I have often thought that music is not merely an artistic activity, nor even simply a cultural one. For me, music is profoundly social. Almost every piece that means something to me is attached not only to sounds and melodies, but to people, places, journeys, friendships, loves and losses. Music has accompanied my life so closely that it has become impossible to separate the works themselves from the circumstances in which they entered my world.
The remarkable thing is that so much of the music I cherish was introduced to me by other people. Mahler, for instance, came to me through a friend of my mother’s, Isabel Granger, a remarkable woman who was far ahead of her time in her work as a social worker helping unmarried mothers. She attended Mahler concerts at a time when Mahler was far less frequently performed than today. Through conversations about her enthusiasm, my mother became interested, and through my mother, so did I.
When I first heard Mahler’s First Symphony, in an inexpensive recording conducted by Paul Kletzki, I was overwhelmed. To my youthful ears it seemed almost like epic film music, vast and visionary. Mahler quickly became an obsession. Yet the music is inseparable from memory. My first truly important date with the young woman who would later become my wife was not at a restaurant or a theatre, but at a performance of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony in its completed version at the Royal Festival Hall. The work itself seemed to open a window onto another universe, and the memory remains inseparable from the music.

So much of my musical life is connected with friendships. Schubert, for example, will always remind me of two friends, one from school and one from university. Both adored his piano music. One of them was dismissive of the symphonies, feeling that Schubert’s orchestral writing lacked the perfection of his keyboard works, but for the piano sonatas he had an almost religious devotion. Whenever I hear those sonatas or the sublime String Quintet, I hear not only Schubert but the voices of those friends.

Other composers entered my life through chance encounters. As a teenager I stayed with a family whose son was fascinated by César Franck. Until then I barely knew Franck’s name. Through him I discovered a composer whose music would remain with me for decades. Later, I heard the Symphonic Variations played at a celebratory concert at King’s College, Cambridge, in honour of a distinguished academic whose ninetieth birthday was being marked. Once again, the music became fused with people and place.
Indeed, places matter enormously. I have always loved visiting composers’ houses. There is something deeply moving about standing in the rooms where great music was conceived. In Vienna I visited the homes of Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven. Beethoven’s house remains particularly vivid in my memory because of the circumstances. We parked our car nearby, only for a violent thunderstorm to erupt. At the same time, a tram was ringing its bell furiously because our car was obstructing its route. My wife dashed down the street to move the vehicle while thunder rolled overhead in. Ever since, Beethoven’s house has been associated in my mind with storms and clanging tram bells.
Haydn evokes the open landscapes around Eisenstadt. Handel recalls Saxony. Elgar belongs forever to the hills of Worcestershire. These places have become part of the music itself. They remind me that great music does not emerge from abstraction but from real people living in real landscapes.
Music has also marked moments of sadness. One of Mendelssohn’s string quartets is forever linked in my memory with the loss of my beloved Lhasa Apso. Whenever I hear it, grief and beauty seem inseparable.

The same is true of friendships. My university friend Ian McDonald introduced me to much of Shostakovich and Vaughan Williams. Together we listened to recordings that were difficult to obtain at the time. Ian believed that Vaughan Williams’s Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies formed a great trilogy: conflict, peace and epilogue. It was a wonderful insight. Tragically, Ian later took his own life. Yet whenever I hear those symphonies, I hear his voice and remember his enthusiasm and generosity.
I have often found that music preserves people. Long after conversations have faded, a phrase from a quartet or a symphony can bring someone back into the room with astonishing clarity.
One of my earliest musical revelations occurred while I was playing in a school orchestra. We were performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23. I sat among the second violins and found myself so captivated by the beauty of the music that I almost stopped playing. For a moment, practical matters vanished and only Mozart remained. It was one of those experiences that convince a person that music possesses a reality beyond ordinary existence.
Yet if there is one composer who anchors everything together, it is Bach.
My entire journey into classical music really began with a recording by Dinu Lipatti. On one side was Bach’s Partita No. 1; on the other, Mozart’s Sonata in A minor. It was Lipatti’s rendering of Bach that changed my life. Listening to that performance was like opening a door into a vast new world. Everything followed from it.
Decades later, Bach remains the centre. Whenever life becomes difficult, whenever events seem confused or overwhelming, I return to Bach. Somehow the music restores order. It gathers the scattered fragments of experience and places them into a pattern that makes sense. It allows me to find the thread of life again.
From the Partitas to the Well-Tempered Clavier, from the Cello Suites to the Brandenburg Concertos, Bach possesses an extraordinary ability to reconcile the intellect and the spirit. The music seems simultaneously human and cosmic. It is impossible for me to imagine life without it.

Indeed, I sometimes find it astonishing that there are people who have never encountered this music. I cannot help feeling that if more people listened to Bach, and indeed to great music generally, many of the world’s problems would become easier to bear. Music is a peacemaker. Music is a reconciler. It calms us. It enlarges us. It carries us beyond our immediate concerns and allows us to glimpse something greater than ourselves.
Perhaps there is a reason why Bach’s music was chosen to travel into space aboard the Voyager spacecraft. Faced with the challenge of representing humanity to the cosmos, those responsible turned instinctively to Bach. The choice seems entirely natural. In his music there is order, beauty, complexity, tenderness and transcendence. There is something that speaks not merely for a nation or a culture but for humanity itself.
And so, after all these years, I find that music remains one of the great constants of life. It is present in memory, in friendship, in love, in loss, in landscapes and in journeys. It accompanies us through triumph and disappointment alike. It reminds us of who we have been and suggests who we might become.
Music before us, music after us, music with us and beyond us.
Music now.
Music in the future.
Music forever.

Longoio is a small mountain hamlet in the Serchio Valley, within the municipality of Bagni di Lucca in Tuscany. It is one of those places where geography and human life are closely intertwined. Set among chestnut woods and steep slopes, the village has historically depended on a fragile balance between forest resources, agriculture, and more recently, industry.
Over time, the Serchio Valley became one of Italy’s important paper-producing districts. The industry developed organically from local conditions: abundant water, historic milling activity, and a long tradition of craft production. By the twentieth century, paper manufacturing and recycling had become central to the valley’s economy, shaping both employment and identity across small communities.
Within this context, the Pazzaglia family of Longoio is associated with the local paper industry. In its more recent form, this activity is linked to Tiziano Pazzaglia and the recycling sector through Green4 S.r.l. The company was locally rooted rather than part of a multinational structure, operating within a dense network of small and medium-sized firms that characterise the Serchio paper district.
Last month, a major fire broke out at the Green4 facility not far from Longoio. Local accounts indicate it began in an external storage area containing baled paper before spreading rapidly into the main warehouse. Fueled by highly combustible material, the fire produced a large plume of smoke visible across the valley and required an extensive emergency response.

