There is a point around the summer solstice when the evenings stop behaving normally. The light simply does not leave when it should. Living near Bagni di Lucca you notice it first in the hills — chestnut woods holding onto the day, paths that feel slightly longer, as if time itself has loosened its structure. It is not dramatic, but it is persistent: the sense that the day is not quite finished, even when it should be. At its simplest, it is just the apotheosis of full summer — clear air, steady and often intolerable heat, long light from morning to night. But at midsummer it feels more charged, as if the landscape is briefly more aware of itself. I once wrote of it as “the year’s turning point… eternal love embracing in nature’s magic.” That still feels accurate: a moment where change is happening even while everything appears still. At such times, Shakespeare feels less like literature and more like atmosphere. A Midsummer Night’s Dream fits easily here, as if the forest itself were slightly theatrical, perception loosening at the edges.
There is a place in our region where this becomes almost physical. At Monte Forato — the natural arch above the Apuan Alps — the sun passes through the opening at sunset, disappears, reappears, then finally sinks. It feels like a brief interruption in certainty itself. When I crossed the exposed ridge it felt steady but below my wife called out in alarm, watching every step as if it were far more dangerous than it felt. That gap between experience and perception has stayed with me: the same moment, completely different realities.
Midsummer here is also shaped by encounters and local memory. I remember a night spent in convivial company with a “white witch” I met while teaching English at the local school. It carried that same sense of loosened boundaries between the ordinary and the slightly mythic that belongs to this season.
Around Prato Fiorito there is also the memory of fire-walking events — organised with the help of our chemist — where people crossed embers in the night air. It felt less like spectacle than ritual: heat, courage, and community condensed into a single threshold crossed on foot.
And beneath all of this is the older layer of St John’s Eve, San Giovanni — herbs gathered at night, water and dew at dawn, fire as both protection and celebration. Even when not explicitly observed, it still feels embedded in the rhythm of the place, as if this part of the year has always been understood as a crossing.
There are also simpler memories: the first clear summer days when everything stabilises, sunrise to sunset uninterrupted, the world briefly coherent again after seasonal uncertainty. And then, almost unnoticed, the sense that this peak is already a turning — that from here, the light begins to withdraw.
Not all of it is celebratory. The earthquake of 21 June 2013 in the Lucido valley just across from us – where we would participate in the living Christmas crib at Equi Terme – remains part of this season as a counterpoint — the same extraordinary light, but fractured by something sudden and real. It reminds you that midsummer is not only brightness, but instability contained within brightness.
What remains, though, is the feeling of extended light that refuses to end properly. Even when the sun goes, the evening continues as if nothing has finished. You only realise later that the turning point has already passed.
And that, in these hills of northern Tuscany, is what midsummer becomes: not a festival of light, but the moment light quietly begins to turn back on itself.
