What better place could we have been last night than at Giacomo Puccini’s family home for a concert to remember that it was a hundred years ago that he sadly died.

It is particularly poignant to remember that this was Giacomo’s last visit before he embarked on that fateful journey to the Bruxelles clinic to seek a cure for his throat cancer exacerbated by more than fifty years of smoking fifty a day.

The concert artistes all gave their best under the guidance of supreme Puccini opera producer Vivien Hewitt whose enthusiastic and elucidating presentations of the pieces sung gave us new insights into a composer who helped to transform opera into a higher (and maybe never to be surpassed) level of music drama.

Casa Puccini in Celle, a lovely little village in the val Pedogna, perhaps fills one more than any other place associated with this great composer and great lover of life with the feeling that ‘he is here’: Certainly the family home is so full of atmosphere, from the bed where Giacomo was born (its the original – the one in the Lucca house is a copy), to the ink blotched manuscripts where the composer penned his student sketches and set down themes for the greatest of his works to Edison’s present of a gramophone just to prove that the whole world could now listen to him

We feel so privileged to be a stone’s throw away from where the heart of Lucca’s musical treasury was born. It was an enchantment to be there ….and there too on the eve of our wedding anniversary… forty seven years so far!