The exact cause was not officially confirmed at the time of reporting, and investigations were reported to be ongoing.
The impact of the fire went beyond the industrial site itself. In villages like Longoio, industry is not separate from daily life: it is embedded in the community. Factories employ local residents, support surrounding families, and form part of the shared landscape. As a result, even those not directly affected by the facility experienced the fire as something immediate and disruptive.
In statements reported locally, Tiziano Pazzaglia described the loss in deeply personal terms, expressing that everything he had built was gone. As Pazzaglia said “there’s only one person who died in the fire and that is me ” His words reflected not only economic damage but the collapse of a long-standing continuity between family, work, and place.
The wider context is one of economic fragility. The paper sector in the region operates under constant pressure from shifting markets and tight margins, meaning that a single incident can have consequences that extend well beyond one site.
The event also occurred during a period of elevated fire risk in the region, where both forest fires and accidental industrial fires are a recurring seasonal concern. While official investigations focused on determining the cause, broader speculation in local settings is not uncommon, although no conclusions of deliberate action have been established.
More broadly, the fire highlights the vulnerability of a tightly interconnected valley economy, where employment, family networks, and industry are closely bound together. When disruption occurs, its effects are social as well as economic.
*
Longoio is one of several hamlets within Bagni di Lucca, and for those who live there it is not an abstract location but a lived environment. I have lived within the same municipality for over twenty years and that proximity shapes how events like this are experienced—not as distant news, but as part of the shared reality of the valley.
Over time, local life has also been shaped by small community institutions such as village shops, which for decades provided essential goods and acted as informal social centres. One such shop operated in Longoio for many years before closing more than a decade ago. It was run by Giorgia the wife of Sergio Pazzaglia the founder of the.factory destroyed by the fire. These kinds of places played an important role in the everyday fabric of the community.
While it is a relief that no lives were lost, the consequences are nonetheless significant. Many livelihoods have been affected at a time when the local economy is already under strain, and what follows requires not only investigation and reconstruction, but also support and resilience for n a valley like the Serchio and its tributary feeding Bagni di Lucca. the Lima , rebuilding is never purely technical. It is also about restoring stability, continuity, and confidence in a place where community and industry have always been deeply intertwined.

In common with the immortal works of art, in common with the greatest of beliefs, and in common with the war dead remembered in Laurence Binyon’s famous words, there are other things that, in a sense, shall not grow old.
These are our photographs.
Gone, one hopes, are the days when photographs simply vanished because they existed only as single paper prints tucked away in drawers, forgotten albums, or cardboard boxes in attics. Today, countless images inhabit their own curious form of eternity. They reside in the cloud, whether that be Amazon, Google, or some other digital repository. There they remain, often duplicated many times over, available not only to us but perhaps to future generations of descendants, archivists, historians and researchers.
Yet one thing is certain: we grow old.
When we look through our photographs, we do so for two contradictory reasons. We rejoice because they remind us of happy moments, of people we loved, of journeys taken and experiences shared. At the same time, we feel a certain sadness because those moments have passed. The holiday is over. The gathering has dispersed. The children have grown. Friends have departed. Some are no longer with us.
The photographs remain, but time has moved on.
That is why old photographs possess such emotional power. They allow us to meet our younger selves again. They show how much has changed, and how much has not. They belong to two worlds at once: the past in which they were taken, and the present in which they are seen.
Recently, I have had enormous pleasure rediscovering old photographs from the pre-digital era. These are not images automatically uploaded from smartphones. They are prints from the age of film, when every exposure mattered. Many survived and have now been scanned.
Once scanned, however, another question arises.
What should we do with them?
Should we preserve them exactly as they are, complete with fading colours, scratches, dust marks, creases and tears? Or should we restore them?
I eventually reached my own conclusion. The original print should always be preserved. That is the archivist’s first rule. But once that has been done, I see no objection to restoration. Indeed, I find great satisfaction in it.
At a basic level, restoration involves cropping, straightening, adjusting brightness and contrast, correcting colour balance, and removing blemishes. These are corrective processes. They compensate for the injuries inflicted by time.
But today we also have new tools. Artificial intelligence has entered the field. I use a variety of systems, each with strengths and weaknesses, and each capable in different ways of removing damage, recovering detail, or restoring clarity to faded images.
This raises a question that is not merely technical, but philosophical.
Are we restoring the past, or recreating it?
Traditional restoration seeks to reveal what was already there. Artificial intelligence can sometimes go further, inferring details no longer visible. The boundary between restoration and interpretation becomes less certain.
Yet when used carefully, the results can be deeply moving.
This question became unexpectedly personal when I returned to a photograph taken during my final year at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1971.

