We weren’t quite sure what to expect. Would it be a simple collection of posters, or perhaps a wall-to-wall digital projection of his most famous images? Instead, what awaited us was a thrilling, fully immersive multimedia experience: original lithographs glowing under soft light, intimate portraits, snippets of period films, hypnotic light displays, recreated Belle Époque interiors, and an abundance of information about one of the most original and daring artists of his generation — Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Born into an aristocratic family in southern France, Lautrec inherited not only noble blood but also a severe genetic condition — a form of brittle bone disease — that stunted his growth and distorted his legs. Physically fragile and often treated as an outsider within the refined social circles of his upbringing, he gravitated instead toward the vibrant, chaotic, and intoxicating world of Montmartre. Here, in the cafés, cabarets, brothels, and dance halls of fin-de-siècle Paris, he found not only companionship but also artistic liberation.

The exhibition masterfully evoked that atmosphere: the smoky glow of absinthe bars, the backstage chatter of dancers, the surreal elegance of the Moulin Rouge, and the raw humanity of the prostitutes he befriended and portrayed with rare empathy. It was in this world that Lautrec mastered the art of lithography, transforming his natural brilliance as a draughtsman into bold, revolutionary poster designs. His works for Parisian music halls became instant sensations — so much so that several were showcased at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the same world’s fair that gave birth to the Eiffel Tower.

But the intense bohemian life that fueled his creativity also consumed him. Excessive drinking turned into full-blown alcoholism, and his compulsive visits to brothels led to syphilis. By the time the new century dawned, Lautrec — just forty years old — was already a physical wreck, and he died soon after. Yet his creative output, his radical visual language, and his instinctive understanding of publicity made him a genuine pioneer of modern graphic communication and a foundational figure for generations of illustrators, advertisers, and designers.

After spending the morning immersed in the serene, contemplative beauty of the Beato Angelico exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi, this afternoon encounter with Toulouse-Lautrec felt like stepping into a different universe. And experiencing it all in the cultural heart of Florence — the Istituto degli Innocenti, with its elegant Renaissance courtyards and luminous Della Robbia glazed terracotta friezes — made the contrast even more delightful. Two very different artistic worlds, both unforgettable, discovered in a single day.

Shockingly, the exhibition at Pisa’s Palazzo Blu of La Belle Époque—that beautifully elegant age which dazzled the twilight of the nineteenth century and carried its radiance like a fragile flame into the early twentieth—opens not with shimmering salons or summery parasols, but with immense canvases strewn with lifeless bodies across bleak, mud-ridden battlegrounds. How could such an era of refinement, grace, and optimism have begun amidst such devastation? And yet the truth remains: it did. The collapse of Napoleon III’s empire was sealed by the catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Sedan, portrayed with harrowing immediacy in Zola’s La Débâcle, leaving France in a state of utter desolation. Paris’s Tuileries Palace and Town Hall lay in smouldering ruins, the boulevards were haunted by the rotting corpses of the Communards who had dared challenge authority, and Prussian troops marched ominously through the capital’s violated heart.

And yet, almost frightening in its resilience, Paris rose again within a handful of years—like a great phoenix shaking dust and blood from its wings. It reclaimed its rightful place as the supreme urban salon of culture, of painting, of literature. It became a magnet for artistic souls across Europe: John Singer Sargent captured the city’s patrician poise with luminous brushstrokes, while Oscar Wilde wandered its grand avenues, intoxicated by its wit, elegance, and the promise of beauty. The exhibition captures this rebirth magnificently through the works assembled, each canvas a portal into that ephemeral golden moment.

Although the exhibition includes a few gems of French art—an atmospheric Renoir, a river-swept Sisley—the dominant presence is unmistakably that of the Italian masters who flocked to Paris and helped define its glittering visual language. Giuseppe De Nittis, my personal favourite, appears in all his brilliance: his velvety vistas of Parisian fog, his exquisitely dressed ladies seen through the soft haze of early morning, his ability to fuse Italian luminosity with French modernity. Giovanni Boldini, the “Master of Swish,” unfurls before us the hypnotic fluidity of his line—the fluttering silks, the spiralling skirts, the near-electric vitality of his portraits, where society women seem to vibrate with life. And then there is Federico Zandomeneghi, with his tender, Impressionist-inspired domestic scenes, capturing women in moments of intimate stillness: reading by lamplight, tying a ribbon, or gazing wistfully from a window.

