The real test for whether we are reaching the end of the pandemic crisis (or, at the very least, learnt to live with it) is to see how many of our traditional annual events have returned to us.
One event which returns after a two-year absence due to Covid-19 is the seventeenth annual Valdottavo oil festival. The two-day event officially opened on 9 April with ribbon cutting in the presence of the mayor of Borgo a Mozzano, Patrizio Andreuccetti, As the publicity posters show several events promised there including helicopter rides and an ecological walk.
We stopped at the Festa dell’Olio last Sunday on a delightful day which almost seemed like early summer. It was great to find such a substantial gathering of visitors after two years absence of these local social events. What was especially good was that we could now see people’s expressions on their faces which until the relaxation of the emergency measures at the start of this April had been covered in public places by those wretched surgical masks.
Valdottavo contains some fine fin-de-siècle villas. Clearly many emigrants struck it lucky abroad and returned to their birthplace retiring in enviable surroundings.
It also has its own ornate little theatre.
Although the festa was supposed to be dedicated to olive oil grown in the local groves there didn’t seem to be much evidence of this product although we did find a stall selling the virgin liquid together with some delicious honey.
Most of the stalls dealt with local food products, garden tools, plants and handicrafts.
We did our own ‘ecological walk’ and passed by an old water-mill, a fine example of renewable energy if only it could be brought back into full working order and avoid our over-dependance on energy sources from unsavoury countries.
We found ourselves in a hamlet above Valdottavo which we recognized as being the place where we had looked at a house for sale a couple of years ago. Although the building was substantial and had an elegant interior we did not regret not having bought it. The maintenance involved in the upkeep of such huge manors must be considerable and, in any case, we remain perfectly contented with what we have bought since…
We look forwards to plenty more events returning to us. Already there is the ‘My flower’ festival returning to nearby Borgo a Mozzano in May (the Azalea festival takes place again in 2023). Who knows what further delights the summer will bring ?
All we have to do now is to get used to going out again!
Palm Sunday marks the start of Holy Week – that time between the triumphant entrance of our Saviour into Jerusalem and His Crucifixion.
The previous evening we’d attended a performance of Piero Nissim’s Stabat Mater at the church of San Cassiano a Vico.
This church was built in the 8th century on a river island created by the Serchio in an area called VicusInsularis and a stretch of medieval wall face dating back to the 12th century is integrated into the masonry of the current church, which owes its present appearance from a series of rebuilding carried out in 1744 and 1826. The internal structure is characterized by majestic eighteenth-century altars. Of particular splendour is the largest one, completed by a front with draperies made of stucco.
At an altar on the right side there is a fresco from the second half of the fifteenth century depicting the venerated Madonna del Soccorso with Saints Sebastian and Nicola da Tolentino.
Behind the main altar is a panel by Michelangelo di Pietro with the Madonna enthroned between Saints Cassiano and Biagio.
San Cassiano a Vico church is a characteristic example of so many other parish churches in the plain of Lucca with a palimpsest of styles where rococo and neo-classical ornamentations conceal an original Romanesque structure.
Eight years had passed since we’d gone to the premiere of our friend Piero Nissim’s Stabat Mater which was set in the splendid great hall of the archbishop’s palace at Lucca. Piero (who I have already mentioned in my post at http://longoio.wordpress.com/2013/10/28/pumpkins-and-puppets/ et.al.) comes from an old-established Jewish family from Livorno. He is a singer, balladeer, puppeteer, author and much more. We had not realised then that he was also a composer on a considerable classical scale.
How wonderful it is that it was this Jewish person who set that most wonderful poem Stabat Mater, about the sorrows of the Virgin Mary at seeing her dead son at the foot of the cross, written by Jacopone da Todi, and that it was the Archbishop of Lucca who provided the setting for its first performance! True ecumenicist thinking here!
Jacopone da Todi, born in Umbria near Perugia, wrote that most moving of verses of which is this English translation:
At the Cross her station keeping, stood the mournful Mother weeping, close to her Son to the last.
Through her heart, His sorrow sharing, all His bitter anguish bearing, and now at length the sword has passed.
O how sad and sore distressed was that Mother, highly blest, of the sole-begotten One.
Christ above in torment hangs, she beneath beholds the pangs of her dying glorious Son.