The photograph shows Sandra leaning out of the window of my lodgings overlooking King’s Parade, with the buildings of Gonville and Caius College visible behind her. At the time, it seemed an entirely ordinary image, capturing nothing more than a moment on an ordinary day.
Yet more than fifty years later, it has come to mean far more than the instant it recorded.
During restoration, I found myself struck by a curious thought. Sandra does not appear younger because the photograph has been restored. She was younger. That was simply the reality of 1971.
What had aged was not Sandra, but the photograph itself.
Over decades, the print had accumulated its own history. Colours faded. Detail softened. The surface bore the marks of time. Restoration removed much of that accumulated photographic age and brought the image closer to its original state.
It is a strange reversal. The woman in the photograph remains fixed in that moment in 1971. The photograph, however, continued ageing year after year. Restoration allows the image to move slightly back toward its own youth, even though time itself remains unchanged.
The photograph is important for another reason. It forms part of what I think of as a three-part trilogy.
The first part began in 1966 and ended in 1967 when circumstances prevented it from continuing. The second part should perhaps have completed it, but instead it amounted to only a single day. Sandra came to Cambridge, we spent that day together, and then our paths diverged again.
Looking back, the photograph seems less like an ending than a pause between chapters.
Six years passed before we met again.
India played an unexpected role in what followed. During a visit there in 1971, I met a friend who later came to England on business and asked to be shown around London. In that moment, I remembered someone I had once known.
Why not Sandra?
The introduction was made, and one day the two of them came to see me. What seemed a simple arrangement became a turning point. The loose threads of the earlier chapters were drawn together, and the third part of the trilogy quietly began.
Unlike the first two parts, this third part did not end.
That is why this photograph carries such significance. It captures a moment when neither of us could have known what lay ahead. Seen simply, it is a young woman leaning from a Cambridge window on a day in 1971. Seen in the context of what followed, it becomes a threshold between an unfinished past and a continuing future.
Photographs have a unique relationship with time. They preserve a moment so completely that it never changes, yet the meanings we attach to it continue to grow. A casual image may, decades later, reveal itself as a turning point.
Perhaps that is why restoring photographs is so satisfying. We know that life is brief. We know that youth fades. We know that moments pass beyond recall. Yet by preserving and restoring images, something is rescued from oblivion.
The ancient Romans observed that ars longa, vita brevis — art is long, life is short.
Photographs are long too.
They may outlive us by generations, carrying fragments of lives that would otherwise disappear.
Not immortal, perhaps. Nothing material is truly immortal.
But they endure.
And when we restore an old photograph and see a loved one looking back across half a century, it can feel, if only for a moment, like a conversation across time.
Sometimes a single photograph captures only a fraction of a second.
Sometimes that fraction contains an entire lifetime.

BY THE LEDGE

The golden light of Cambridge softly gleams,

You wait within the glass, a spirit bright,

The tide of destiny flows through our dreams.

​I did not know the hardship in the schemes,

Or why I missed the comfort of your sight;

The golden light of Cambridge softly gleams.

​We weathered long and lonely, distant streams,

To find the way back through the darkest night,

The tide of destiny flows through our dreams.

​Your beauty, heavenly, transcends the themes,

That poets weave in verses of delight;

The golden light of Cambridge softly gleams.

​Though time took all our certainty and seams,

And trials forced us to the bitter height,

The tide of destiny flows through our dreams.

​A love inevitable, beyond the extremes,

Has brought you to my arms, to hold you tight;

The golden light of Cambridge softly gleams,

The tide of destiny flows through our dreams.

Anyone travelling up from Ponte a Serraglio towards Granaiola knows the Global Village, housed in the buildings that once formed part of the Demidoff complex. Few people, however, notice what stands just beyond it.
On the right-hand side of the road, almost hidden by vegetation, is a small abandoned chapel. For years it remained smothered by brambles, ivy and bamboo, so much so that many motorists passed by without ever realising it was there. It was Sandra who found the chapel and brought it to my notice Today, thanks to some clearing of the surrounding growth, it has become visible once again and is beginning to catch the eye of those who travel this road.

At first glance it might appear to be nothing more than a roadside shrine. Looking more closely, however, it is clearly something more substantial. The façade has a proper entrance protected by an ornate wrought-iron gate, and behind it can be seen a larger stone structure, now almost completely engulfed by greenery.
It is not the Oratory of Madonna della Neve, which stands much higher up, just below the village of Granaiola. This little building seems to belong to a different and less familiar story. It may have been a private nineteenth-century oratory connected with an estate that has long since disappeared, or perhaps a chapel built for travellers making their way along the old route to Granaiola.
For the moment, its origins remain something of a mystery. Local guides and lists of religious buildings in the area do not appear to mention it clearly, and that only adds to its fascination. It is one of those places that survive the passing of time, forgotten by most people yet still quietly present in the landscape.
Looking at it today, with its weathered walls and the vegetation slowly reclaiming it, it is easy to imagine a time when the chapel was cared for, visited regularly and lit by candles. Perhaps local farmers stopped there to say a prayer before climbing to the fields above Granaiola. Perhaps travellers paused for a moment of devotion as they made their way along the road.
For now, we do not know its name or its exact history. Yet this small chapel on the road to Granaiola serves as a reminder that in Bagni di Lucca even the most hidden corners can preserve fragments of a past still waiting to be rediscovered.

Today is 2 June — Italy’s Republic Day — a public holiday and date that carries significance far beyond ceremony. It marks the moment in 1946 when Italians, emerging from the devastation of the Second World War and the collapse of fascism, voted to become a republic and to leave behind the monarchy and the legacy of Fascist Italy. It was not simply a change of government, but a re-founding of political legitimacy on democratic principles.
That decision grew directly out of the catastrophe of World War II. In Italy, the war was not only something suffered from the outside; it became internal, fragmented, and ultimately divided. In the final phase of the conflict, occupation and resistance produced a civil war within the wider war itself — a rupture that turned political disagreement into lived conflict between compatriots. That experience left a deep imprint on the national psyche, still visible in memorials, landscapes, and family memory across the country.

That rupture is also one of the central themes explored in Anna Valencia’s novel ‘The Chestnut House’ set in our part of the world and more specifically the Garfagnana. Anna Valencia is a friend who I met through a cat donation from her while she was living in this area and I translated her unputdownable work into Italian because its subject matter carries equal importance for an Italian audience. The novel brings this chapter of Italian history into vivid human focus, showing how civil division and wartime occupation penetrated ordinary lives. It is particularly powerful because it translates political rupture into lived experience, reminding us that behind every constitutional transformation lie private stories of survival, loss, and reconstruction.
Against this background, the Republic was not a triumph in the conventional sense. It was a reconstruction — political, social, and moral. Italy did not simply emerge both defeated and victorious; it reassembled itself from collapse. The republic represented an attempt to restore order, justice, and democratic continuity after dictatorship and war, and to redefine the relationship between citizens and the state on new foundations.
This gives Italy’s experience a particular intensity compared with countries that were not occupied in the same way. Britain, for example, endured severe bombing and wartime loss but was not occupied (with the exception of the Channel Islands). Its post-war transformation therefore took place within an uninterrupted constitutional framework. The reforms of the Labour government under Clement Attlee reshaped welfare, housing, and the economy, but within a stable institutional continuity.
Italy’s transformation was more fundamental. The 1946 referendum that created the republic was also the first national vote in which women participated fully, marking a profound shift in civic identity at the moment of national re-foundation. Citizenship was no longer inherited or restricted; it was actively extended as part of the republic’s creation.
All of this unfolded under the early pressures of the Cold War. Europe was dividing into opposing spheres of influence, and Italy stood at a strategic crossroads, with tensions reflected in issues such as Trieste and the wider presence of the emerging Iron Curtain. Despite this instability, the republic aligned itself with democratic institutions and the long process of European reconstruction.

