A Small Place in Italy (18 page)

Without preamble the priest, a young man, said that I must come with him immediately to the village to visit Signor Silvestre who, apparently, had learned by a sort of bush telegraph that I was in the neighbourhood and would be extremely upset if I didn’t come at once.

I was angry at the way the priest had presented the matter and at the same time I felt ashamed at even hesitating to do what he was asking me to do. It was useless to say that I was coming to see Silvestre and the others the following week.

I said that of course I would come. We all had a
grappa
, including the priest, and then the two of us set off for the village which was called Vecciatica. It took three quarters of an hour by a steep and rocky track, the continuation of the one by which we had come down from the
crinale
, to get to the place where the road began and the priest had left his car, using torches as the night was as black as pitch and the rain was hissing down; it took another half an hour by car to get to Vecciatica.

Signor Silvestre used to make the long, arduous journey up to the hut every day bringing food, that was if it wasn’t snowing, a long hard climb. Sometimes one of his young sons would
accompany him, or his daughter. Sometimes he came by himself.

When he arrived he used to sit down in front of the fire and say, ‘Now let us talk about New York’, or ‘Let us talk about New Guinea’, or wherever it was he wanted to talk about, and then one or other of us two
Inglesi
would turn the log on which he was sitting to what we hoped was the direction of wherever it was and when he was properly orientated we would begin to talk about these places, most of which we were as ignorant about as he was.

Then, at Christmas, we went down through the snow to spend Christmas with him and his wife and the other people of the village who had helped us. Signor Grassi, who mended my boots after I burned a hole through the sole when I fell asleep by the fire in the hut, and his wife; and Signor Valenti and his wife, Luisa, who gave us each a hot bath in a big wine barrel and washed our hair; and Signor Soldati, who was a carpenter, and his wife, and many others.

And so, when I finally reached Vecciatica, with the rain still pouring down, still soaked through, there had been no point in changing, and knocked on the door of Signor Silvestre’s house which was the last in the village, and said,
‘Permesso?’
as I always had, and it opened and he stood there, with his hands outstretched with the Signora standing behind him, looking over his shoulder, and he said,
‘Ti stavo aspettando,
Enrico’ (‘I have been waiting for you’), I knew that my journey had been really necessary.

The following day, after waiting hours for the weather to improve, which it didn’t, we left around nine. We didn’t really mind because we were all feeling a bit battered. Outside it was as thick as porridge.

The next obstacle was Monte Orsaro, 1831 metres, 400 metres overhead in what the Germans call the
Ewigkeit
, the eternity. It took us an hour and a half to get to it by way of Lago Padre, another minute glacial lake, and the Bocchetta dell’Orsaro, a very nasty windswept break in the
crinale
at 1821 metres. The final
climb of what looked quite like a real rocky mountain, with visibility about thirty feet, was rather difficult as Monte Orsaro was the nodal point of a number of ridges leading down from it in various directions, all except one of which would land us in the soup.

It was at this time, having entrusted the map and the compass to Pietro, under the impression that he was
au fait
with how to use them, that I discovered that he wasn’t. He took the wrong ridge. One could hardly blame him.

From Monte Fosco, 1683 metres, to Monte Tavola, 1604 metres, the going was the toughest of the entire trip, by way of something the maps called I Ronchi di Luciano, whatever that was, through a dense forest of beech. There was no track through the forest at all. The only way to pass through it without being lost was to follow what remained of a rusty wire fence which sometimes ceased to exist altogether.

From here onwards there was another difficult section through more of these sodden sodding beech woods to the Passo di Cirone, 1255 metres, which linked Bosco on the Parma side with Pracchiola, a beautiful Alpine village on the Pontremoli side of the
crinale
.

The rest was easy, mostly a switchback over downland dotted with trees, but with heavy rain and nil visibility, to the Passo della Cisa, 1039 metres, with the road from Parma to Pontremoli crossing it, a route followed by Hannibal.

At the Cisa we got a lift to Pontremoli and squelching in through the main gate to where Wanda was waiting for us we made a rather sorry spectacle.

‘I was worried,’ were Wanda’s first words when we arrived at the
ristorante
where she had been waiting a couple of hours. ‘
Anche noi’
Pietro said. ‘We also.’

After that I did a number of walks on the
crinale
on various parts of it, one of them alone, but I never again encountered such conditions.

Our nearest town besides Fosdinovo was Sarzana and we often travelled there on the bus, which was the means by which various ladies, such as Signora Fernanda, conveyed their produce to the market there. Sarzana succeeded Luni, after its destruction and abandonment, as the principal city of the plain and it was then known as Luna Nova.