Is there one who would not weep, whelmed in miseries so deep, Christ’s dear Mother to behold?
Can the human heart refrain from partaking in her pain, in that Mother’s pain untold?
For the sins of His own nation, she saw Jesus wracked with torment, all with scourges rent:
She beheld her tender Child, Saw Him hangs in desolation, and Till His spirit forth He sent.
O thou Mother! Fount of love! Touch my spirit from above; make my heart with thine accord:
Make me feel as thou hast felt; make my soul to glow and melt with the love of Christ my Lord.
Holy Mother! Pierce me through, in my heart each wound renew of my Saviour crucified:
Let me share with thee His pain, which for all my sins was slain, who for me in torments died.
Let me mingle tears with thee, mourning Him who mourned for me, all the days that I may live:
By the Cross with thee to stay, there with thee to weep and pray, is all I ask of thee to give.
Virgin of all virgins blest! Listen to my fond request: let me share thy grief divine;
Let me, to my latest breath, in my body bear the death of that dying Son of thine.
Wounded with His every wound, steep my soul till it hath swooned, in His very Blood away;
Be to me, O Virgin, nigh, lest in flames I burn and die, in His awful Judgment Day.
Christ, when Thou shalt call me hence, be Thy Mother my defence; be Thy Cross my victory;
While my body here decays, may my soul Thy goodness praise, Safe in Paradise with Thee.
As the local parish priest explained in his introduction to the evening’s concert the ‘Stabat Mater’ refers to the fifth of the Seven Sorrows suffered by Christ’s mother. These are:
The hymn, or sequence, is certainly one of the most powerful of all religious poems and is a meditation on the suffering of Mary, Jesus Christ‘s mother, during that fifth sorrow, her son’s crucifixion. Liturgically, it is sung on the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows which is commemorated on September the 15th.
Let me say emphatically that one does not have to be a religious person to be affected by this most poignant of poems. For me it is addressed to all mothers who have lost their sons through disease, war or crime. It is especially and distressingly relevant today when so many mothers have lost their children as a resuIt of the war in Ukraine.
The Stabat Mater is a truly inspirational universal work and it is no wonder that it has influenced the greatest of composers to set it to music. In my collecting passion I have amassed no less than forty-six different version of it and at the moment am listening to Bononcini’s setting, a musician from Modena, who composed his version for Vienna in 1711. My all-time favourite remains Szymanowski’s Polish composition.
Piero Nissim’s version for four voices and organ set Jacopone’s verses in a lyrical, meditative strophic frame and was profoundly felt by both singers and audience.
Nissim performed the StabatMater together with Roberta Ceccotti (soprano), Maria Bruno (mezzo-soprano) and Francesco Lombardi (bass). The ensemble was accompanied by Maestro Franco Meoli. In the second part of the evening, pieces by Piero Nissim were performed for one or two voices on spiritual themes and two compositions by the pianist Loredana Bruno with the Beata Vergine Del Soccorso Choir and the participation of the soprano Elisabetta Della Santa. The event was promoted by the Parish of San Cassiano in Vico and by the Brunier Association of Lucca.
After the concert we were able to meet up with Piero Nissim and reminded him that we had attended the premiere of his composition. Piero was pleased and remarked. ‘In that case you’ll probably have noted some improvements since then!’
Holy Week is all about the greatest story, truth, myth, whatever name you like to give to it which surely resounds within the heart of any sentient person, no matter what colour class or creed they may be, who has any pretention of being called human. It is unutterably sad that at this same time the most atrocious war is being waged in which one Christian nation has invaded another Christian one. It is quite beyond any words for me to fully express my sorrow at this greatest tragedy of our present times and I can only join my own grief at what is happening on our own continent with all those who feel the same.
I could never have imagined that the two most cataclysmic events in recent world history (and consequently in my life) have taken place during the past two years. I am, of course, referring to the Covid -19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
These two happenings seem to me to be recreations of events I had previously only encountered in my readings of history. The pandemic made me think of the reign of ‘King Cholera’ in Victorian England. Asiatic cholera (originated this time in India) spread to Europe in the early years of the nineteenth-century. In Britain its first cases were diagnosed in 1831 and the epidemic reached London in February 1832. In France alone over 100,000 died from the disease. (It also reached the part of the world where I live now – Lucchesia Italy – as the archaeological excavations of the cemetery at Benabbio castle reveal). And, of course, there was the ‘Spanish Flu’ of 1919 which decimated more victims than fell on the battlefields of World War One.
