‘Who’, or let’s say even ‘what’, is a Facebook friend? Are any of these virtual friends co-terminous with real friends – those one has something in common with, sharing interests whether they be Neapolitan opera or Mongolian horsemanship, or who one helps or been helped by whether these be laying concrete or sharing grief. Those beings, in other words, that one may go further with than just by switching on the laptop and clicking on their name to find out what they have been up to. Rather those persons one is willing go out of one’s way to meet and share very special quality time.

In the manner of Venn diagrams not all my real friends are Facebook friends and not all my Facebook friends are real friends. In fact, the numbers of Facebook friends who are real friends constitute probably less than a thousand’s part of the combined total of facebook and real friends.

Who are real friends anyway? I think we would be very lucky to count more than a handful of friends we could really trust to be friends in the full sense of the word: i.e. those who we can trust and confide in and, as importantly, those who trust and confide in us.

Real friends, anyway, are rarely for keeps. The literary world is filled with instances of once supposedly immortal friendships which have gone astray: the poet Thomas Gray and the letter-writer, gothic novelist and antiquarian Horace Walpole, the poet Alexander Pope and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and, particularly painful, Samuel Johnson’s break with Mrs Thrale.

As Johnson wrote in his essay on friendship:

“Friendship has other enemies. Suspicion is always hardening the cautious, and disgust repelling the delicate. The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay, or dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint, and too numerous for removal.”

Now that is truly the nitty-gritty of friendships: the fear of a ‘gradual decay’ in the relationship. And the greatest friendship can without question lead to the greatest decline of that friendship. The summit of all friendships and collaborations that are included in the fullest sense of the word ‘love’ – indeed a love supreme – is, of course, marriage. Well-prepared those, therefore, who awkwardly find that decay has set in their relationship and take steps to separate from each other in mutual friendship rather than acrimonious and expensive divorce. For marriage, whether it is sanctioned by the church or whether it be the natural nuptial of true minds is never to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly.

A breaking up of a friendship outside the sphere of marriage is regrettably yet another sort of divorce and, unlike many divorce proceedings, may take place rather more quickly. I’ve been spending time going over my photographs and every now and then come across a snap that makes me want to gasp in shock or even disgust. How could I have possibly been friends with this person? Could I not have seen how keen they were merely to possess me, use me, and take me over for their own egotistical aims? What did they actually teach above positive qualities that should be present in any amity? Just by obsessing about a friendship that has decayed, or even more than decayed festered into grave-yard like decomposition I corner myself into an attitude which shuns any sort of friendship because any sort of friendship could end abruptly – and the end of any friendship is sad at the very least.

The only true friends in this world apart from those of us lucky enough to have found a loving spouse are for me to be found in the miracles of nature and the family of other animals. I count among my best friends the magnificently regal chestnut tree that graces the entrance gates to my estate. At dawn the song of birds awakens me to a new dawn full of golden promises. Through the dangers of the night I am kept safe by the tweets of little owls. And the morning gusts of fresh forest air blowing through my windows awaken me more warmly than any cup of caffè macchiato.

So where do friends come in? Where can such transient phenomena find a place in our lives? I don’t quite know. I don’t quite know whether I have said too much about myself to friends or too little. I don’t know whether my questions to them have been too inquisitive or not. Curiosity can lead to greater knowledge. Greater knowledge can lead to greater familiarity. A greater familiarity can lead to…well we all know where that can lead to.

All things pass away. That is the great theme of life and its simplest, yet most difficult, lesson to learn for us mortals. Clashing continuously between the delusion that one lives for ever, indeed that one is immortal,  living near the sad reality of the charnel-house, the disintegrating tombstone, the strangulation of the ivy and the putrefying graveyard we stand with our feet on each side of a chasm which is ever widening, with tremors: at first small and barely felt to grander quakes that extend the gap beneath our bodies, wider and wider until one day, barely aware of what is occurring until it is far too late, we fall into that chasm, into that brimless void which swallows up all our beings, all our thoughts, all our lives, all our affections and all the friendships we believed in and are then enfolded by the different exospheres of a planet we have never seen before, whose light has never illuminated us, whose topography we have never trodden on, whose transcendence beyond all human thought is the purest distillation of everlasting light itself:

SOWERS OF THE SYSTEM

I can face you here and kiss your red lips

pouting with death’s sensual desire. I touch

your golden waterfall of hair, the tips

of your nipples – I now love you so much!