Originally a possession of the Bishops of Luni, in 1204 they transferred themselves to Sarzana where they exercised their temporal power until 1308. It then became a bone of contention between Pisans who were the first to fortify it, Luccans, Florentines, it was Lorenzo the Magnificent who ordered the building of the present citadel and walls, the Viscontis, the French and the Genoese, and involved matters of such complexity that it would be tedious to attempt to enlarge on them here.

Sarzana was the birthplace of the humanist pope, Nicholas V, originally Tommaso Parentucelli, who reigned from 1447 to 1455 and in 1450–1 established Glasgow University by Papal Bull. He also organized a crusade against the Turks after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and acted as an international arbiter when he conferred on Portugal the discoveries made by Henry the Navigator. There was a statue of him on the façade of the cathedral,
a position which he shared with two other popes, S. Eutichianus and Sergius IV.

The way into Sarzana, that was if you didn’t arrive by way of Attilio’s back road, or by bus, was through a splendid ornamental gateway, made in the fifteenth-century walls of the town in 1783. Once inside it, the Via Mazzini, the principal street, led to the first of the three largest squares, the Piazza Garibaldi, where there was an elegant, early nineteenth-century theatre, the Teatro degli Impavidi (the Fearless), now used as a cinema. At the opposite end of it, where a tree-lined road led down to the railway station and the fruit and vegetable market, there was a huge, nude Carrara marble statue of a man, of vaguely Fascist inspiration, that must have weighed several tons.

Continuing on down Via Mazzini the shops, as the years passed, became progressively more elegant, and we always wondered who actually bought the clothes that were on sale as we never saw anyone wearing them. Certainly no one would ever dream of wearing such garments up the hill at Fosdinovo. What was even more surprising in later years was the proliferation of shops selling chocolates, expensive pastries and eventually luxurious foreign foods, caviar, foie gras, Scotch smoked salmon, and the costliest French wines such as Romanée Conti, Krug and Château d’Yquem. I sometimes wondered what Signor Giuseppe would make of a bottle of Romanée Conti.

A short distance further on, on the right, Via Mazzini opened up in Piazza Nicolò V to display the brilliantly white Gothic Cattedrale di S. Maria Assunta, begun in 1340, which then took another 134 years to complete. High up in it, there was a crucifix brought to it from Luni in 1204, painted and signed by the artist, Maestro Guglielmo. And nearby, in the twelfth-century church of San Francesco there was the tomb of Guarniero Antelminelli, son of the omnipresent Castruccio Castracani, erected in 1328.

Continuing on past various
palazzi
, the names of which made I Castagni sound pretty homely, such as Palazzo Piceddi-Benettini and Palazzo Magni-Griffi, whoever they were, we used to pass S. Andrea, the oldest church, first recorded in 1135, with a tall campanile soaring over it. Soon after this Via Mazzini came to an end on the corner of the tree-lined Piazza Matteotti with a huge First World War memorial taking up a lot of space at the lower end where the Palazzo Municipale was, which also took more than eighty years to build, from 1472 to 1554. At this corner there was Sarzana’s poshest
caffè
in which some of the older, more elegant, slightly grizzled Sarzanesi used to lounge around with camel-hair coats slung insouciantly over their shoulders in the cold weather, reading the papers and indulging in various other cultural works, such as smoking Dunhill pipes.

Behind this square in an old, decrepit part of the town, there were ground-floor rooms crammed with junk, a lot of it ironwork, in which Wanda made some interesting finds, that was until richer, more sophisticated
antiquari
from Lucca moved in and it became impossible to buy anything at a reasonable price.

Market day in Sarzana was Thursday. The market took up every inch of space in Piazza Garibaldi, Piazza Matteotti, and the surrounding streets. It was not a very interesting market, apart from being a large one, but everyone, including ourselves, used to go to it, just in case we missed something worth having but nothing even faintly interesting, apart from food, ever turned up.

What we really looked forward to was going to a pizzeria which had an enormous oven and eating pizza and
focaccia
, a delicious sort of flat bread baked and eaten with olive oil, and drinking the rough wine that was all the proprietors had to offer.

And there was Carrara, ruled by the Malaspina, as was Massa for some 317 years from 1473 until 1790, situated at the feet of the
great cliffs of the Apuan Alps in which the marble quarries were. Carrara was not only the place where the Mafia and the Camorra ordered their tombstones and sculptors such as Henry Moore chose their materials. It was and is still famous as being the headquarters of the anarchists of the world, could it be because there was so much high explosive lying around? Every year they used to arrive here from all over the world for great get-togethers which were usually of a surprisingly mild kind.

