There is something rather magical about summer evenings in the Serchio Valley. Throughout the day the Tuscan sun presses down with remarkable intensity, but as darkness approaches the air slowly cools, and by about nine o’clock life begins again. It is then that one of Borgo a Mozzano’s most delightful cultural institutions comes into its own: the Teatro di Verzura.
It is not a theatre in the conventional sense. There is no imposing façade, no velvet curtains, no elaborate stage machinery. Instead, it is a theatre created from nature itself. Pergolas, carefully tended gardens, hedges and trees combine to produce an intimate setting where ideas seem to flourish as naturally as the surrounding vegetation. The audience sits beneath the evening sky, while swallows give way to bats and eventually the stars emerge above the hills of the Serchio Valley.
I have come to regard these evenings as among the highlights of every Tuscan summer. They are, in many respects, superior to television. They possess all the immediacy of a live broadcast, yet something infinitely richer: they are real encounters between remarkable people and an attentive audience, with no cameras, no studio lights, no artificiality. One sits surrounded by nature while listening to some of the most interesting figures in contemporary Italian public life.
Over the years I have listened to an extraordinary variety of speakers. There was Magdi Allam, whose remarkable journey from Islam to Christianity provoked a thoughtful discussion about identity, faith and the relationship between religion and modern Europe. On another occasion a courageous young Iranian woman spoke movingly about the struggle against oppression in her homeland and about the hopes carried by the Iranian diaspora. Then there was Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, whose presence inevitably evoked reflections upon the Italian monarchy, national memory and the curious place occupied today by the descendants of the House of Savoy.
These are not simply lectures. They are conversations that continue long after the evening has ended, carried home in one’s thoughts beneath the warm Tuscan night.
The most recent meeting was especially memorable because the guest was Professor Alberto Mario Banti of the University of Pisa, one of Italy’s most distinguished historians of the Risorgimento. I had long admired his historical writings, but this evening revealed another side of his intellectual life. In conversation with Borgo a Mozzano mayor Andreucetti Banti spoke not about Garibaldi or Italian unification, but about rock music.
At first sight this may appear an unusual departure for an eminent historian, but as Banti unfolded his argument it became perfectly clear that he regarded popular music not simply as entertainment but as one of the principal historical documents of the second half of the twentieth century. His books, including Just Like a Dream, together with his study of the cultural significance of The Beatles, demonstrate that songs can reveal social transformations every bit as clearly as political speeches or official documents.
The music itself became a form of historical evidence.
As he spoke, familiar names immediately transported many of us back to another age: The Doors, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, Love, Buffalo Springfield and so many others whose music became inseparable from the extraordinary upheavals of the late 1960s. Their songs expressed dissatisfaction with war, authority and convention while opening entirely new conversations about peace, freedom, ecology, community and human relationships.
Listening to Banti, I realised how closely his historical analysis touched my own memories, because unlike many historians I had not merely studied that world.
I had lived it.
In 1970 I spent the summer months in the United States when the Haight-Ashbury phenomenon still possessed much of its extraordinary energy. For a time I lived in a commune on Market Street in San Francisco, immersed in an atmosphere that was unlike anything I had previously encountered.
It was impossible not to be changed by such an experience.
The commune itself reflected every contradiction of the counterculture. There was generosity and idealism, an almost instinctive rejection of unnecessary authority, endless conversations that continued until dawn, music that seemed to accompany every aspect of daily life, and a genuine hope that another kind of society might be possible.
There was also experimentation, uncertainty and risk.
One experience remains permanently fixed in my memory. During one particularly frightening LSD trip I completely lost my bearings. Reality itself seemed to dissolve. What gradually brought me back was not medical intervention but the remarkable calm of one of my fellow commune members, who sat quietly beside me reading long passages from The Tibetan Book of the Dead. At the same time I listened repeatedly to Let It Be by The Beatles, which had only recently been released, together with the sublime Adagio, the slow third movement of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. Since Bruckner never lived to complete the final movement, that Adagio has often been experienced as the spiritual conclusion of the work. Somehow those two very different musical worlds—the simplicity of The Beatles and the immense spiritual vision of Bruckner—became permanently intertwined in my memory.
Looking back after more than half a century, I realise that the experience altered me far more profoundly than I understood at the time. It opened questions about consciousness, spirituality and the complexity of human experience that have remained with me ever since.
When I eventually returned to Cambridge, I found myself living between two very different worlds.
The contrast was unmistakable. On one side stood what we jokingly called “the greys”: respectable Cambridge undergraduates in tweed jackets, corduroy trousers, polished shoes and conservative haircuts, representing continuity with centuries of academic tradition. On the other side were those of us influenced by the counterculture—long hair, caftans, beads, beards and an altogether different conception of how life might be lived.
The division was by no means absolute. Friendships crossed those boundaries and many people occupied the territory somewhere between the two. Nevertheless, it was sufficiently obvious that each group had acquired its own label. They regarded us as hippies; we affectionately referred to them as “the greys.”
Looking back now, it is astonishing how much significance could be attached to something as simple as the length of one’s hair.
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