From the opening of the new Auser charity shop in Villa
to the presentation of Valerio’s posthumous book of poems at Sala Rosa,
to Enrico’s Puccini organ music recital at San Cassiano
to Monti di Villa’s Patron Saint (St John the Baptist) celebrations
there was so much to enjoy for us yesterday in our little corner of the Earth.
Auser’s new second-hand shop opened yesterday at Bagni di Lucca Villa.
There are delights for everyone: retro fashions, tablecloths, linen, shoes, games, dolls and toys, for every age and beyond!
Opening times:
Wed and Sat 10-12.30
Fri 17-19
PS. Proceeds from sales go to support people in need in our community.
The ‘Palio della Balestra’ (crossbow competition) at Bagni di Lucca’s Villa Buonvisi della Vicaria della Val di Lima yesterday. It was a pleasant way to spend yet another sunny Sunday afternoon here. Participants included two girls: brilliant prize-winning shot Nicole looking like Maid Marian in a green gown and a Chinese girl from Pistoia involved in publicising the network of underground mediaeval tunnels in that city.
What a great show it was last night at our local theatre (Teatro Academico) and our brilliant amateur theatrical company with our own playwrights in a Comedia Esilarante (=farce) with a semi-Gianni Schicchian theme!
Ps For seeing plays in Italy do note the following terms used:
Commedia = serious play
Commedia brillante = comedy
Commedia esilarante = farce
Commedia all’italiana = Italian style play
Commedia romantica = love play
Commedia nera = black humour play
Commedia erotica all’italiana = erotic play
Commedia drammatica = drama
Genere comico – farce
PPS I played Scrooge in the same company’s Italian version of ‘A Christmas Carol’ in 2016. See
The Beeb’s Radio Three announcers’ continued mispronunciations of the Italian language never ceases to amuse me.
One example this morning had me in hysterics. It was when that famous aria from Gluck’s ‘Orfeo ed Euridice’ ‘Che farò senza Euridice’ was announced. Accents and emphases in Italian with its wide, sonorous vowel sounds are essential and can produce unlikely results if declaimed incorrectly. In this case the accent on the second vowel of ‘farò’ was not emphasised so the sentence changed from ‘What will I do without Euridice ‘ to ‘What a lighthouse without Euridice!’, ‘faro’ without the accent meaning ‘lighthouse’ in Italian.
My thoughts immediately changed from poor Orfeo wandering in the underworld in search of his beloved to an Eddystone-style lighthouse abandoned from the saving grace of a lighthouse keeper’s daughter. For Euridice had now become for me the heroine Grace Darling who rescued the survivors from the shipwrecked Forfarshire in 1838 and brought her national fame, a fame which, sadly, she did not enjoy for long dying aged just twenty six
I look forward to a production of Gluck’s immortal opera about unrequited love with Euridice playing the role of the lighthouse keeper’s daughter and with Orfeo as the hapless sailor about to have his ship splintered upon storm raging rocks.
Castelfiorentino doesn’t come to mind as one of Tuscany’s prime towns to visit. After all, near it are such places as Siena with a cathedral which made even Wagner cry with joy at its beauty, San Gimignano popularily called the mediaeval manhattan because of its tower houses and Certaldo, Boccaccio’s birthplace.
Even approaching Castelfiorentino with its abandoned industrial estate doesn’t entice. Yet it holds easily accessible wonders. We visited it primarily to see the gorgeous frescoes Benozzo Gozzoli (of Medici-Riccardi palace fame for his wondrous nativity painted in the chapel there) created for two local tabernacles. One is the Madonna della Tosse (of the cough – perhaps good for praying to if one has a sore throat). The other is the. Visitation. Both artistic beauties have been rescued from the elements and placed in a purpose-built museum of debatable aesthetic value but very well laid out all the same.
Castelfiorentino has some delightfully untouristy old streets containing a handful of inviting bars, restaurants and shops.It also has a medley of fine renaissance mansions and interesting churches.
The town’s finest ecclesiastical architecture, dedicated to its patron saint, is the sanctuary of Saint Verdiana, a name which means ‘youthful freshness’.
While children just out of school were playing ball games in the extensive green space in front of the church’s graceful eighteenth century façade we entered a baroque interior with a vast painting covering the whole of the nave ceiling and representing the apotheosis of the town’s patroness.
At the BEGO Gozzoli museum the young lady at the ticket desk had told us the story of Saint Verdiana.
‘She embraced a life of poverty, generosity and abstinence always seeking more ways of practising penance and abnegation to the point at which for thirty three years she lived immured in a tiny cell in the company of two spiteful snakes who were constantly biting her in an attempt to throw her out. She performed many miracles: shops empty of supplies found their stores filled with goodies the following morning. People were cured of terrible diseases’. (At this point I wondered whether she would have been able to cure snake bites). ‘At Verdiana ‘s death all the town’s church bells rang simultaneously without anyone handling them. Verdiana was appointed patroness of the town and people began to perform pilgrimages to her austere hovel.’
In the grandiloquent baroque church we found a staircase leading down to the place where Saint Verdiana lived with her two reptilian tormentors. There was no light but fortunately we switched on our telefonino torch and managed to find ourselves before a small brick hut with a barred entrance. Next to it in the tenebrous crypt was the statue of the saint and a little altar.
Today such a person as Verdiana could easily have been delivered into the hands of the local social services for corrective therapy. However, in an age where Faith reigned supreme she was made into a saint and worshipped. Would we call that change of attitude progress? I sometimes wonder.