I’ve had enough of our modern image

with its isms and lack of indulgence.

Only your weald of symbols will assuage

my thirst for the meaning of when? and whence?

The vast words: despair, destiny and hope,

time and judgement, the sea of lost mankind –

witnesses to your omnipresent scope –

are dyed with the last sun’s hues in my mind.

They mantle me in the casts of the night

and point to the celestial city’s light.

FP

Fields of sunflowers greet one in the summer season on the way to the beach at Marina di Vecchiano. Growing in the drained wetlands backing the coastline fringed by extensive umbrella pine forests the giant florescence of these gorgeous flowers, so characteristically marking the year’s hottest season, fill me with tumescent joy.

Originally native to the Incas of Peru where they had been cultivated over three thousand years ago and symbolised the image of the sun god the seeds of sunflowers were brought to the west by Francisco Pizarro at the beginning of the sixteenth century and since that time they have decorated the gardens of Mediterranean homes and the pockets of the farmers who grow them for the excellent oil their seeds produce.

However, before even the conquistadores the sunflower also entered into Greek mythology in the legend of Clitie a nymph who fell in love with the sun god Apollo and waited every day for his chariot to take her away. Instead the merciful god transformed her into a sunflower which constantly turns its face to follow the sun.

For me besides representing the summer’s flower par excellence and being allied to my own star sign of the Lion the sunflower reminds me of three precious things.

First is the wondrous poem by Blake first published in 1794 as part of his Songs of Experience:

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,

Who countest the steps of the Sun:

Seeking after that sweet golden clime

Where the travellers journey is done. 

Where the Youth pined away with desire,

And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow: 

Arise from their graves and aspire, 

Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

What does this poem signify for me? Hope for better things perhaps? A vision of the golden country? A place where sexual repression is removed? A planet where absolute love appears in all its glory to shine eternal blessings upon all humanity? Yes all these things surely! There are places where most of us wish to go. There are islands in the bluest of seas, forests of freshest sylvan green, mountains of unalloyed snow where the ideal becomes real, where every breath is tender, where every touch is soft, where but to live is to experience purest ecstasy. We have all imagined these places and the luckiest of us have also found them in the scattered corners of our tortured earth. I find them in a field of sunflowers.

My second sunflower theme is that of Van Gogh’s paintings of this divine flower. For this greatest of painters martyred by his own soul the sunflower represented the purest floral transformation of hope itself. To paint its petals was for Vincent to re-establish his identity and re-find his aims. As he wrote to his brother Theo ‘it’s a type of painting that changes its aspect a little, which grows in richness the more you look at it’. More descriptively, the Italian for sunflower is ‘girasole’ which translates as ‘turn towards the sun’. Like it we too should always turn our whole beings towards that which gives us life, warmth, love, everything that is positive and energizes our universe.

The third theme of sunflowers is that it is the symbolic flower of Ukraine – a country so sadly topical in today’s world. How could an enemy say that by bombing a popular café and meeting place in Kramatorsk, one of the few social centres surviving in a place at war now for almost two years, and killing or injuring over fifty persons including babies and teenage twins, it was targeting a military objective?

The sunflower has become, like the yellow and blue of Ukraine’s flag a universal mark of unity, resistance and hope.

Ah sunflower do not be weary of time but be here with us every summer and fill us with happiness and golden horizons!

We were relaxing in our favourite café at Ponte a Moriano on the way back from a visit to the dentist in Lucca. My wife had misplaced a prosthetic tooth which temporarily substituted a missing one to be replaced next month. Desperate searches in our house through everything from carpets to cushions to file leaves failed to locate the precious item, precious because without it the setting of the new tooth could easily fail.  My wife’s visit was thus to obtain that provisional replacement.