Sometimes, well into the twentieth century, the blocks of marble, having been roughly squared off on the spot, were simply rolled down the mountainside; but usually they were lowered down a series of paved slipways on wooden sledges, which ran on soaped wooden rollers, their descent controlled by cables wound round posts on either side of the slipways. This was an extremely hazardous business. At the bottom, the blocks were loaded on to ox-wagons and carried off either to the ships at Marina di Massa, or to the railway.

One of the largest of these monoliths quarried at Carrara, perhaps the largest, was 17 metres high, 2.35 metres thick and weighed 300 tons. It was subsequently erected in the Foro Italico, previously the Foro alla Farnesiana, in Rome in 1929.

During our twenty-five years at I Castagni we had innumerable guests. Among the most welcome were those who had been prisoners-of-war in Italy. One of these, Tony Davies, had made a spectacular escape together with another POW, jumping from a train at night while it was on the move, a dangerous thing to do.

He had recently suffered a coronary but in spite of this he succeeded, while staying with us, in climbing the Monte Malpasso, the 1716-metre peak on the
crinale
, along which, almost thirty years earlier, he had walked all the way to the battle front, only to be wounded and re-captured in sight of the Allied front line.

It was unfortunate for his wife, who was terrified of snakes, that the mountainside was infested with adders. Since birds of prey had been for the most part eliminated from the Italian countryside by the
cacciatori
, they had proliferated. Now they literally rose up around her, and around the rest of us – we were not all that happy about them either – and she begged us to order a helicopter to take her off the mountain, a service which we were unable to provide.

One of the things we used to look forward to when we were at I Castagni, especially when our children and friends were staying with us, was to travel to Lucca by train.

This rather amazing railway ran from Aulla on the Magra to Lucca, on the way crossing the watershed which separates the Apennines and the Apuan Alps. This line was not finally completed until some time in the early 1960s, by which time in Britain the diabolical Doctor, later Baron Beeching, was proposing the closure of 5000 miles of track, 2000 stations and the dismissal of 70,000 staff, a target he very nearly reached, and would have done, if there had not been a change of government.

To reach one of the numerous stations on this railway, some at a distance of not more than three or four kilometres from one another, we used to drive from Fosdinovo over the Foce il Cuccù and then descend by winding roads which ran through groves of chestnuts and olives, vineyards and small villages such as Tendola, San Terenzo and Ceserano to Rometta, a small place on the far bank of the Aulella, a torrent which feeds the Magra, in which the washing used to hang flapping in the wind like flags. Here we used to leave our vehicle outside the station which was called Stazione Fivizzano – Rometta – Soliera, because these were the
principal places which it served, and there at Rometta, we used to buy our return tickets.

Altogether there were about ten trains a day between Aulla and Lucca, the distance was about 90 kilometres, and the journey took 1 hour 45 minutes, but if you boarded the train at Rometta it took about an hour and a half and was about 10 kilometres shorter.
^*

Sometimes we left I Castagni an hour or so earlier so that we could visit Fivizzano, a town eight kilometres from Rometta up the valley of the Torrente Rosaro.

Fivizzano was a strange place. Built on a spur of Monte Tergogliano, more than a thousand feet up, until the beginning of the twelfth century its defence was the responsibility of whoever occupied the Castello di Verrucola, an impressive fortress that looked down on the village of the same name and on Fivizzano itself a couple of hundred feet below.

For the next six hundred years or so the inhabitants of Fivizzano seem to have had an awful time of it. In 1317 the town was badly knocked about by the troops of the
condottiero
Castruccio Castracani who appears to have wreaked havoc wherever and whenever he came on the scene. It then fell into the hands of the Malaspina and in 1430 it was taken by another noted
condottiero
, Piccinino. Almost everyone who arrived at Fivizzano succeeded in damaging it, more or less seriously.

In 1433 Cosimo de’ Medici, Cosimo the Elder, built the present walls and used Fivizzano as a base from which to conduct a war against the Republic of Lucca. Extensive damage was caused to it by Charles VIII of France when he entered Italy at the head of an army in 1494. Damage was again done to the town by the troops of the Marchese del Vasto in the sixteenth century, by an earthquake in 1920, and in the Second World War.

The piazza in the centre of what is left of old Fivizzano is entered through a grand archway, and a large part of it is taken up by a splendid fountain erected by Cosimo III in 1683. In it there also stands an elegant sanctuary of 1576, one of the buildings badly shaken by the earthquake but now restored. There is also an
albergo/ristorante
, Il Giardinetto, and an old-fashioned
caffè
, which at that time had potted plants in its front window and was always packed with male customers whatever the time of day.