Described as an aesthete, a term which some find today less than flattering, Harold Acton is a consummate personification of refined Anglo-Italian sensibility.
Inheriting his family’s renaissance villa ‘La Pietra’, purchased with largely American wealth in 1904, Harold went on to lead ‘bright young things’ at Oxford in a supremely fashionable life-style inspiring such novels as Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Brideshead Revisited’.
Beginning with a volume of poems Acton found his true métier as a historian and wrote brilliantly on such subjects as the Medici and Naples. He was also an excellent orientalist with a thorough knowledge of Chinese acquired during his residence there.
Acton’s greatest quality must, however, be his generosity and encouragement towards young people which he showed by bequeathing his property to New York University (after Oxford refused it) for the use of students from the new world to stimulate their knowledge of the old.
We visited Acton’s place yesterday afternoon on a placid early June day. We entered via a long evergreen-lined avenue leading to the villa’s late renaissance facade.
Entering the villa we were invited to see an exhibition illustrating the young aesthete’s early education.
Ascending a spectacular helix staircase:
we were shown Acton’s playroom displaying family photographs and his childhood books by our guide who came from Georgia and was here on an internship.
Acton, after progressive private tuition in Italy, which turned him into a cosmopolitan European with a knowledge of several languages, went on to English boarding school and then a crammer to get him into Eton where his contemporaries included George Orwell and Anthony Powell.
We were also shown Harold’s bedroom where he died thirty years ago, in 1994.
A convivial ‘rinfresco’ of savouries and prosecco followed in the sweet setting of the walled garden, well-cultivated with every vegetable a kitchen should desire.
We then descended through a series of terraces, each one more spectacular than the other and designed in the finest Italian classical style by Acton himself, to the ‘teatro verde’, a natural setting of box hedges and umbrella pines where the evening’s concert was to be held.
What more ideal repertoire than Mozart played by Florence’s premier chamber orchestra? Two pieces comprised the programme. First came the harp and flute concerto composed during the young Mozart’s trip to Paris which had promised big things but ended tragically with his accompanying mother’s death.
The charming concerto, excellently played, was followed by the 29th symphony, perhaps the first to show the true genius of the man. It was also the first piece of classical music that grabbed me when I heard it at my school’s lunchtime gramophone society event. It remains one of my favourites among Wolfgang’s oevre.
The concert’s conductor, who had performed for Acton himself, remarked on the green theatre’s acoustics which were indeed excellent.
If fairy-tale gardens, aristocratic villas and delicious refreshments were not enough to satisfy our senses a flaming sunset descended upon us as we left Harold’s land of lost content.
A little Jerusalem arises among the gentle hills surrounding Montaione in Tuscany. Within its bounds one can find all those places mentioned in the gospels relating to Jesus’ last days on the Earth. There is Mount Calvary, Golgotha the Place of the Skull, the house of Caiphas, the palace of Herod and even Christ’s sepulchre.
San Vivaldo, a hermit who spent much of his life living in a hollow chestnut tree, thought up the idea of transforming a spot in Tuscany into a miniature Holy Land. It was a time when, despite the militant efforts of the Crusades, the Turkish Muslims had rendered Palestine out of bounds for Christian pilgrims. What else could be done in a time before Zeffirelli-type epic films or computer generated virtual reality to recreate the ambience of those events so dear to so many people using the best means available at the time?
For the construction of the chapels, a friar, Fra Tommaso da Firenze relied on his experience gained from countless trips to the Holy Land and on interactions with Brother Bernardino Caimi, who in those years was designing a Holy Mountain at Varallo in Piedmont.
A little hill brought to mind Mount Calvary. Other features reflected topographical similarities with the sanctuaries existing in Jerusalem at the beginning of the 16th century.
It was for this reason and through the Papal bulls that gave prestige and religious merit to a pilgrimage to a parallel universe reflecting the original Holy Land that
starting from the fifteenth century chapels were built each one containing a scene from those momentous last days of the Saviour.
The chapels house valuable terracottas of the Della Robbia tradition which illustrate the last period of Jesus’ life. They had the function of a ‘ Biblia puperum’, that is to represent the Bible and make it understandable, even empathetically, to the largely illiterate people of those times.
We visited the chapels yesterday in a little group of five persons with a sweet Italian whippet under the guidance of a most erudite young man who pointed out things to us in the chapels’ dramatic depictions which we had never suspected.
For instance the man on the far right riding a palfrey is none other than Joseph of Arimathea who brought Christ to England and Glastonbury and supplied His sepulchre after the crucifixion.
The vividness of the depictions struck us. We felt that we were really part of the dramatic scenes: mingling with the crowds, joining the other disciples at the Last Supper’s table and witnessing those final harrowing moments on the Via Crucis.
The artistry of the terracotta figures reached heights which fully proclaimed the influence of a Della Robbia workshop. I remained amazed that these testimonies of a pre-digital age still had so much power in them with their expressive energy and vivid colours.
So even if so many of us today, sadly like those times which gave rise to this rural artistic installation, feel discouraged to visit Jerusalem with the current troubles we can still partake of the vision of San Vivaldo and visit a ‘little Jerusalem’ set deep withn the wooded Tuscan hills.
I remember having visited San Vivaldo before. Searching through my photos I came across these recording a cycle trip there from Florence in 1986. We were shown around by a lone friar who someone has identified as Fra Antonio. We were young then and married for less than ten years. Hopes sprang eternal then: some realised, others, like wanting to have children, dashed to the ground. It was lovely, therefore, to say that we have returned. almost forty years later to a loved spot of our youth.