In my own family, this connection is direct. My wife’s father was an Italian army radio operator at El Alamein, responsible for battlefield communications in the North African campaign while my father was a British Eighth Army tank driver involved in armoured warfare and the maintenance and repair of vehicles in the same theatre. These were not abstract roles but essential functions within the machinery of one of the most decisive battles of the war. Both men were part of the same immense historical moment, each contributing in different ways to the same conflict.
Like many of their generation, they did not often speak in detail about what they had experienced – although my dad mentioned that he found it exciting to be involved in it. The war was present but contained — carried in silence as much as in memory. Yet it shaped everything that followed.
That silence reflected a wider post-war condition. Many who had lived through the conflict preferred not to revisit it. The priority became rebuilding life: restoring stability, expanding opportunity, and moving toward a world defined by normality rather than survival. Across Europe, austerity and scarcity lingered into the 1950s, but they coexisted with a strong desire to build a more secure and hopeful future.
Even so, the war never fully disappeared from culture or consciousness. It remained embedded in education, public life, and entertainment, where it appeared as shared reference rather than distant history. Over time, however, that immediacy faded, and lived experience gradually became historical knowledge.

This is why Republic Day retains such importance in Italy. It is not simply a celebration of constitutional form, but a reminder of how that form was created: through occupation, civil fracture, resistance, reconstruction, and a conscious decision to rebuild public life on principles of justice, equality, and participation. To think that Italian women had to wait until 1946 to be able to vote and that now just eighty years later the country is governed by a female prime minister who has already served longer than most Italian prime ministers and where the opposition leader is also a woman.
Over time, Italy’s republic has also become part of a wider European story — one shaped by countries emerging from war and choosing cooperation over conflict, stability over fragmentation, and institutions over collapse. Italy’s role within that process reflects both national recovery and continental reconstruction.
In the end, Republic Day is not only about 1946. It is about continuity — the deliberate, fragile continuity of democracy itself. It is a reminder that freedom is never automatic, justice is never permanent without effort, and the republic exists only as long as each generation chooses to sustain it.

For those of us belonging to the Baby Boomer generation, born in the immediate post-war years, this history was never distant. It was still present in the people around us. Our parents belonged to the wartime generation, and their lives were shaped by experiences that continued to define the post-war world even when not spoken aloud. The Second World War was not only present in parental memory, but also in education and culture: we were taught by teachers who themselves had directly experienced wartime service or national service, and only the very youngest teachers had escaped that direct involvement. The war therefore remained embedded in the classroom as part of lived authority, not abstract history. At the same time, it persisted in public culture and the media — in BBC broadcasting, in television, and even in comedy. Series such as Dad’s Army treated wartime experience as shared cultural memory, while Fawlty Towers could rely on its famous phrase “don’t mention the war” precisely because the subject still sat so close to the surface of everyday life.

The War was still present even in the playful antics of our English secondary school scout summer camp antics.

.When memory becomes history, it gains perspective but loses immediacy. What once felt close becomes something studied, and with that distance comes a risk: that the cost of democratic stability — the fragility behind it — becomes easier to forget.
This is why Republic Day retains such importance in Italy. It is not simply a celebration of constitutional form, but a reminder of how that form was created: through occupation, civil fracture, resistance, reconstruction, and a conscious decision to rebuild public life on principles of justice, equality, and participation.

Saturday felt like the true beginning of summer in Bagni di Lucca.
The town suddenly seemed to come alive, with not one, not two, but three major cultural events taking place on the same day. In the end, we managed to attend two of them, and both proved well worth the effort.
The highlight of the day was undoubtedly the inauguration of the restored Villa Ada. For many local people, this was more than just the opening of a building. It was the culmination of a dream that had taken decades to become reality.
The ceremony itself was a reminder of how differently public events are celebrated in Italy compared with Britain. There was the national anthem, treated with genuine respect and pride. There was the town’s vicar’s blessing.There were speeches from the mayor and other local figures. In Italy, speeches are an essential part of any public occasion. Whether it is the opening of a restored villa, a concert, or a community event, there is always time taken to explain the significance of what is happening.

And then, of course, there was the refreshment.
This was no hurried buffet. Everything had been prepared with care and attention, and guests were able to enjoy food and conversation in the beautiful gardens of Villa Ada. The atmosphere was festive, elegant and, above all, hopeful.

The reopening of Villa Ada represents a remarkable achievement. Until 1975 the villa was still occupied by the aristocratic family who owned it. There was an exhibition of photographs showing how the interiors looked then. After they left, the property passed into the hands of the thermal baths company and subsequently after they relinquished it gradually fell into decline. For years it stood as a reminder of better times, and many wondered whether it would ever be restored.