Together, these artists portray flowering girls and gracious ladies, convivial picnics beneath trembling leaves, leisurely promenades with lapdogs trotting at their heels, and opera evenings shimmering beneath gaslit chandeliers. These paintings reveal an age whose elegance was not mere decoration but a declaration—a reflection of a society glowing with confidence in its own refinement, its own destiny.

How heartbreaking it is to realise that this world of top hats, bustles, jewels, servants, and languid promenades along tree-lined avenues or corn-fields was destined to be swept away by a cataclysm far greater than the Franco-Prussian War: the Great War, which would extinguish the very foundations of the Belle Époque’s brilliance. And yet for nearly half a century, that age—almost wilfully oblivious to the shadows gathering at its edges—shimmered in the glow of gaslight, champagne bubbles, and glittering diamonds. It lived, perhaps unconsciously, on borrowed time.

For many of us, La Belle Époque casts a long, melancholic shadow. Why? Perhaps because we instinctively idealise it, smoothing away the poverty, the crime, the hunger, the corruption, and the cruelty that lingered behind its velvet draperies—faults present in every age. Yet for the two or three hours we spent wandering through its vanished world, gazing at its memories suspended in oil and light, we felt transported into a life that has evaporated forever: a life marked by security, stability, shared conventions, rigid courtesies tempered by carefree gaiety, a life glowing simultaneously with certainty and boundless creativity. And above all, a serene elegance—an elegance that seemed to emanate from the very air the people breathed.

We found ourselves filled with emotion, our hearts edging perilously close to tears, mourning not only the loss of an era but the knowledge that we shall never experience such a time ourselves. That exquisite world—half dream, half recollection—now survives only through the faded stories told long ago by my elder relatives, themselves long vanished, when I was still a small child listening wide-eyed to tales of a Belle Époque whose light flickered briefly, beautifully, and is now lost forever.

Yesterday afternoon, as part of the on-going programme of Bagni di Lucca’s branch of Unitre (University of the Third Age) we attended a lecture by Ilaria Del Bianco, entitled “Pascoli and Emigration.” Del Bianco, who is well-known in the region for her work on local history and migration studies, brought to the subject a combination of academic rigour and personal warmth. Her long involvement with the Associazione Lucchesi nel Mondo, as well as her family’s own history of emigration, gave her words a resonance that went beyond pure scholarship.

She began by recalling how the name Giovanni Pascoli usually conjures up images of the nido domestico, the sheltered “nest,” the half-hidden world behind the hedge, and the muffled sounds of distant storms. But, she reminded us, Pascoli’s life was anything but sheltered. Born in San Mauro di Romagna in 1855, he grew up in a family marked by tragedy: the unsolved murder of his father, the subsequent deaths of his mother and siblings, and the dissolution of the family home. These early fractures shaped his lifelong search for rootedness and belonging.

Del Bianco emphasised how these wounds made Pascoli particularly sensitive to the pain of displacement—not only his own, but that of millions of Italians who, from the late 19th century onward, were forced to leave their homes in search of survival. Pascoli himself knew what it meant to live far from one’s origins: his years wandering between Bologna, Turin, Florence, Messina, and Pisa gave him, in Del Bianco’s words, “the emotional memory of an emigrant, even without crossing oceans.”

She then explored Pascoli’s relationship with our area, particularly Barga and the Serchio Valley, where he lived from 1895 onward at his beloved villa at Castelvecchio. From this vantage point he witnessed the extraordinary exodus of the Lucchesi and the Garfagnini, many of whom left for Scotland, the United States, and South America. “Here,” Del Bianco observed, “he saw the empty houses, the aging parents, the letters arriving late—or never.” This proximity sharpened his poetic empathy.

(Pascoli and his friend Puccini at Castelvecchio. These was talk of a collaboration between the two on an opera libretto but it never materialised. )

One striking example she discussed was Pascoli’s poem “Italy” (L’Italia), inspired by the return of a young emigrant who can no longer speak her mother tongue. Del Bianco read aloud the lines in which Pascoli captures the bewilderment of the girl, raised in America, who answers Italian questions with English fragments:

“Ma la fanciulla parlava un’altra favella,
una favella franta,
simile a quella dei bimbi.”

This linguistic fracture becomes, as Del Bianco explained, a symbol of the fragile thread that binds migrants to their homeland—one that can thin, stretch, and sometimes snap.