Outside, at what, when we came here before the train left, was an early hour, the streets were more or less deserted. If it was early in the year Fivizzano was a cold place, and if you turned right after emerging from the
caffè
, having drunk a
rhum caldo
, you found yourself in a street in which the wind always seemed to be whistling straight down it off the Apennines at the Passo di Lagastrello which in early spring were often covered in snow.

In this street, on the right-hand side there was a building which housed a fantastic collection of ecclesiastical bric-à-brac: candelabra still wreathed in what looked like original spiders’ webs, worm-eaten pews, life-size saints in glass cases, pulpits, spooky-looking reliquaries with bits of what had been human beings in them, altar pieces, crumbling bibles and missals, all objects taken from churches that were, one could only hope, no more, and all for sale.

The business was owned by an elderly man who always followed us around to make sure that none of us made off with a reliquary containing a toenail that once belonged to some early Christian martyr, or some such treasure.

He was also an undertaker, an
impresario di pompe funebri
was his correct title, and he had a grandson of about twelve who, he told us, was learning the business, embalming and suchlike, in the holidays and in the evenings when he had finished his homework. A nice hobby for a schoolboy.

The coffins, of which there were dozens, were painted jet-black and were built to last a lifetime, with solid brass handles. The coffins were kept hidden behind long black draperies and sometimes when the double doors on to the street were opened, a sudden gust of wind would part them and display this ghastly collection. Then the old man would become annoyed, as he liked to keep his other interests as a purveyor of religious bric-à-brac separate from that of an
impresario di pompe funebri
in which the supply of coffins appeared to be running in excess of demand (Fivizzano only had 1469 inhabitants at the last count in 1959 and the numbers were still shrinking). What the
impresario
really needed was a re-run of the Black Death.

Further up this street, on the left, there was an almost equally remarkable establishment, a men’s outfitters crammed with hundreds of pairs of trousers, mostly made from synthetic material in the style of the 1950s, with shirts to match, all presided over by a rather grumpy, middle-aged man – living in Fivizzano seemed to make people bad-tempered – who stood in the far corner of the shop, waiting for buyers who never came.

How he himself came into possession of such a quantity of unsaleable clothing was a mystery. The travelling salesman who had succeeded in landing him with them must have been possessed of exceptional powers. Perhaps he had been the travelling salesman.

In order to ingratiate myself with him I eventually bought a pair of his trousers which were surprisingly expensive, considering the horrible material in which they were constructed and the number of years he must have had them in stock. Like antiques they appeared to increase in value with age. They also had the terrible, ineradicable defect of being, as tailors say, ‘cut too high in the rise’, which gives the wearer the impression that his private parts are dragging along the ground.

But in spite of my efforts to drum up some trade it was no
use. He still found my presence just as irritating as if I hadn’t bought anything. All he was interested in was a complete clearance – and the next time we went to visit him he locked the door in our faces. The time after that neither he nor his stock was there any more and we were told he was
defunto
. Perhaps he is buried somewhere on the southern slopes of the Apennines under a huge pile of trousers.

Back at the station, we waited for the train. For a long time, from the moment it left Aulla, we could hear it howling as it came, with the driver of what was now, in the second half of the twentieth century, a diesel engine pulling out the stops on what was the equivalent of an old-fashioned train whistle, which now sounded as if someone was being conveyed by ambulance to a casualty ward.

When it came in – Stazione Fivizzano – Rometta – Soleria was the first stop – we leapt aboard, clutching the baskets which contained our
merenda
and which, later, empty by this time, we would use for our shopping in Lucca. Then the stationmaster, or sometimes his wife if he was elsewhere, waved a baton at the driver and we were off. All three of them liked us to make use of their train, especially at this off-peak time of day when any workers who used it were long since at work and no one was due to travel in the other direction for hours yet. By doing so we became a statistic in favour of the continuation of the service which, if some Italian version of Beeching appeared on the scene, could be very uncertain. In fact no such reformer did appear and, at the time of writing, the service continues. Altogether, besides ourselves, there were not usually more than half a dozen passengers on the train at any one time, except on the return journey and in the school summer holidays, which in Italy go on for ever.

But it was more fun when there were other locals on board. Then we could talk about the weather if it merited it, the crops,
the prospects for the
vendemmia
and always, never forgetting, the State of Italy.