More than one person commented during the afternoon, “I never thought I would see this happen in my lifetime.”
Now, thanks to funding aimed at regenerating historic buildings and town centres, Villa Ada has been given a new future. It will host exhibitions, community events, cultural activities and local groups. It is exactly the sort of project that Bagni di Lucca needs, and one can only hope that local people and visitors alike will support it.
Unfortunately, we were unable to attend the early evening Writers’ Festival event at Villa Webb. This new series of literary evenings promises to bring authors, discussions and book presentations to the town throughout the summer. As someone interested in creative writing, I was sorry to miss it. It is precisely the kind of initiative that enriches a community and connects readers with the people who create books.
Still, the day was far from over.
At 9 p.m.—a perfectly normal starting time in Italy, though perhaps not too suitable for many British visitors—we attended a screening of a film managed and directed locally exploring the relationship between Rose Cleveland and Evangeline Whipple, whose book A Famous Corner of Tuscany remains one of the most charming accounts of Bagni di Lucca.
The film was beautifully made. It combined dramatic reconstructions, historical research and expert interviews to tell a story that was both personal and moving. It portrayed the deep bond between the two women and the sacrifices they made throughout their lives, while also placing their story firmly within the wider history of Bagni di Lucca.
What particularly impressed me was the way the film highlighted the town itself. It reminded the audience why so many international visitors chose Bagni di Lucca as their home or refuge. For generations, the town has been a meeting place of cultures, ideas and people from across the world. In many ways, that international spirit remains part of its identity today.
By the time the film ended, it felt as though we had experienced a whole festival compressed into a single day: the reopening of a historic villa, the launch of a literary programme and a film celebrating an extraordinary chapter in local history.
Not bad for a Saturday.
Sunday, by contrast, was much quieter. A few jobs around the house, a chance to recover, and time to reflect on everything we had seen.
Now Monday approaches, bringing with it the return of ordinary routines. But if Saturday is any indication of what lies ahead, Bagni di Lucca is set for a lively and memorable summer.
And that is life in Bagni di Lucca, 2026. Watch out for plenty more local events on this page!

One of the oldest and most historic hotels in Bagni di Lucca is finally being brought back to life. After decades of neglect and decline, the Hotel Svizzero — remembered fondly by many visitors and residents — is now undergoing a major restoration that aims to return the building to its former importance in the spa town.

The project, overseen by the young architect Stefano Scarpellini and a team of specialists, will transform the historic complex into a three-star hotel equipped with modern comforts while preserving the character and elegance of the original building. Completion is expected in 2028.

Located on Via Contessa Casalini, opposite the gardens in the centre of Bagni di Lucca, the refurbished Hotel Svizzero will include fifteen guest rooms distributed over three floors, together with three apartments in a smaller adjoining building. The plans also include a semi-covered swimming pool suitable for both summer and winter use, a wellness spa, gymnasium, bar, and two parking areas.

Particular care is being taken to preserve the historic appearance of the building. The furnishings will combine contemporary comfort with a classic atmosphere, and the architectural lines of the old hotel will remain intact. Even the large plane tree beside the perimeter wall — much loved by local residents — is being preserved.

Bagni di Lucca remains, in essence, a traditional spa town, whose identity has always been closely tied to its thermal heritage. In recent years there have been several attempts to revive this vocation through a series of redevelopment projects, including initiatives linked to historic villas such as Villa Ada and the hoped-for restoration of Villa Fiori. Some smaller thermal facilities have also been brought back into use, helping to restore at least part of the town’s bathing culture. However, despite these efforts, the main historic spa complex in the centre — the old “Varraud” baths — remains closed, deteriorating, and sadly out of operation. Many locals feel that until this central establishment is restored, Bagni di Lucca cannot fully reclaim its identity as a true European spa town.

The name “Hotel Svizzero” — literally “Swiss Hotel” — also carries a double significance. On the one hand, this part of Tuscany has often been described as having a landscape reminiscent of Switzerland: wooded valleys, green hills, and in places a character that feels closer to the Jura Mountains than to the stereotypical image of Tuscany alone. While the nearby Apennines and Apuan Alps add height and drama, the overall impression is of a lush, almost Central European scenery. On the other hand, the name reflects a long-standing association with Swiss hotel standards, traditionally considered among the highest in Europe. In this sense, “Hotel Svizzero” captures both the character of its surroundings and an aspiration toward quality, combining landscape and hospitality identity in a single name.

For many years the hotel itself stood in a state of abandonment, a sad contrast to the role it once played in the social life of the town. Older residents still remember staying there or attending events in its rooms during its more elegant days. Among those who later chronicled its decline was a visitor who recalled seeing the hotel’s gates and entrance area repainted in striking colours while the building itself remained in a neglected state, a vivid contrast that symbolised its long period of uncertainty.

The Hotel Svizzero is closely associated with one of its most celebrated guests, the French novelist Alexandre Dumas. Best known for works such as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas visited Bagni di Lucca during his travels in Italy and became part of the hotel’s enduring legend. According to local tradition, he was of such imposing physical stature that the hotel’s entrance had to be enlarged to allow him to pass through — a story that has become part of the building’s folklore, whether literally true or not.

Further literary interest surrounding Dumas has been reinforced by later rediscoveries of his work. In particular, the novel The Last Cavalier, long overlooked, was only rediscovered and published in 2005, renewing attention to his vast literary output. Dumas was one of the most prolific writers of the nineteenth century, as well as a politically engaged figure connected to the Italian Risorgimento and the founding of the newspaper Indipendente. His life was as energetic and dramatic as his fiction, and his cultural legacy extends well beyond literature. One of his sons later wrote La Dame aux Camélias, the inspiration for Verdi’s La Traviata.

A personal connection to Dumas’ literary legacy can be found in the work of Robin Buss, a now sadly deceased friend and translator responsible for bringing The Three Musketeers to modern English readers. The scale of his translation work was so substantial, and the printed proofs so extensive, that he once joked he nearly had to move out of his home, as the pages and galley proofs occupied almost every available surface. It is a small but telling reminder of the physical and intellectual weight behind translating Dumas’ vast body of work

Stefano Scarpellini, who was born in Bagni di Lucca, has described the hotel restoration project as both a professional undertaking and a personal commitment to the future of the town. The redevelopment is expected to create jobs and attract renewed tourism, contributing to the economic and cultural revival of the area.

For many residents who remember the hotel in its heyday, its reopening will mark the return of an important piece of Bagni di Lucca’s history.