As we were sipping our caffè macchiato by the increasingly torrid square of this small provincial town, a piazza bordered on one side by a recently restored art-deco theatre looking fresh again in its grey and cream paintwork a thought suddenly flashed into my mind regarding the sacredness of a very special tooth in a South Asian culture, a tooth which too had been lost but found again.

We had visited Sri Lanka in 2020, a visit which unfortunately had to be cut short because of the arrival of the horrors of a pandemic. Even that island of serendipity was now starting to be affected. Indeed, the last visit we could make before being confined to our hotel in Kandy was to the Temple of the Tooth. We walked along a wall flanking the temple and encircling the placid waters of the Bogambara Lake. Was it really to be our last unconfined walk? Were we now to be returning to another quarantined country wearing sanitary masks and having our temperature regularly taken? How long was this threat not, in my imagination, encountered in London since the nineteenth century cholera outbreaks to last for?   Britain was now approaching belatedly the time when its own inhabitants would be required to practise social distancing and any walks were to have a strictly utilitarian function like going to the supermarket.

Looking through my posts written at that time and place is sobering. I can hardly believe we had to go through all that in a time when we thought that such like the Black Death and the Plague had long gone by.

Here are some of them for further reading:

But why should there be a temple dedicated to a tooth in the first place and on an island once known under the British Raj as Ceylon?   Sri Lankan legend tells that when the Buddha died in 543 BC in India, his body was cremated. Only one of his teeth remained untouched by the flames and was retrieved from the funeral pyre by a disciple who gave it to the King as an object worthy of veneration

The king decided to hide the tooth forever by sending it to a secret place which happened to be the island of Sri Lanka in order to prevent conflict over a relic which was considered to be not only sacred but also politically magical since it was believed that whoever had the tooth possessed the divine right to rule. The sacred relic was smuggled with the help of a princess who hid the tooth in her luxuriant hair.

At this point in my musings a miraculous vision appeared before us: it was a monk wrapped in his dark burgundy coloured kasaya or robe. The appearance signalled for me that he was a Buddhist monk of the Theravada order from Sri Lanka. But how could my thoughts materialize in this wondrous manner? How could this South Asian mirage materialise in the noonday sun of a local Italian square?

The monk and we smiled at each other and immediately a friendly contact was made. His broad grin was utterly welcoming. In clear Italian he said ‘I can see you are interested in who I am.  You also recognized that I am a Buddhist monk and that my country of birth is Sri Lanka. Indeed, I was born, brought up and became a monk in Kandy near to the sacred temple sheltering the great Gautama Buddha’s tooth. Would you like to come and visit our temple?’

‘You have a temple here in Ponte a Moriano?’ I asked amazed.

‘Of course we have. It’s only five minutes down the road.’

Although the five minutes turned out to be more like a quarter of an hour and the sun was getting hotter and hotter we appreciatively followed the monk and eventually turned into a yard faced by a yellow-rendered old house.

Eventually a key was produced and the door was unlocked. Inside the house seemed at first like a typical Italian dwelling with kitchen range and table and chairs. Down a corridor, however, one that was flanked by a cupboard with religious items, we turned round the corner into what must have once  been the dwelling’s main living room but which now had changed to a different use and housed a changed presence: the Buddha himself. Before our eyes the statue of the Gautama replete with transcendent calm gazed with compassion upon us and blessings from the one who wished to dispel all suffering from this world fell upon us.  

Sri Lanka had returned to us.  Kandy was once again really sweet!

Our monk enjoined us to share lunch with him. ‘We are not allowed to cook but our local Sri Lankan community brings me food here every day. There is no one else to share it with me so I am privileged to be able to invite you two to share it with me.’

Our lunch was delicious. Perfumed rise with vegetables, soya meat, brinjal and poppadum followed by a delicious desert of mango slices.

After lunch we visited the temple’s garden where a Bodhi tree, under which the Gautama gained enlightenment, grew in a pot.