The unprovoked obscene war currently festering through Ukraine (but isn’t all war obscene?) reminds me of what I learnt about the indescribable tortures of the Thirty Years War, the wiping out of a whole generation in the Great War, the death marches of the Second World War, the building of the Burma-Siam railway, the massacres of Babi Yar and, sadly so much more suffering making one think that any thought of Humanity has disintegrated.
Could I possibly be living in an age which my parents assured me I was lucky to have been born into since I would never have to witness the horror of war, the trauma of being a refugee or the dread of famine like they had to? For much of my life I felt fortunate enough to only have to experience the tragedies of the holocaust, the Ukrainian famine or the destruction of Dresden by reading about them and browsing at photographs. I could never have imagined that I would not have to peruse a history book or view archive film to learn something about what innocent humanity has had to experience from indiscriminate tyranny.
No I never imagined further ….now, however, all I have to do is switch on the television to be plunged in some of the worst atrocities perpetrated by the human race at any time and all ……in real-time!
What is slightly different about the Ukraine war from other wars is the extensive presence of mass-media. The internet, social media and blogs means that so much of what is happening there is being recorded by individuals for posterity. The latest atrocity, that of a Russian cluster bomb with the script ‘for children’ daubed on it, exploding at a Ukrainian railway station crowded with civilians waiting to catch a train that would carry them to a safer place has been captured on mobiles and instantly transmitted to the world through Wi-Fi. Furthermore, there is today a much greater number of journalists and reporters embedded in the Ukrainian army and in the field than was ever before the case in previous world conflicts. Moreover, a very large number of these reporters are women who are showing incredible guts in facing the situations they are daily encountering there, both physically and emotionally.
We are lucky here at least not have to face the daily routine of air-raid sirens, the absence of food, water, electricity and medical supplies and the fear of being blasted from the face of the earth by Russian GRAD-21 multiple rocket launchers. However, the war must surely be having a certain psychological effect on us all, even though we might be a few hundred miles away from its centre. Every day we must prepare ourselves for more atrocities to be screened on our television sets, see more women and children killed and maimed, witness ever more horrors and tortures suffered by a martyred populace, see ever more insult to our planet by pollution from burning fuel supplies and wrecked civilian cars and tank hulks.
How much more can we take? Couldn’t we watch a classic serial instead or merely switch the damn goggle-box off? Just shrug our shoulders and say it’s nothing to do with us? Then we would surely be subject to the condemnation of indifference, that coldest of words and one that is inscribed on the fateful platform at Milan Central station which transported thousands of citizens to the Nazi death camps.
It is almost impossibly difficult to be indifferent to something that is happening in our European continent, something that connects all people who live here with an interrelated history, with others of a similar Christian-based culture. Although all men are born equal and there should never be any taint of racism it must be said that we are ever more drawn to the tragedy that is daily unfolding in Ukraine because so many of the agonised faces we see could in their looks be next-door neighbours or even our relatives.
It is often said that the final version of history is written by the victors. I sincerely hope that Ukraine will be in a position to write the genuine account of what is happening to it now. The bravery of its people and the maturing of its president into a great war-time leader can ask for nothing less.
What is the difference between science and pseudo-science? If a theory is subject to change because of new evidence, (for example when Galileo proved the Earth was no longer the centre of the solar system and famously stated ‘e pur si muove’ – and yet it moves…around the sun…) then that is a scientific theory. If, however, new unproved evidence is used with regard to a pre-existing theory without ever changing it but continuing to support it then that for me is pseudo-science.
A scientific theory can never be said to be 100% truthful and unchangeable since it is always subject to modification (or even refutation). A pseudo-scientific theory, on the other hand is declared THE TRUTH by its fanatics and every new piece of evidence that does not fit into it it is thrown out like‘fake news’
As long as there are humans living on this planet both science and pseudo-science will continue to live in an uneasy and sometimes violent coexistence. Flat earthers, cargo culters and Ikean believers will continue to have their devoted acolytes.