Now the train entered a short tunnel and emerged from it to cross the Aulella. The countryside was beautiful as it was everywhere all along the line, with little villages and towers and castles and churches perched on hills and crags, and vines and olives and cypresses and chestnuts flourishing, and there were farmhouses down near the line with peasants working in the shade of the trees and the
pergole
, just as they would be at this time of day around I Castagni on the other side of the mountains; and when we waved to them they waved back. And there were pastoral scenes that resembled paintings by Claude or Poussin, and some of them were almost as good.

It was difficult looking out at such scenes to believe that in this area, in August 1944, the SS had massacred 369 persons, mostly women and children, some of them in the villages we had passed through on the way from Fosdinovo to the station, and destroyed a total of 454 houses, as a reprisal for attacks on the 16th Reichsführer Division. And that in the course of this operation the entire family of Renato, our bricklayer – father, mother, brothers and sisters – were all murdered, he, then a small boy, being the only survivor.

Here we went through a short tunnel and looming overhead now, their high peaks hidden in a dark blue indigo haze which only allowed us to see their outline indistinctly, were the Apuan Alps. Now, having crossed the Aulella, the train abandoned it and began to punch its way up the valley of another torrent, the Lucido.

Meanwhile we sat, weather permitting with the windows open, eating our
merenda
of bread and
prosciutto
and drinking our red wine. If there were any other
contadini
sitting close to us on the train, custom demanded that we should offer to share our picnic with them –
‘Vuol favorire?’
– and if they had any food that they
were going to eat on the journey, they would offer it to us; but such offers were not really expected to be accepted, and seldom were. Quite often it rained and there was a thick fog and the whole scene looked like a wet day in Ballachulish, but it was with the heat and the sun and the blue indigo haze that we both like to remember it.

After seventeen kilometres – you could tell how far you had come by looking out of the window and consulting the kilometre stones – we reached Stazione Monzone – Monte Bianchi – Isolano, and then at twenty kilometres the station for Équi Terme. Équi Terme was at that time a wonderfully dotty and primitive spa. Much patronized by local people it stood on the banks of the Lucido, in which there was usually very little water, unless the snow was melting up in the Alps, or there had been a storm. The old baths, which were probably in use in Roman times, were at the foot of a cliff on the far bank. Its waters, which were terribly smelly, were laced with
cloruro solfato-sodico
, what sounded a nasty mixture of chlorine, sulphur and sodium, and it first emerged from the bowels of the earth, so far as we could ascertain after digging about in it, a short way up the torrent, staining everything it came in touch with in various virulent shades of yellow.

The Terme had a very nice, modest, old-fashioned, slightly Firbankian hotel, the Albergo Radium, which had some good nineteenth-century furniture, and was open from 15 May to 15 October, by which date it was pretty empty.

According to the prospectus, obtainable from the Albergo, these waters could be bathed in, inhaled, used for irrigational purposes or even drunk and were said to be
‘efficace nei reumatismi, malattie cutanee, adenoidismo, asma e nelle affezioni ginecologiche’,
and certainly some of the customers looked as if they might well be suffering from some or all of these complaints, which made us unwilling to join them in the pool. So whenever we visited it, and
it was a fascinating place, we steeled ourselves to drink a glass of the beverage which was so horrible that we both felt that it must have been doing us good.

From the Terme a rough road led up past marble-sawing plants to the quarries at the foot of the Pizzo d’Uccello, a 1781-metre peak, otherwise known as Il Cervino dell’Apuane – the Apuan Matterhorn. Another road with something like fifteen bends in it in less than a mile led up, from Stazione Monte Bianchi at seventeen kilometres, through wild mountainous country to the mining village of Vinca, one of the loneliest in the entire massif. From it we climbed the Pizzo d’Uccello in about an hour and a half. It was worth it.

Then, at around twenty-two kilometres from Aulla, the train entered a twenty-kilometre-long tunnel and began to burrow its way under the ridge which joins the Apuan Alps to the Apennines. This ridge also forms the watershed between the Aulella, which flows westward to join the Magra at Aulla, and the Serchio, which flows down (when it flows at all) into the region known as the Garfagnana, past Lucca and then into the Ligurian Sea. From Piazza al Serchio, at a height of 494 metres the highest on the entire railway, it was downhill all the way by the river valley to Lucca, through countryside with dozens of churches hidden away in it, many of them crammed with valuable statuary, paintings and crucifixes, some of them magnificent, some since stolen, what remained of what must have been until 1944, when the Garfagnana formed part of the Gothic Line, an unimaginably rich store of religious art, all awaiting a visit from the
impresario di pompe funebri
at Fivizzano, that is if he hadn’t long since already been there.