She also touched on Pascoli’s socialist sympathies, especially in the 1880s, when he defended workers’ rights, denounced social inequality, and wrote poems like “Il Canto dell’Aratore” that dignified labour. Del Bianco reminded us that Pascoli was even imprisoned in 1879 for participating in a socialist demonstration in Bologna—an early sign of the political conscience that would later inform his reflections on migration. In the poem “Il Musico,” he describes a worker-musician forced abroad by poverty:

“E partì, come gli altri:
per pane e per fortuna andò pel mondo.”

Through verses like these, Pascoli showed that migration was not simply a personal choice but a consequence of systemic injustice—an escape from a country that had failed to feed its own people.

Del Bianco painted migration as a central, not marginal, theme in Pascoli’s poetry:

• the farewell at the station,
• the mother who waits for letters,
• the returning emigrant who no longer recognises home,
• the children who hear Italy only in stories.

These everyday tragedies, she explained, were happening all around Pascoli in Barga, then one of the most emigrant-heavy villages in Italy. The poet absorbed them into his moral universe. In “Nebbia,” for instance, Pascoli seems to wrap himself in fog as a way of protecting the fragile “nest” from a world defined by departure:

“Nascondi le cose lontane,
nascondimi quello ch’è morto.”

Fog becomes both a refuge and a veil drawn over loss.

The lecture concluded with a powerful reflection by Del Bianco:
Pascoli is often celebrated as the poet of small things, but he was also the poet of great departures.
He understood that emigration is not only a socio-economic fact but also a poetic wound, a fracture in memory, language, and identity.

As we stepped out of the Bagni di Lucca Library at 5:00 pm, many of us felt we had rediscovered a different Pascoli—one rooted not only in the intimacy of the hedge and hearth, but also in the long roads that lead away from home, and in the silent ache of those who take them.

Within this forest copse
lie the softest dreams of years gone by —
seeds of laughter, ripened suns,
the tender breath of summers past.

Time was my companion here:
hands deep in soil, coaxing life
from furrows heavy with promise —
tomatoes blushing, salads crisp with morning dew,
and fruit, the jewels of the princesses
of olive groves, shining in their silver light.

Here once stood the table,
laden with feast and joy,
where friends, like vines,
wound their laughter through the dusk.
And near, the silent company of felines departed
still drifts among the oaks and poplars,
their spirits brushing against the gold of evening leaves.

Now I gather the harvest of another waning year,
and memory plays its soft lament —
as in the Brahms quintets,
where sorrow and sweetness merge,
each note dissolving into the next
in an almost unbearable beauty.

The November sun sinks low;
its rosy gleam folds into the azure sky.
Around me the earth exhales
her perfume of leaf and shadow,
and I, grown tender with remembering,
feel her cradle close once more —
the living earth, the loving earth,
the eternal earth —
holding time, and all of us,
in her dark, forgiving hands.

In Piazza San Michele, the angels never close their eyes.
They gleam with the cold wakefulness of marble —
those sleepless sentinels whose wings catch the shifting light
like sails made of bone.
At the pinnacle, the Archangel’s sword forever gleams,
and once — so the old women mutter —
it flared blood-red at midnight.
After that night, the city began to whisper.
They spoke not of the miracle, but of the clock.

The Tower of the Hours near San Michele is a patient creature.
Its pallid face regards the square with the composure of something
that has long since stopped pretending to be human.
Those who linger beneath it say the hands tremble,
a subtle quiver before they strike the hour,
as though waiting for a reply from the other side of time.

Lucia, a young violinist with a hunger for echoes,
rented a small room above the gelateria opposite the church.
Each evening she played with her windows open,
and her bow drew thin filaments of light from the darkness.
Her music hovered in the air like the breath of something unseen —
cats crouched beneath her sill,
tourists paused mid-gelato,
and the stones themselves seemed to listen.

One night in late autumn, after rain had scoured the piazza clean,
she looked down through the shop window below her —
and saw the clock’s reflection turning backwards.
Up above, the real clock stood still,
its hands obedient, unmoving,
while in the glass another time unfolded in reverse.

Curiosity, that bright contagion, seized her.
She descended into the square.
The air still shimmered faintly,
as though the rain had left behind a memory of itself.
She approached the façade,
its columns streaked with night,
and beneath the clock she heard it:
a faint, secret ticking within the stone —
a heartbeat trapped in marble.