What is alarming about the age I am now living in is that the confrontation between science and pseudo-science is becoming ever more extreme. I can point to four major instances in the last few years where the distinction between the two has led to irreconcileable confrontations.
The first is the con of brexitism which, no-one – except of course, those who trust in pseudo-science – really believes has made the UK a better place.
The second is trumpism which continues to assert that the former POTUS, the latter-day messiah sent to save America from destructive forces, was the victim of a dark conspiracy.
The third is anti-covidism which insists that Covid-19 is a specially engineered epidemic used to body-snatch humans by injecting them with the appropriate serum.
The fourth is perhaps the worst for it refers to the present horrific war in Ukraine, Putinism.
Sadly families and friends continue to be divided by brexitism, anti-covidism, trumpism and Putinism and, because it is essentially a battle between science and pseudo-science, no amount of discussion appears to be able to reconcile the two sides.
It is pointless showing how farmers, from Welsh hills to East Anglian fenlands, are suffering from the effects of brexitism. It is useless to describe the way the American constitution continues to be threatened by trumpism. It is worthless to try to convince anti-covidists that Covid-19 is as real as any infectious disease. It is desperation to declare that the corpses scattered in the streets of Bucha are actually set-up effects staged by Ukrainian to discredit the Kremlin tsardom.
Pseudo-science lends itself admirably to conspiracy theory where events are explained by invoking a conspiracy by politically motivated sinister and powerful groups when other explanations are rather more probable. So brexitism was fuelled by the belief that the EU was going to remove UK sovereignty, anti-covidism was charged with ideas of specially engineered epidemic scares, trumpism was fired by the belief that society was going to the dogs because of democratic liberalism and putinism was driven by the creed that neo-Nazis were running Ukraine.
Friends and families have regrettably been separated by the influx of false dogmas. What is so terrible is when whole nations are torn to smithereens by the war between science and pseudo-science. It is becoming ever more heart-breaking to view the reports coming out of the beautiful, still-independent republic of Ukraine. I do not think I have ever had to hear such terrible international news in my lifetime. Anything approaching what we are having to witness at the present time and in our own continent is only to be compared with what I have read in history books regarding events like the battle of Stalingrad, the bombing of Dresden and the Holocaust.
Stupid me who thought that Europe had learnt something after experiencing two apocalyptic wars in the last century! I now doubt we shall ever learn anything at all – at least in the years remaining of my lifetime.
Passing by Ponte a Serraglio, Bagni di Lucca’s historic gaming and bathing focus (although it’s some time since it possessed a gaming license and the natural hot water baths have regrettably been closed for over two years now) my wife pointed out to me a hitherto unnoticed little chapel hidden in a thick bamboo grove. It’s so pleasing how so often when one has been living and thinking of knowing the same area for some time new discoveries continue to be regularly made.
We stopped and made our way through the dense grove to reach the chapel.
Although now in a very derelict state with a gaping hole in its roof, rotting pews, a decayed altar and overgrown walls the chapel still preserves something of the noble air it once possessed.
The outer corbels ornamented with classical volutes are particularly elegant as is the elaborate wrought-iron entrance door and the charming lantern holder.
It’s easy to think one has seen everything on regularly traversed routes. This time, however, Sandra’s quick observational powers brought to our attention a building I had never noted before and seems not to be shown to any local maps.
Who built this chapel? To which saint was it dedicated? Was it in memory of a dear departed or to fulfil some vow I wonder? As with too many buildings in our area it’s a real pity it hasn’t been restored and perhaps re-used for another purpose like a shelter for walkers on one of the several local footpaths of our area like the ‘Via del Grano’ described in my previous post.
Already threatened in many of the world’s habitats, in particular the Amazon and Ganges river valleys where they have flourished for millennia, Fresh-water dolphins (Platanistoidea) are to be introduced as an experiment in a protected basin of the Lima, a tributary of the Serchio River in the Lucchesia region of Tuscany. DOPES (Dolphin Organization for Preserving Endangered Species) is overseeing this worthwhile project.
There will be a viewing platform for the observation of these adorable creatures near Cocciglia and there are plans for the area’s tourist boards to be publicizing this new initiative which should add considerably to the many attractions of this lovely part of the world.