Lino Capolicchio was an Italian actor, director, and screenwriter, born in Merano in 1943 and who died in Rome in May 2022. He was one of the most important faces of Italian cinema in the 1970s, especially known for intense and melancholic roles.
The film that made him famous was The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, directed by Vittorio De Sica and based on the novel by Giorgio Bassani. For that performance he won the David di Donatello award.
Another of his best-known films is The House with Laughing Windows by Pupi Avati, which became a classic of Italian thriller and horror cinema.
Capolicchio also worked extensively in theatre and television. He studied at the Silvio D’Amico Academy in Rome and began his career with Giorgio Strehler at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano.
In later years he taught acting and also devoted himself to film and theatre directing. In Lucca, for example, he staged works by Giacomo Puccini at the Teatro del Giglio.
After a difficult and unhappy love affair, Capolicchio became a close friend of my future wife, Alexandra.. Their friendship grew during an emotionally difficult period in his life and remained warm and affectionate. Sandra introduced him to new artistic and musical circles and once took him to a concert where he met Donovan. Those friendships and encounters formed part of the rich cultural world that surrounded Capolicchio beyond cinema and theatre.
Years later, I was able to rediscover a number of snapshots of Lino, many of them taken around Belgrave Square in London, where Sandra spent the first part of her life while her father served as Secretary General of the Italian Cultural Institute London. With a little help and careful restoration work, I managed to recover something of their original beauty and atmosphere. The photographs now preserve fleeting moments from that time: Lino in conversation, at ease among friends, and moving through the artistic and cultural world that linked London and Italy during those years.
It is moving to remember that it was in this same month of May that Lino left us in 2022 — already four years ago now — yet these photographs and memories still retain something vivid of his presence, sensitivity, and quiet charm.

A contemporary news item reports on Lino Capolicchio, who was photographed in London with my future wife. The article highlights several details about the 25-year-old actor: It says that despite having planned a trip to Russia to recover from a failed romance, it seems that Lino quickly moved on, suggesting his sentimental disappointments are short-live Lino had recently achieved notoriety through his roles in the films Escalation and Metti, una sera a cena….Before his success, Lino spent many years trying to establish himself in the industry. His training included studies at the Piccolo Teatro academy, and he previously appeared in television dramas such as Davide Copperfield and Il conte di Montecristo, as well as performing in theatre with the Brignone company.

The three tombs of Evangeline Whipple, Rose Cleveland and Nelly Erichsen stand in their recently restored and re-whitened dignity at the upper left side of the old Protestant cemetery of Bagni di Lucca. Quietly grouped together beneath the Tuscan hills, they tell a story which is at once literary, artistic, political and profoundly human — a story whose resonance seems only to grow stronger with time.

Evangeline Whipple will already be familiar to many readers through her affectionate and evocative book A Famous Corner of Tuscany (1928), one of the most charming English-language portraits ever written of Bagni di Lucca and its expatriate community. Nelly Erichsen, meanwhile, was the illustrator of several volumes in Dent’s celebrated The Story of… series, including works on Italian cities which introduced many readers in northern Europe and America to Italy’s artistic and architectural heritage. Through her artistic circle she also connects with the wider Anglo-Italian world of Lina Waterfield and the cosmopolitan expatriate society of early twentieth-century Tuscany.

Yet it is Rose Cleveland who remains the most historically striking of the three. Known publicly as the sister of President Grover Cleveland, she served for part of his first administration as acting First Lady of the United States before his marriage to Frances Folsom Cleveland. In an era obsessed with appearances, newspapers commented endlessly on her unconventional elegance and intellectual seriousness. More significantly, she was recognised as a woman of exceptional intellect, deeply engaged with literature, theology, politics and philosophy at a time when such interests were still often discouraged in women.
Born in Fayetteville, New York, in 1846, Rose was the youngest of nine children of the Presbyterian minister Reverend Richard Cleveland. After her father’s death, she helped support the family through teaching and scholarship, later becoming a respected educator and lecturer. She published essays and works including George Eliot’s Poetry and Other Studies, You and I: Or Moral, Intellectual and Social Culture, and The Long Run.
Behind the public figure, however, there existed a deeply personal emotional life. In middle age, Rose entered into a relationship with the wealthy widow Evangeline Marrs Whipple. At the time, such relationships between intellectually independent women were often referred to as “Boston marriages” — a term that disguised what society found difficult to acknowledge: that women could form deep emotional, intellectual, and romantic bonds with one another.
The surviving letters between Rose and Evangeline reveal an extraordinary intensity of feeling. They are among the most candid same-sex love letters of their period. Rose writes of “long rapturous embraces” and of “the summit of joy, the end of search, the goal of love.” Written in an era when women were assumed to be passionless and socially dependent, these words now read as both radical and strikingly modern.
Their relationship endured separation, social pressures and personal complexity. Evangeline had previously been married to Bishop Henry Whipple, but after his death in 1901 the bond between the two women re-emerged with renewed strength. Eventually, Rose and Evangeline settled in Bagni di Lucca together, sharing their life there with Nelly Erichsen amid the expatriate artistic and literary circles that flourished in the town during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The First World War transformed this peaceful Tuscan refuge into a place of humanitarian urgency. Following the Italian defeat at Caporetto in 1917, thousands of refugees poured through northern and central Italy. Rose, Evangeline and Nelly responded by assisting displaced families, refugees and orphaned children, placing themselves directly in contact with the suffering caused by war. Soon afterwards, the influenza pandemic known in Italy as La Spagnola swept through the region.

Both Nelly Erichsen and Rose Cleveland died in 1918 during the pandemic. Evangeline survived them by twelve years and was eventually buried beside them. The three adjoining tombs, each marked with a carved flower, remain among the most poignant memorials in Bagni di Lucca — symbols of friendship, devotion, courage, independence and chosen family.
Today, more than a century later, interest in Rose and Evangeline has expanded far beyond specialist historical circles. Their correspondence has become a key source for studies of women’s writing, LGBTQ+ history, and transatlantic cultural life. Rose Cleveland is increasingly recognised not merely as a presidential sister or historical curiosity, but as a serious intellectual figure whose life quietly challenged the assumptions of her time.
This renewed attention also resonates with broader questions about women and political power in the early twentieth century. A particularly striking parallel is found in Edith Wilson, who, after President Woodrow Wilson suffered a severe stroke in 1919, effectively controlled access to the presidency and the flow of governmental business for the remainder of his term. Though never formally empowered, she became a de facto gatekeeper of executive authority at a moment of national and international crisis.
Her role exposes both a constitutional gap — the absence at the time of any clear mechanism for presidential incapacity — and a broader historical reality: that women could exercise significant political influence within structures that formally excluded them. Edith Wilson remains a controversial but essential figure in the history of women’s political agency, positioned between invisibility and authority.
Modern scholarship on these questions has been notably advanced by Rebecca Boggs Roberts, whose book Untold Power re-examines Edith Wilson not as scandal, but as a complex political reality shaped by necessity and circumstance.
We met Rebecca Boggs Roberts last year in Bagni di Lucca, where she was engaging with the wider historical landscape connected to American women who lived, travelled, and were ultimately buried in the area. She kindly presented us with a copy of her book, and she continues to research these interconnected lives — from Edith Wilson in Washington to the expatriate women who shaped their lives in Tuscany.