During our lunch we learned that our host had become a monk when he was fourteen. Now, aged thirty-two, this meant that he had been one for eighteen years. He had also been a monk in Germany and, surprisingly for me, in Russia. He had not been to England yet but in all these languages he was fluent. In Italian too after living in Italy for just two years so far.

‘And what do you think of Italy?’ my wife asked. ‘I like this country very much. There is a good religious sentiment here. I see it in the crosses erected by the roadside, the ringing of bells and the processions I have seen with the statues of the saints. It makes me feel very much at home.’

There is a small but flourishing Sri Lankan community in the Lucchesia and indeed, one of our favourite food stores in Lucca is called the Sri Lanka Bazaar. In Bagni di Lucca until quite recently there used to be a convent of three nuns, two of which were from Sri Lanka, who ran a nursery for children at the head of our valley of Camaione. Sadly because of covid and the consequent decline of subscriptions the nursery closed down.

We were so delighted to enter into an Italian variation of a Theravada Buddhist monastery and share lunch with our friendly monk. In an area certainly not to be described as significantly multicultural it was particularly welcomed. And now a single tooth will gather for me extra significance whether it be both physical and, more essentially, spiritual.

Our little ‘great wall’ has received it’s second tier and both walls should prevent any landslides from occurring, at least during our lifetimes.

Our workers, all from Kosovo, but now living in and around Bagni di Lucca, have almost completed a very decent piece of work and I have no hesitation in recommending them to others.

Several years have passed since we last visited the aquarium of Livorno. At the time of our visit then it was being refurbished and less than half of it was fully open to the public. This time we decided to revisit this aquarium with its complete collection.

The Diacinto Cestoni Municipal Aquarium is located by the seafront and the Mascagni Terrace and is named after Diacinto Cestoni (1637-1718) an Italian naturalist. Diacinto was a largely self-taught apothecary and practiced in Rome, Livorno and Geneva, before returning permanently to Livorno where he cultivated his many naturalistic interests and earned the esteem of two great naturalists Francesco Redi and Antonio Vallisneri. Vallisneri was born in Trassilico an Apuan village quite near us which I have described in my post post at Trassilican Transcendence | From London to Longoio (and Lucca and beyond) Part One (wordpress.com).

The aquarium is the largest in Tuscany and was originally inaugurated on 20 June 1937. It was destroyed during the Second World War and rebuilt in 1950. In 1962 it was further expanded and in 1968 it became the seat of the Interuniversity Centre of Marine Biology founded by the Universities of Bologna, Florence, Modena, Siena, Pisa and Turin. On 31 July 2010 the renovated complex was finally inaugurated and now houses about two thousand fish from over three hundred different species which are displayed in thirty three tanks.

Although certainly not on the scale of Genoa’s aquarium we found Livorno’s aquarium well-managed with its occupants reasonably happy as far as we could judge from their ichthyonic expressions which are often somewhat ambiguous. I especially liked the way the tanks were displayed with their Mediterranean grotto-like borders and excellent marine vegetation.

I particularly enjoyed seeing the turtles and the skates which ‘flew’ above our heads.

The reptilarium, included in the admission price, is quite small but is well-worth visiting as well.

Adjoining the aquarium is an American-style diner with an emphasis on hamburgers and period-style café furnishings. We had a coffee here but avoided the hamburgers.

From the aquarium we proceeded on a fine walk along the seafront to the scenic Terrazza Mascagni.

Livorno once again had seduced us with its particular character so different from one’s standard view of the traditional Tuscan town.

An old English cemetery in Italy is a pleasantly melancholic place. Here amid the crowded, almost tenement like excrescences, characterising the typical modern cemetery in that country one may come across a patch of rural green scattered with decayed tombstones where each inscription silently cries out that “there’s some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England”. Of course, although a considerable bevy of retired colonels are buried in these consecrated plots, there are few of them who died in battle – the British War Cemeteries Commission looks after them in some very beautiful settings. (See my account of one at https://longoio.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/liberation-day-and-the-last-trumpeter/ ).

