All the fuss about the (in Italy and the UK partisl) solar eclipse yesterday got me thinking about eclipses generally — and, more particularly, about how many total solar eclipses I have actually witnessed during my lifetime.
The answer is rather disappointing.
I was born on 8 August 1948, and in all those 78 years I have actually witnessed only one total solar eclipse.That was the famous one in England on 11 August 1999 three days after my 51st birthday.
I went all the way down to Land’s End by motorbike, expecting to witness one of the great spectacles of nature.

And I saw virtually nothing.
It was completely under cloud. All I really saw was the light changing and the sky becoming strangely dark before returning to normal. It was still impressive to experience the middle of the day suddenly becoming something quite different, but my wife, Sandra, who had sensibly stayed in London, had a much better experience. She actually saw the eclipse and told me afterwards that it was absolutely stunning especially as she viewed it using the special telescope our neighbours had.
Still, my journey to Cornwall wasn’t entirely wasted. I met an old friend from school and university at his place near Tallerton, and I also managed to visit Jane Austen’s house. So I got something out of the expedition, even if the eclipse itself remained hidden behind the Cornish clouds.
There was, of course, another total eclipse during my lifetime which was visible from Italy, on 15 February 1961. I was in England at school at Dulwich College.
It was, however, a partial eclipse in England, and I do remember being warned about it at morning assembly. We were told not to look directly at the Sun, even during a partial eclipse, because we could damage our eyes. Perhaps it was because it occurred so early in the morning that it was not so immediately noticeable but 95% of the sun was covered by the moon in south-east London, where I lived at the time.

In 2015 I witnessed a partial eclipse in my part of italy. It started at 9.23 am reached its maximum coverage of the sun, which was 60.1%, at 10.31 and ended at 11.43. The local astronomical society of Lucca set up a telescope on the city walls from which this picture was taken:

A primary-school friend of mine, talking about yesterday’s eclipse, said that she was going to watch it from her beach hut, using a colander and a piece of blank paper to project the image of the Sun. Yesterday, however, was not a great eclipse for us here. There had been a violent storm and a great deal of rain, which was actually very welcome, but the clouds subsequently covered the sky.
There was another problem. The Sun was already quite low in the sky. I’ve always thought that if you’re going to have an eclipse, the best time to have it is at high noon not just before sunset! The magic is in the contrast between brilliant daylight and the sudden transformation of the landscape.
And this is what makes eclipses so fascinating.
For ancient peoples, an eclipse must have been absolutely terrifying. The Sun was the great certainty of existence. Every morning it rose and every evening it set. And suddenly, for no apparent reason, it disappeared.
Today we know exactly what is happening. We can calculate an eclipse centuries in advance. But knowing what is going to happen doesn’t necessarily make it less extraordinary. I first leaned how eclipses both solar and moon work from collecting my Brooke Bond PG tips cards.

There is something deeply unsettling about seeing the natural order of things temporarily suspended.
I remember one of those wonderful adventure films in which the intrepid European explorer finds himself in the middle of Africa, surrounded by hostile natives who are threatening to put him into a cooking pot. He knows from his astronomical calculations that an eclipse is about to occur.
So he announces that he is God and that he is going to cover the Sun.
And, sure enough, at precisely the predicted moment, the Sun disappears.
Suddenly the explorer is no longer the helpless foreigner surrounded by cannibals. He has become a supernatural being with the power to extinguish the Sun itself.
It’s a wonderful cinematic idea — and it is based on something that really happened. Christopher Columbus famously used his knowledge of a predicted lunar eclipse in 1504 to frighten the indigenous people of Jamaica. Knowledge of astronomy becomes a form of power.
But there is another film in which the eclipse has a much more profound significance: Michelangelo Antonioni’s extraordinary L’Eclisse.

Antonioni means rather more to me than simply being a great film director, because I have a personal connection with him through another of his films, Blow-Up.
When I was working at Woolwich College, I used to go to the park opposite the college — Maryon Park. The first time I went there I experienced a very strong sense of déjà vu. I had never been there before, but I knew I had seen it.
Then I realised: I had seen it in a film.
I asked the park keeper, because they still had park keepers in those days, and he told me that Michelangelo Antonioni had been there and had filmed Blow-Up in the park.
And suddenly the pieces fell into place.
There were the steps where Vanessa Redgrave had walked down. And over there was the place where the mysterious body had supposedly been found.

Antonioni had made some changes, of course. He had put up false façades and altered various things for the film. But this was unmistakably the park from Blow-Up.
It was an extraordinary discovery — to find yourself physically standing inside a film that you had watched.
And it makes me see L’Eclisse in a slightly different way.
In L’Eclisse, Antonioni uses the disappearance of the Sun behind the Moon as a metaphor for a society undergoing enormous change.
Italy in the early 1960s was moving away from the traditional, patriarchal, Catholic society of the past – a society where my then teenage wife was remonstrated for riding a moped as being unladylike – towards something much more modern, individualistic and socially liberated. The old certainties were beginning to disappear.
And the same kind of transformation was taking place in Britain.
The respectable, rather buttoned-up Britain of bowler hats, businessmen and commuters was giving way to the extraordinary social revolution of the 1960s — the young people, the sexual revolution, flower power, new music, new fashions and a completely different attitude towards society.
And Antonioni was perfectly placed to capture this kind of transformation.
In L’Eclisse, something happens to the Sun.
In Blow-Up, something happens to a body.
In both films, something that should be there suddenly becomes uncertain, mysterious and almost impossible to grasp.
In Blow-Up, the photographer believes he has discovered a murder in the park. He enlarges his photographs again and again, trying to discover the truth. But the more he enlarges the photograph, the less certain reality becomes.
The body itself seems to disappear.
And in L’Eclisse, the eclipse similarly takes something perfectly familiar — the Sun — and makes it suddenly strange and unknowable.
This is perhaps what makes Antonioni such a great director. He wasn’t simply making films about individual people. He was making films about societies in the process of changing, and about what happens to human beings when the world around them changes faster than they can understand.
And he continued this exploration in Zabriskie Point, his extraordinary excursion into America and the counterculture of the late 1960s.
So perhaps there is a connection between my rather disappointing experience at Land’s End in 1999 and my fascination with Antonioni.
I went to see an eclipse and found that the most important thing was what I couldn’t see.
And years earlier, in Maryon Park, Antonioni had made a film about a man who thinks he has seen something — a murder — and then finds that the more closely he looks, the more uncertain everything becomes.
In both cases, the missing thing becomes more important than the thing that is actually there.
Perhaps that is what an eclipse really represents.
It isn’t simply the Moon passing in front of the Sun.
It is the temporary disappearance of something we thought was permanent.
And perhaps that is why eclipses have fascinated human beings for thousands of years — and why they have fascinated artists and filmmakers too.
The world changes.
The old certainties disappear.
And for a moment we are left looking at the space where something used to be.

The above photo of yesterdays eclipse was taken by Aldo Lanini’s expedition to Monte Matanna in nearby Garfagnana. Acknowledgements to Aldo for allowing me to reproduce it here.

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