Seen together, these histories form a revealing contrast: Edith Wilson represents informal power at the centre of political authority in Washington, while Rose Cleveland, Evangeline Whipple and Nelly Erichsen represent a more personal form of independence, creativity and chosen community on the margins of Anglo-American life in Europe. Both illuminate different ways in which women navigated systems only beginning to acknowledge their public role.
This continuing interest will be marked this coming Saturday in Bagni di Lucca at the Biblioteca Comunale “A. Betti”, where the national premiere of the docufilm Evangeline e Rose will take place at 21:00.
The film is presented by the Fondazione Michel de Montaigne and is based on the volume Mia preziosa e adorata. Lettere d’amore di Rose Cleveland e Evangeline Simpson Whipple 1890–1918 (Italian edition, 2021), itself derived from the earlier Precious and Adored (2019), edited by Tilly Laskey and Lizzie Ehrenhalt. The project originated from an idea by Enrica Benedetti.
Directed by Patrizia Lazzari and Mariana Giurlani, and promoted by the Associazione Città delle Donne di Lucca, the Fondazione Banca del Monte di Lucca, the Comune di Bagni di Lucca and the Fondazione Montaigne, the docufilm reconstructs a wholly female historical narrative centred on Rose Cleveland and Evangeline Whipple. It revisits their humanitarian work during the First World War and the Spanish flu epidemic, when they provided assistance to the local population and refugees in Bagni di Lucca.
Filmed in 2025 in key locations around the town — including places still associated with their lives and burial — the documentary blends dramatic reconstruction with historical testimony. The roles of Whipple, Cleveland and Nelly Erichsen are portrayed by Michela Totino, Silvana Rossomando and Rosella Petrucci, interwoven with scholarly contributions from historians and researchers including Tilly Laskey and others who have worked extensively on the Anglo-American presence in the region.
The screening is free and open to the public, and represents not only a cultural event, but also a renewed act of remembrance for a story rooted in both personal devotion and historical transformation.

The story of Rose Cleveland, Evangeline Whipple and Nelly Erichsen therefore belongs not only to American political and cultural history, nor solely to the expatriate world of Tuscany, but to a wider reflection on dignity, education, equality and the freedom to live and love with autonomy. Their graves in Bagni di Lucca remain eloquent reminders that progress is never guaranteed, and that every generation must decide anew which values it is prepared to defend.

Le tre tombe di Evangeline Whipple, Rose Cleveland e Nelly Erichsen si trovano nella loro recentemente restaurata e nuovamente imbiancata dignità nella parte alta a sinistra del vecchio cimitero protestante di Bagni di Lucca. Silenziosamente riunite tra le colline toscane, raccontano una storia al tempo stesso letteraria, artistica, politica e profondamente umana — una storia la cui risonanza sembra crescere con il passare del tempo.

Evangeline Whipple è già nota a molti lettori attraverso il suo affettuoso ed evocativo libro A Famous Corner of Tuscany (1928), uno dei ritratti in lingua inglese più affascinanti mai scritti su Bagni di Lucca e sulla sua comunità di espatriati.

Nelly Erichsen, invece, fu illustratrice di diversi volumi della celebre serie Dent The Story of…, compresi libri dedicati alle città italiane che, per molti lettori dell’Europa settentrionale e dell’America all’inizio del XX secolo, offrirono la prima visione delle meraviglie artistiche e architettoniche dell’Italia. Attraverso il suo ambiente artistico si collega inoltre al più ampio mondo anglo-italiano di Lina Waterfield e alla società cosmopolita degli espatriati della Toscana di inizio Novecento.

Eppure è Rose Cleveland a rimanere la figura storicamente più significativa delle tre. Conosciuta pubblicamente come sorella del presidente Grover Cleveland, servì per parte del suo primo mandato come First Lady ad interim degli Stati Uniti prima del matrimonio del presidente con Frances Folsom Cleveland. In un’epoca ossessionata dalle apparenze, i giornali commentavano incessantemente la sua eleganza non convenzionale e la sua serietà intellettuale. Più significativamente, fu riconosciuta come una donna di straordinaria cultura, profondamente interessata a letteratura, teologia, politica e filosofia in un’epoca in cui tali inclinazioni erano ancora spesso scoraggiate nelle donne.
Nata a Fayetteville, New York, nel 1846, Rose era la più giovane di nove figli del pastore presbiteriano Reverend Richard Cleveland. Dopo la morte del padre contribuì al sostegno della famiglia attraverso l’insegnamento e lo studio, diventando successivamente un’educatrice e conferenziera rispettata. Pubblicò saggi e opere tra cui George Eliot’s Poetry and Other Studies, You and I: Or Moral, Intellectual and Social Culture e The Long Run.
Dietro la figura pubblica, tuttavia, esisteva una vita emotiva profondamente personale. In età matura Rose intraprese una relazione con la ricca vedova Evangeline Marrs Whipple. All’epoca, tali relazioni tra donne indipendenti venivano spesso definite “Boston marriages” — un’espressione che mascherava ciò che la società faticava ad ammettere: che le donne potessero costruire legami profondi, affettivi e intellettuali tra loro.
Le lettere sopravvissute tra Rose ed Evangeline rivelano un’intensità straordinaria. Sono tra le più esplicite lettere d’amore tra persone dello stesso sesso del loro periodo. Rose scrive di “lunghi abbracci estatici” e del “culmine della gioia, la fine della ricerca, il fine dell’amore”. Scritte in un’epoca in cui le donne erano considerate prive di desiderio e dipendenti, queste parole oggi appaiono al tempo stesso rivoluzionarie e sorprendentemente moderne.
La loro relazione attraversò separazioni, pressioni sociali e complessità personali. Evangeline era stata precedentemente sposata con il vescovo Henry Whipple, ma dopo la sua morte nel 1901 il legame tra le due donne si rafforzò nuovamente. In seguito Rose ed Evangeline si stabilirono insieme a Bagni di Lucca, condividendo la loro vita con Nelly Erichsen, nel contesto dei circoli artistici e letterari anglo-americani che fiorivano nella cittadina tra fine Ottocento e inizio Novecento.