Unfortunately the majority of the English buried here came to Italy for health reasons and died when the balmier Mediterranean clime failed to cure them. We think of the one whose ‘name is writ in water’ buried near the Caius Cestus pyramid in Rome’s evocative burial ground. This cemetery had lost its little group of ex-pat volunteers tending it during the last war. It was up to my Italian-born mum, then a student at Rome University, and her fellow students to come and help keep the graves clear from weeds. How the dead can truly unite peoples, even those at war with each other!

Our Bagni di Lucca cemetery is, instead, a paragon of loving care. The tombs of the dearly departed have many examples of those who died from Tuberculosis, that disease which took away so many before antibiotics were discovered by Alexander Fleming. (TB – which I too had although antibiotics were around by then – an infection which even in the last century took away from us some of the finest writers in the English language well before their fiftieth birthday, like D. H. Lawrence and George Orwell). Bagni di Lucca’s ‘cimitero inglese’ has been masterfully restored over the past ten years and, together with its cypresses encircling the walls, its well-kept gravel paths and its regular opening hours, has once again become a hallowed place in our spa town.

For more details see https://longoio3.com/2020/09/06/the-dead-live-anew-at-bagni-di-luccas-anglican-cemetery/

I think also of that haunting spot in Florence, the inspiration for Boecklin’s painting ‘The Island of the Dead’, Rachmaninov’s lingering tone-poem and the eternal home of such idols of literature as Elisabeth Barrett Browning and Walter Savage Landor.

Sadly, the oldest of these English cemeteries which Italians more accurately term ‘cimiteri acattolici’ (non-Catholic i.e. non-Roman Catholic) cemeteries, is in considerable need of TLC. As a diversion from a scan at Livorno’s epic hospital yesterday we visited the city’s English cemetery.

It must be remembered that Livorno (or ‘Leghorn’ as the brits called it – based on what they heard pronounced in the local dialect) was for centuries the main trading station for British interests in the central part of the Italian peninsula. There was a considerable colony of English speakers there, a consul and an Anglican church of Saint George. The English presence in Livorno can be traced back as early as the seventeenth century, when, after the port’s expansion projected by Sir Robert Dudley, Queen Elizabeth’s’ favourite’ – the English word for what in Italian would be called a ‘cicisbeo’ – the Royal Navy made Livorno its base for patrolling the Mediterranean routes .

Despite the opposition of the Catholic clergy, in the eighteenth century permission was granted to the English consul for an Anglican clergyman to reside there. A former Jesuit chapel was first used but in 1839, an Anglican church was started designed by Angiolo Della Valle. Dedicated to the patron saint of England, the classically inspired building was completed in 1844. Damaged by the bombings of the Second World War, Saint George’s passed to the Confraternity of ‘La Misericordia’ (a volunteer body dedicated to the health, welfare and an ambulance service for deprived people) who restored and consecrated it for Catholic worship in 1956. It is now leased by the Misericordia to the Romanian Orthodox Church.

Returning to the cemetery I found it locked. Perhaps not unsurprisingly some might add. It always seems be locked. Do they really expect the dead to escape while no-one is watching?

Despite the presence of a former Anglican church, a Waldensian chapel nearby in this little-known corner of Livorno and a few phone calls to the pastor I was unable to find anyone with a set of keys to unlock the gates of the English cemetery. Not trusting my acrobatic skills I did not venture to scale those gates but had to content myself with taking a few shots of the tombs I could see through the barred entrance and in searing mid-noon heat.

I know that Tobias Smollett, the Scottish surgeon, playwright and picaresque novelist beloved by Dickens and ridiculed by Lawrence Sterne lies buried here. Sadly, smitten by the death of his 15 year old daughter and with health problems arising from an intestinal disorder, Smollett set out on a second Italian trip after the success of his ‘Travels through France and Italy’ which is filled not so much with transcendent descriptions of the artistic beauties of Italy but with the inhabitants’ social life, customs, economy and morality. These include accounts of extortionate inn-keepers, the  immorality of Italian noblewomen in having a ‘cicisbeo’ in their service, anti-Catholic rhetoric, a diatribe against duelling and so forth, all nicely caricatured by Sterne in his own ‘Sentimental Journey’ where Smollett appears in the character of Smellfungus.

