It doesn’t matter how long one has lived in an area there will always be new things to discover. Such is the case with the Bagni di Lucca walks, organised by the Fondazione Montaigne, which have re-started this month and which are continuing to prove very popular.

Last Saturday afternoon we joined a walk to the historic centre of Bagni di Lucca: Bagni alla Villa. This is where visitors would stay to take the thermal waters. Among guests seeking cures for various ailments, or just escaping from the summer heat were Montaigne, Byron and Shelley.

Some years ago we visited the elegant villa belonging to Count Burlamacchi of ancient Tuscan lineage. His villa is now managed by the most recent descendant of the family, Francesca, who has turned it into a tastefully select group boutique hotel. The butler showed us round this delectable residence:

More details about Villa Burlamacchi and how to book it may be found at:

Burlamacchi Villas

Contiguous to the Villa Burlamacchi is the Villa Chiappa where the Shelley family stayed after they reached Italy in the summer of 1818. There is so much to say about their sojourn here, much of which was summed up in a conference I attended at the English church a couple of weeks ago.

Percy would go and bathe naked in the nearby torrents, read Herodotus and translate Plato’s ‘Symposium’. Wife Mary would look after their three toddlers. The couple would go on long walks in the cool chestnut forests around and even reached the top of the bald, grassy mountain overlooking Bagni, the Prato Fiorito. (See my posts on that at: https://longoio.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/the-elysian-fields-of-prato-fiorito/)

It’s so sad to realise that the time the Shelley family spent at Bagni di Lucca was perhaps the happiest spell of their life in Italy: a life which subsequently met various tragedies: the death of two of their children, Mary’s horrific miscarriage and, most terrible of all, Percy’s death just four years later when he drowned in the bay of Lerici on July 8th 1822.  

It bodes well for the thermal establishment here, the Bagno alla Villa that it belongs to the Burlamacchi counts who intend to restore it and offer its waters and cures to a new generation. Clearly maintenance has taken place in the recent past but if one owns a set of ancient baths then one soon realises that the great spoiler of these buildings is the damp!

We headed for the Villa Webb which once belonged to a wealthy Scottish merchant from Livorno. Among his guests was Lord Byron who clearly must have found his accommodation very winning. The villa, which is quite grand, has a ground floor dedicated to the Vicaria di Val di Lima, the historical re-enactment society which has done so much to bring back pageantry and ancient pastimes to Bagni di Lucca.

Indeed, while we were there cross-bow practice was taking place with the participation of a particularly sharp-shooting young girl. (We are also joining a crossbow training cross.)

The palazzo’s first floor, or Piano Nobile, is dedicated to traditional games of chance. Bagni di Lucca was especially renowned for its fashionable casino whose income contributed much to the upkeep of the baths.  ‘Camerlano’ Virgilio Contrucci is the mastermind behind the fascinating display of gambling machines which he has reconstructed or restored. Virgilio gave us an interesting revue of the gambling machines used to milk visiting lords of their wealth. Fortunately there is no license to use the machines for such purposes today and so we were able to preserve our euros!

The top-most floor of the palazzo is called ‘the Museum of the Impossible’ and in its gloomy creepiness displays the most notorious examples of the freaky and the insane from two-headed sheep, to shrunken heads to daemons to weird unclassifiable monsters.

I thought of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ and imagined she might have been inspired by some of the behemoths on show but, of course, Mary had already written her astonishing masterpiece before coming to Bagni di Lucca and, besides, the museum only opened about ten years ago.

The walks in and around Bagni di Lucca and the Val di Lima are conducted by young members of the Fondazione Montaigne which has set up a programme to encourage and introduce a new generation to the natural and historic wonders of our part of the world. It bodes well for the future of Bagni and tourism.

The following Sunday morning we joined in a tour of the Barsanti chalk figurine workshop on the outskirts of Bagni di Lucca Villa. In former times much of the town’s income was derived from the world wanderings of the ‘figurinai’, or plaster statuette makers. Indeed, a tall story goes that when Christopher Columbus landed in the New World the first person he met was a figurinaio selling him a souvenir statuette!

The height of the industry was in the first half of the last century when there was a proliferation of statuette makers at Bagni. Today only a small handful endures. ‘Arte Barsanti’ is one of the few remaining and, even then, is largely a one-man affair run by the enthusiastically industrious Simone who guided us around his workshop.

The atmosphere of the works is rather Dickensian and would not look out of place in any of Charles’ novels where the action takes place in a small factory or studio. I was particularly taken by the chalk dust which had settled on the cobwebs there and the steep stairs leading to the various rooms of the establishment.

In the attic of this time-warp of a building is a most beautiful presepe or christmas crib:

Simone showed us the various stages of producing ‘figurine: the casting of the plaster in moulds, the drying of the product and the painting of these beautifully detailed figures. I was pleased to note that, despite competition from the Far East and the use of plastic-based materials which enable the statuettes to resists outside climatic conditions, there is still this enchanting industry in Bagni. Founded in 1900, may the Arte Barsanti flourish for at least another hundred years!

The Arte Barsanti web site is well laid out with an English version at https://www.artebarsanti.it/en/home-eng/

All the walks are free with a donation gratefully accepted for the upkeep of the English cemetery.