La Prima guerra mondiale trasformò questo rifugio toscano in un luogo di emergenza umanitaria. Dopo la disastrosa sconfitta italiana di Caporetto nel 1917, migliaia di profughi attraversarono il Nord e il Centro Italia. Rose, Evangeline e Nelly risposero offrendo assistenza a famiglie sfollate, rifugiati e bambini orfani, esponendosi direttamente alle sofferenze della guerra. Poco dopo, la pandemia influenzale conosciuta in Italia come La Spagnola colpì la regione.
Sia Nelly Erichsen che Rose Cleveland morirono nel 1918 a causa dell’epidemia. Evangeline sopravvisse loro di dodici anni e fu infine sepolta accanto a loro. Le tre tombe contigue, ciascuna segnata da un fiore scolpito, restano tra i memoriali più toccanti di Bagni di Lucca — simboli di amicizia, dedizione, coraggio, indipendenza e famiglia scelta.

Oggi, a più di un secolo di distanza, l’interesse per Rose ed Evangeline si è ampliato ben oltre gli ambienti specialistici. La loro corrispondenza è diventata una fonte fondamentale per gli studi sulla scrittura femminile, sulla storia LGBTQ+ e sulla cultura transatlantica. Rose Cleveland è sempre più riconosciuta non solo come sorella di un presidente o curiosità storica, ma come figura intellettuale di rilievo che ha silenziosamente messo in discussione le convenzioni del suo tempo.
Questa rinnovata attenzione si collega anche a questioni più ampie sul potere femminile nel primo Novecento. Un parallelo particolarmente significativo è rappresentato da Edith Wilson, che dopo il grave ictus del presidente Woodrow Wilson nel 1919 controllò di fatto l’accesso al presidente e la gestione delle attività governative per il resto del mandato. Pur senza alcun incarico formale, divenne una sorta di “guardiana” del potere esecutivo in un momento di crisi nazionale e internazionale.
Il suo ruolo evidenzia sia un vuoto costituzionale — l’assenza all’epoca di un meccanismo chiaro per la gestione dell’incapacità presidenziale — sia una realtà storica più ampia: le donne potevano esercitare un’influenza politica significativa all’interno di strutture che formalmente le escludevano. Edith Wilson resta una figura controversa ma essenziale nella storia dell’agenzia politica femminile, sospesa tra invisibilità e autorità.
Gli studi contemporanei su questi temi sono stati significativamente arricchiti da Rebecca Boggs Roberts, il cui libro Untold Power rilegge la figura di Edith Wilson non come scandalo, ma come realtà politica complessa, determinata da necessità e circostanze.
L’abbiamo incontrata lo scorso anno a Bagni di Lucca, dove stava approfondendo il più ampio contesto storico legato alle donne americane che vissero, viaggiarono e furono infine sepolte nell’area. Ci ha gentilmente donato una copia del suo libro e continua le sue ricerche su queste storie intrecciate — da Edith Wilson a Washington fino alle donne espatriate che hanno segnato la vita culturale della Toscana.

Letti insieme, questi percorsi storici offrono un contrasto significativo: Edith Wilson rappresenta il potere informale al centro dell’autorità politica a Washington, mentre Rose Cleveland, Evangeline Whipple e Nelly Erichsen incarnano una forma più personale di indipendenza, creatività e comunità scelta ai margini della vita anglo-americana in Europa. Entrambe le esperienze mostrano, in modi diversi, come le donne abbiano navigato sistemi che solo lentamente iniziavano a riconoscere il loro ruolo pubblico.
Questo rinnovato interesse sarà celebrato sabato prossimo a Bagni di Lucca, presso la Biblioteca Comunale “A. Betti”, dove si terrà la prima nazionale del docufilm Evangeline e Rose alle ore 21:00.
Il film è presentato dalla Fondazione Michel de Montaigne ed è basato sul volume Mia preziosa e adorata. Lettere d’amore di Rose Cleveland e Evangeline Simpson Whipple 1890–1918 (edizione italiana 2021), derivato dall’opera originale Precious and Adored (2019), curata da Tilly Laskey e Lizzie Ehrenhalt. Il progetto nasce da un’idea di Enrica Benedetti.
Diretto da Patrizia Lazzari e Mariana Giurlani, e promosso dall’Associazione Città delle Donne di Lucca, dalla Fondazione Banca del Monte di Lucca, dal Comune di Bagni di Lucca e dalla Fondazione Montaigne, il docufilm ricostruisce una narrazione interamente femminile centrata su Rose Cleveland ed Evangeline Whipple. Il film ripercorre il loro impegno umanitario durante la Prima guerra mondiale e l’epidemia di spagnola, quando offrirono assistenza alla popolazione locale e ai profughi.
Girato nel 2025 in luoghi significativi di Bagni di Lucca — inclusi spazi ancora oggi legati alle loro vite e alla loro sepoltura — il documentario alterna ricostruzioni sceniche e testimonianze storiche. I ruoli di Whipple, Cleveland e Nelly Erichsen sono interpretati da Michela Totino, Silvana Rossomando e Rosella Petrucci, intrecciati con contributi di studiosi e ricercatori, tra cui Tilly Laskey e altri specialisti della presenza anglo-americana nell’area.

La proiezione è a ingresso libero e rappresenta non solo un evento culturale, ma anche un atto di rinnovata memoria per una storia radicata nell’amore personale e nella trasformazione storica.
La vicenda di Rose Cleveland, Evangeline Whipple e Nelly Erichsen appartiene dunque non solo alla storia politica e culturale americana, né esclusivamente al mondo degli espatriati in Toscana, ma a una riflessione più ampia su dignità, istruzione, uguaglianza e libertà di vivere e amare con autonomia. Le loro tombe a Bagni di Lucca restano un richiamo eloquente al fatto che il progresso non è mai garantito e che ogni generazione deve decidere nuovamente quali valori è disposta a difendere.