Apart from Smollett, interred here in 1771, and a smattering of retired British army colonels there are other literary remains buried in the sequestered shades of Livorno’s cimitero Acattolico. Among these are:

Margaret King, teacher’s pet of Mary Wollstonecraft. Later in Italy, she helped and befriended Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary Shelley and her travelling companions, husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and stepsister Claire Clairmont.

Louisa Pitt, wife of Sir Peter Beckford, lover of William Thomas Beckford, the author of the novel ‘Vathek’.

So there we are. I wonder how many other corners of foreign fields there are where the English – or rather the British – lie buried in serenity (apart from Allied bombing during the last war which heavily damaged some tombs). I wonder too how, when and where my own interment will take place. No worries; for some years now I have been a member of the Società Della Cremazione. (Headquarters in Livorno…or Leghorn if you like).

See also with regard to Livorno my posts at:

https://longoio2.wordpress.com/category/livorno/

Even a visit to a hospital (Livorno) for a scan can open one’s eyes to some of the country’s astonishing architecture found off the beaten track.

The hospital chapel has fine stained glass by Livornese Natali.

It’s a particularly splendid highlight to a hospital built in fascist neoclassical style by Ghini and inaugurated in 1931.

Let’s trust that this building is restored for another generation…

Although not famed in the way that other Italian cities like Florence and Rome are Lucca has some very characteristic museums all of which are worth even a cursory visit.

Here is my list of Lucca’s museums:

National Museum of Palazzo Mansi

Villa Guinigi National Museum

Guinigi Tower

Clock tower

Museo della zecca

Palazzo Pfanner

Casa Puccini

Cartoon Museum

Domus Romana

Via Francigena museum

Cathedral Museum

Natural History museum

Pfanner Museum

Cesare Bicchi Botanical Museum

Ragghianti Foundation

Barsanti and Matteucci museum

National Archive

Torture Museum

Giglio theatre Museum

Crossbow museum

I count twenty museums and wonder how many visitors to this gracious Tuscan city may realise the quantity of museums it has.

We have been quite diligent in discovering these places. However, one museum we’d never visited before was the Museo Della Zecca – the Mint museum. Situated on the western part of the city walls near San Paolino Bulwark the museum occupies an old guardhouse. It is rather small but within its confines contains no less than four separate exhibitions.

The first deals with its principal concern: coins and their minting. I’ve never been very interested in numismatics myself but realised that the museum’s collection is extensive and includes items going back from the nineteenth century to the Etruscan era.

The curator and ticket issuer of the museum gave us a demonstration of how a press, based on a prototype invented by Leonardo da Vinci, first produced mass supplies of coins. We received a sample each which was generous of him but regretfully would never have bought us a cappuccino!

The second exhibition regarded the manufacture of cameos in the Lucchesia. I suddenly became aware that only one person could have organized such a precious collection including examples of the age when Lucca was ruled by Napoleon’s sister Elisa. The curator confirmed my hunch and indeed it was none other than Gabriele, the son of a noted Japanese concert pianist and an Italian antiquarian. A few years ago I had assisted Gabriele in his researches and met up with him again in London. Two engravings gifted by Gabriele for my labours now grace our living room. Gabriele has since published his findings in a limited edition volume priced Euro 200 and is a valued colleague in a distinguished Rome auction house.

The third exhibition involved that immortal Italian children’s book character Pinocchio represented here by historical puppets and dolls, all rather charming.

The last exhibition weaved around the way that coins’ profiles can cast light on changing fashions like women’s hair styling. This aspect was equally well-presented and illustrated.

After exiting from the miniscule but captivating Museo Della Zecca we continued onwards to complete our walk along the almost three mile circuit of Lucca’s walls.

