A trio of travellers, two young men and one girl, wended their way through our beloved Val di Lima a year ago. Using no vehicles except their legs and with one of them even barefoot they traversed mountain paths, sometimes rocky, sometimes overgrown with brambles, sometimes lush pastures enjoyed by flocks of sheep and goats. Sleeping largely under trees, within shepherd’s caves, in abandoned pastoral hut they faced all weathers from torrid summer heat to torrential downpours.

What was their mission? Clearly to be one with nature: to re-establish contacts with the elements of our beautiful but transgressed Earth. However, there was a second reason for their pilgrimage. It was to meet local people and hear them speak and perhaps gather some stories from them: stories of historical events, of legendary tales or scandalous village gossip.

After meeting the villagers and listening to them the trio would cast what they had heard into dramatic vignettes. For they were also strolling players in mediaeval mode and arriving at the next village on their path would enact those vignettes before the newly-met inhabitants in their village square.

What was the object of all this? I suppose it was foremost to redeem the intrinsic worth of our valley’s inhabitants, to give back to them the true value they had as part of Italy’s cultural milieu. Perhaps, in the manner of Gray’s ‘mute inglorious” Miltons, the lives and traditions of the Val di Lima’ denizens would be restored to their proper places as highly valued expressions of even the supposedly humblest of existences.

I also imagined a latter-day ‘Canterbury Tales’ in which the author re-elaborates stories heard from his fellow travellers while on a pilgrimage.

From our trio’s experiences in the remote corners of the Val di Lima a film emerged. For I did not mention that our travellers were accompanied by a film cameraman-director who shot over 180 hours of their peregrinations. His problem was clearly how to edit this footage into less than two hours while still giving a good idea of the trio’s experiences. In the end the director ditched the standard documentary format with third-person narrative, and very structured focus on particular aspects of the experience, for a kind of existential collage in which his own persona disappeared and where the protagonists were seemingly in control of the action.

So it happened that what we viewed at Bagni di Lucca’s Teatro Accademico yesterday evening was a sequence of snippets showing the actors cooking and sleeping in abandoned settlements, engaging with locals and hearing their stories, tramping through thick forests and accidentally falling in and getting badly scratched by brambles, joking among each other, focusing on the faces of villagers as they related their narratives and indispersing these with views of the villages visited and the local dramatic vignettes they enacted.

The fact that the production was shot in black-and-white emphasised its nature as not yet another nice, welcoming, glorious technicolor documentary on an area’s natural and cultural wonders but rather a more personal, even intimate recollection. The film also reminded me of something quite Pasolineque in the often raw nature of the footage and the sometimes abrupt cutting.

After the movie’s screening all its protagonists met up on the stage to discuss the whys and wherefores of what they had accomplished. The addendum to the evening ironed out quite a few queries about what we had seen.

‘Tessere il Valico’ (weaving the pass) is certainly a very worthwhile project and has given me food for thought about how other aspects of our lovely Val di Lima could be approached in greater and perhaps rather more structured detail: our high-level footpaths perhaps, some of our exquisite Romanesque churches, our artists and artisans or even a focus on our local poets and actors, some of whom can recite whole cantos from Dante’s Divine Comedy by heart.

The evening concluded with the sudden guest appearance of a very seasonable visitor.

Ah well ..it’s now time to search for those colourful lights again!