She laid her palm against the wall.
The ticking stopped.
And from within the stone a voice,
cool and androgynous as moonlight, whispered:
“The hours you play
are not the hours we keep.”

After that, Lucia’s music changed.
Her bow no longer danced — it drifted,
each note slow and heavy,
as though drawn from the depths of sleep.
Listeners said her melodies seemed to hesitate,
reluctant to vanish,
like memories that refused to die.

Then, one winter dawn, the clock of the Tower of the Hours ceased.
Its hands froze upon the moment
before Lucia’s final note dissolved into air.

But sometimes, near Porta Sant’Elisa,
in the great LIDL window where the sanctuary of Santa Gemma
casts its spectral reflection at sunset,
a glint of gold can be seen turning —
slowly, defiantly, backward.
There, perhaps, the angels of Lucca
keep their own unearthly hour,
and Lucia’s song still circles —
a ghostly reel of time
spinning in reverse.

Un’altra mattina a Lucca e un altro mio racconto:

SAN MICHELE E LA TORRE DELLE ORE

In Piazza San Michele, gli angeli non chiudono mai gli occhi.
Brillano con la fredda veglia del marmo –
quelle sentinelle insonni le cui ali catturano la luce mutevole
come vele d’osso.
In cima, la spada dell’Arcangelo brilla per sempre,
e una volta – così mormorano le vecchie –
brillava rosso sangue a mezzanotte.
Dopo quella notte, la città cominciò a sussurrare.
Non parlavano del miracolo, ma dell’orologio.

L’orologio della Torre delle Ore è una creatura paziente.
Il suo pallido quadrante osserva la piazza con la compostezza di qualcosa
che da tempo ha smesso di fingere di essere umano.
Chi si sofferma sotto di esso dice che le lancette tremano,
un leggero fremito prima di battere l’ora,
come in attesa di una risposta dall’altro lato del tempo.

Lucia, una giovane violinista affamata di echi,
affittò una piccola stanza sopra la gelateria di fronte alla chiesa.
Ogni sera suonava con le finestre aperte,
e il suo archetto attirava sottili filamenti di luce dall’oscurità.
La sua musica aleggiava nell’aria come il respiro di qualcosa di invisibile:
i gatti si accovacciavano sotto il suo davanzale,
i turisti si fermavano a metà gelato,
e le pietre stesse sembravano ascoltare.

Una notte di tardo autunno, dopo che la pioggia aveva ripulito la piazza,
guardò giù attraverso la vetrina del negozio sotto di lei –
e vide il riflesso dell’orologio che girava all’indietro.
Lassù, l’orologio vero era fermo,
le lancette obbedienti, immobili,
mentre nel vetro un altro tempo scorreva al contrario.

La curiosità, quel contagio luminoso, la prese.
Scese nella piazza.
L’aria tremolava ancora debolmente,
come se la pioggia avesse lasciato dietro di sé un ricordo di sé. Si avvicinò alla facciata,
le cui colonne erano striate di notte,
e sotto l’orologio lo sentì:
un debole, segreto ticchettio nella pietra –
un battito cardiaco intrappolato nel marmo.

Appoggiò il palmo della mano contro il muro.
Il ticchettio cessò.
E dall’interno della pietra una voce,
fredda e androgina come il chiaro di luna, sussurrò:
“Le ore che suoni
non sono le ore che osserviamo noi”.

Dopodiché, la musica di Lucia cambiò.
Il suo archetto non danzava più – fluttuava,
ogni nota lenta e pesante,
come se fosse stata estratta dalle profondità del sonno.
Gli ascoltatori dicevano che le sue melodie sembravano esitare,
riluttanti a svanire,
come ricordi che si rifiutavano di morire.

Poi, un’alba invernale, l’orologio della Torre delle Ore si fermò.
Le sue lancette si bloccarono sull’istante
prima che l’ultima nota di Lucia si dissolvesse nell’aria.

Ma a volte, vicino a Porta Sant’Elisa,
nella grande vetrina del LIDL dove il santuario di Santa Gemma
proietta il suo riflesso spettrale al tramonto,
si può vedere un luccichio d’oro che gira –
lentamente, provocatoriamente, all’indietro.
Lì, forse, gli angeli di Lucca
osservano la loro ora ultraterrena,
e il canto di Lucia continua a girare –
una spettrale bobina del tempo
che gira al contrario.