Few cities can have such a seductive promenade as that afforded by Lucca’s walls. The sequence of shady walks with views not only of the palazzi and campanili of the historic city but also of the extensive panorama beyond stretching to the Apennine and Apuan mountains will always enchant me no matter how many times I tread these ramparts.

The Medici Villa at Poggio a Caiano is the jewel in the crown of the Medici villas. Buontalenti was its architect and among its frescoes are masterpieces by Pontormo. The villa has also been the residence of Pope Leo X, Bianca Cappella, Napoleon’s sister and Italy’s first king. The extensive gardens are well maintained too.

We last visited this gorgeous country house in May on our return from Florence to our mountain house. The Villa Ambra (as it’s also called) is perhaps the best example of the buildings commissioned by Lorenzo the Magnificent and dates back to the late fifteenth century. The architecture contains elements in its design that later served as models for future country houses. These include a merging of interior with exterior features. This is evident in the villa’s loggias, its symmetrical distribution of the rooms around a central hall, its dominant position on a hill in the landscape and its conscious reinterpretation of classical architectural elements such as barrel vaults, classical orders of columns and pediments.  

Going through my photographs I found to my shock horror that we first visited Poggio a Caiano back in 1985 when we cycled all the way to it from Florence in the heat of a torrid Arno valley summer. That’s getting on to forty years ago. That time flies is a platitude but these years have whisked past us at the speed of light! Anyway this is how the villa looked like then. Thankfully little has changed except that its gardens are even more luxuriant now.

Yesterday was the first of the two annual occasions the ‘Giostra Del Saraceno’ or ‘Joust of the Saracen’ takes place in the city of Arezzo. The second time this tournament runs is in September.

Dating back to mediaeval times when it was employed as a means of chivalric training the Saracen’s joust involves the four quarters of the city which are named as follows and carry appropriately coloured flags and shields:

Porta Crucifera, known as Culcitrone (green and red),

Porta Del Foro, known as Porta San Lorentino (yellow and crimson),

Porta Sant ‘Andrea (white and green) and

Porta Del Borgo today called Porta Santo Spirito (yellow and blue).

After a large pageant involving hundreds of participants dressed in historic costumes together with sbandieratori (flag-jugglers) and musicians the central event takes place. This involves two horsemen or knights from each quarter charging along an earthen track known as ‘lizza’ and tilting their spear towards the target which is a statue representing the Saracen or infidel. At a time when there was a real threat that invaders from East would land on Tuscan coasts and kidnap the region’s fair and nubile damsels the Saracen was someone to be truly feared.  If hit by the opponent’s spear the Saracen swings round on a rotating base and the adversary then has to avoid being clobbered by a cat-of-three-tails held in the infidel’s hand. It is indeed a tricky situation. Failure to hit the target avoids the danger of being flogged but then no points will be scored.  And if one hits the target then a swift manoeuvre is necessary to avoid being unseated by the Saracen’s wrath

This year it was Arezzo’s 143rd Giostra Del Saraceno. The winner was the quarter of Porta Sant Andrea who won and received the prize of a Golden Lance. Celebrations continued through the night as befit such a victory.

Going back to my photographs I find that we last attended this colourful and dramatic event in 1994. I cannot believe that almost thirty years have gone since we enjoyed the excitement of ‘La Giostra’ in Arezzo’s Piazza Grande. This was an age before the internet, before digital photographs when one had to wait to see from the local chemist if the film rolls one handed to them returned with some nice pics or was a washout. (We also used ‘Truprint ‘to send our precious film to the developers hoping that there would be no delay, or worse, loss of our previous holiday snaps. How much easier it is today it is when anyone who has a decent mobile phone also has the facility of taking, seeing and sending instant photographs to anyone in the world! At the same time I would give anything to be back to the days for the years of youth are beyond any value.

Perhaps we may return after all this while to witness the ‘Giostra del Saraceno’s second annual sortie which takes place on the first Sunday of September on the day, dedicated to the sacred image of the Madonna del Conforto, (Madonna of Comfort)  protectress of Arezzo, and for this reason called the “Giostra della Madonna del Conforto”.