp-squid like and a gloomily drizzly and misty morning has descended upon our Val di Lima. It’s stay-at-home and watch DVDs weather.
Let’s go somewhere warm, at least in our imagination! In recent days I’ve been viewing feature films and TV mini-series dealing with India. Sadly, however, they all seem to have one major theme in common: that of the situation of the chee-chee in the sub-continent. In case you didn’t know the term chee-chee is an ethnic slur against Anglo-Indian or Eurasian half-castes. In most cases, this means a person born of an English father and an Indian mother although more rarely it can be the offspring of an Indian father and an English mother.
Ethnic slurs or ethnophaulisms may range from terms used without too much offence to refer to persons from another country. A yank to refer to a citizen of the USA, for example, does not arouse important objections. However, the use of an infamous N-word certainly does. Many ethnophaulisms used for European peoples relate to the foods they are supposed to eat. The French are frogs, the Germans are Krauts and the English are rostbifs for example. Subdivisions of the English, those who voted for Brexit, even have their food term: gammons.
No such less impolite distinction relates to the chee-chee, however, which is derived from the Hindi word for dirt. In fact to say something is chee-chee means ‘how disgusting.’
The first film I watched regarding chee-chee persons was ‘Bhowani Junction’ directed by George Cukor. Dating from 1956 it is adapted from John Masters’ novel published two years previously. Ava Gardner stars stunningly as Victoria Jones an Anglo-Indian chee-chee with a Welsh father working on the railways and an Indian mother. Her performance forms the highlight of the film which also has a musical score by Miklos Rozsa.
Victoria is torn between her dual heritage. She feels like a foreigner in an Indian milieu but is also an outcast in English society. She is torn between her loyalty to the British in India (after all, she is serving in the army) but is also involved in the fight for Indian independence. This conflict is fully personified in her divided love for an Indian Sikh Ranjit Kasel, an Anglo-Indian Patrick Tayor and an English colonel Rodney Savage. This is where the film differs from the book. In the book, Victoria pairs up with her fellow chee-chee Patrick. In the film, she marries Rodney and goes with him to the UK when he finished his service.
The same theme of the Chee Chee is `Queenie` a 1987 TV miniseries adapted from the novel by Michael Korda based on the life of the actress Merle Oberon. Michael is the son of Vincent, who directed several films starring Merle and whose husband, Alexander Korda, was Michael`s uncle. For once the film is a lot better than the book which I thought was pretty awful.
Queenie is a lovely girl of Indian and Irish descent but fair enough to pass as a white girl until her heritage is found out by her class-mates who taunt her about it so much that Queenie runs away from the exclusive school. Invited by a boyfriend Queenie is also thrown out of the English club when her background is discovered. Incidentally, Queenie is beautifully played by Mia Sarapochiello who is of Italian descent.
Merle Oberon felt she had to hide her Anglo-Indian background and invented a story that she was born and raised in Tasmania with her birth records there destroyed in a fire. Invited by the Tasmanian government to attend a celebration in her honour she retracted her story.
At the moment I am re-watching that magnificently produced ‘The Jewel in the Crown,’ a TV mini-series dating from 1984 and based on Paul Scott`s Raj Quartet. Here, the Anglo-Indian love interest is between Daphne Manners serving in the British Army in India and Hari Kumar a journalist who had received an education in an English public school. The interaction of Art Malik and Susan Wooldridge in these roles is utterly engaging, exposing the divided loyalties of so many English and Indians in the sub-continent.
The general theme is that Anglo-Indians (by which I now include Indians brought up and educated in England) have a searingly tortured sense of not being Indian enough to be Indian in India and not English enough to be English in England.
Incidentally, this epic mini-series was directed by Christopher Morahan who later made ‘The Peacock Spring’ starring his daughter Hattie and which develops the chi-chi theme in the love affair between an ingeniously eager English schoolgirl on holiday in India and an aspiring young Indian poet.Continue reading →
