Donovan’s World

As I worked I speculated about the fate of its owners. Were any of them killed? Did the survivors still live in the area? And I wondered how long this wreck would last before it was finally demolished. Italy is a country of earthquakes and ancient buildings. It’s a wonder so many of the historical centres have lasted so long.

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz

Last night an ancient thunder banged and rumbled over the hills of Barga. An intimidating, bullying tempest, it whipped the heavens and the chestnut glades like a mediaeval landowner reminding his subjects of their vassalage. By dawn the overlord had quieted and withdrawn to observe an uneasy peace. Throughout the day, the sky has been heavy with threat; strange perfumes have arisen on the humid air; scents of rich earth and floral decay ; fecund seductions of early summer.

Hannibal

School history left me believing that the Roman army was invincible; so far advanced in weapons and technique that, until the decline and fall of the Empire and its slow retraction into its heartlands while the jackal longbeards and skinheads nibbled its extremities and turned out the lights to start the Dark Ages, it never lost a battle. A romantic notion, of course, and one easily shot to pieces by a cursory examination of the record, but sufficiently embedded in me for Hannibal’s victory at Lake Trasimeno to be astonishing.

© DON DONOVAN

From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

Sommocolonia is a very old Roman village, the name derived from Latin, meaning ‘high colony’.

Past the ruins of one of two 16th century towers I spend a happy half hour sitting on a hillside with my feet buried in buttercups doing a little watercolour of some tall houses which grow from the lower road and whose roofs are at eye level. The joy of drawing these assymetrical buildings is that the textures of their walls are so varied: brick patches through cracking plaster with clumps of flowers or grasses growing from trapped soil held in mortar lines; or rubbled stone, chalked with swallows’ droppings and ochreous lichens; and windows set at odd angles in seamed frames that haven’t seen paint since the great flood.

© DON DONOVAN

From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

Mounted on a wall across the piazza of Castelnuovo a fat, street-stained, bronze cherub gazes benignly over the shoppers. Ideally, to photograph him, I should have the camera on the tripod but that’s impossible with the amount of passing traffic so I walk out to where the pedestrians end and the traffic begins and as I raise the camera a small blue Alfa-Romeo with ‘Polizia’ on its side stops beside me, blocking the traffic. I lower the camera and look at the driver, a young policeman who gives me a knowing half smile as, from the passenger’s seat, a stout officer emerges. He is gorgeous; a cockerel in blue with scarlet trim adorned by shiny buttons, medal ribbons and embroidered badges. In one hand he carries a pair of white kid gloves which he slaps across the palm of the other as he approaches.

I return to the side of the square to appraising stares: who is this straniero that he has so much influence with the capo di tutti polizia di Castelnuovo di Garfagnana?

© DON DONOVAN

From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

No. 2 Via Della Chiesa is an unusual four-storeyed triangular building in Bagni di Lucca. The façade at the sharpest point of its triangle is comprised of three wedding cake tiers of pompous Corinthian columns topped by an open, eagle’s nest balcony adorned with plant pots of scarlet and pink geraniums. Once washed a mustard orange-yellow it’s now peeling with neglect and is filthy from diesel fumes. Two grimy marble plaques are inset into its walls. The first, installed in September 1974, commemorates the imprisonment and torture here of patriots by ‘Nazi Fascists’ during the second world war. One comes up short imagining the screams that would once have emanated from the shuttered basement windows…

I am intrigued by the words ‘Nazi Fascists’. European union demands that old enmities be set aside and that those who were once oppressed by Germany should avoid direct criticism of the German people. So, on war memorials, ‘Nazi’ is the politically correct word that describes the oppressors, neatly avoiding giving offence while leaving older Germans to decide whether or not any blame attaches to them for past atrocities. I first came across this form of tombstone diplomacy at Echternach, a small border town in Luxembourg, separated from Germany by a narrow river. German tanks had rolled across Echternach’s mediaeval stone bridge to invade Luxembourg early in the war and the town’s subsequent liberation ‘from the Nazi invaders’ by American forces in 1945 is recorded on a memorial plaque in the town. Clearly the Italians as well as the Luxembourgeois have taken the polite route when it comes to memorial texts.

… the second tablet records that in this building lived ‘Ouida’, Louise de la Ramée, ‘scrittrice Inglesi amante del’ Italia, amica degli animali qui dimoro negli anni 1904-1905’ which, I think, means that she was an English writer, lover of Italy and friend to animals.

Marie Louise de la Ramée was known as ‘Ouida’ because that was how she pronounced ‘Louise’ when she was a child. She wrote forty-five novels and was sixty-six when she died in 1908. I wonder what life was like here for those English litterati some of whom finished up in the neglected English cemetery up the road? I think the Italians took them to their hearts - otherwise why would they record ‘Ouida’s’ stay in their town with as much prominence as the torture of patriots by the ‘Nazi Fascists’?

From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

© DON DONOVAN

Bagni di Lucca in Tuscany’s middle Serchio valley, moulded by the confining, forested hills either side of the Lima River is a town of gracious villas, spas, hotels and slab sided houses three or four storeys high whose walls plunge like pastel cliffs to the stony river bed.

‘The Baths of Lucca’ where mineral-rich hot springs well out of the rock, have been used for therapy and luxury since Roman times. Emperor Frederick I praised the town in 1245, I guess he wallowed in one of the pools for the gout or poxy pustules that had been wished upon him by Pope Gregory IX to go with his excommunication. He must have been a bit of a lad, Fred, because he not only became Emperor of the Germans at age two, and King of Sicily at three, he also managed, in his fifty-six years (during which he earned the title ‘Stupor Mundi’ - Wonder of the World) to get himself crowned King of Jerusalem and throw all Italy into turmoil when he made war on a couple of popes. He lost, and his family, the Hohenstaufens, went into an irretrievable decline.

When Fred took the waters in the thirteenth century the road up the Serchio Valley was probably just a mule track so I guess the hot pools were mostly used by the locals; but Napoleon’s sister, who also liked a wallow, had a decent road made from Lucca in 1805 and started the town’s tourist boom.

In a shaft of sunlight that illuminates the soup plate leaves of the plane trees we see four young nuns walking briskly, in step, two by two, jolly, waving their arms in conversation like something out of ‘The Sound of Music’. You don’t see nuns much these days, let alone young ones. They look beautiful; pink, virginal faces trapped in black and white frames. I wish I could stop the car and photograph them - but I’d never ask, I’d make a terrible paparrazzo!

There’s always a key shot to illustrate an article; as Bagni di Lucca is a river town it’s a view upstream from the main traffic bridge, Ponte di Castruccio. Nearby there’s a café, where Pat says she’ll be happy to sit under a sun umbrella and drink cappuccino while I go over to the bridge and set up the camera and tripod. Just as I frame the picture the sun shuts off so I have to wait. I hear a warbly whistling and looking below and to one side I see on the balcony of one of the houses an ugly looking fellow with a wall eye and tattoos trying to attract my attention. Behind him an old, black-clad woman sits in a rocking chair, her eyes closed like a basking cat. Whistler’s mother.

He shouts to me but I can’t hear him for the noise of traffic over the bridge. I shout back ‘No parlo bene, Italiano. Sono da la Nuova Zelande’ but he goes on chattering away, mostly inaudibly, and making gestures, then he asks me if I’m German.

‘Tedesco?’

‘Si, Australiano.’ That’ll do, thank God for Sydney Harbour Bridge.

From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

© DON DONOVAN

A distant clanking noise. A herd of goats is coming up the mule road behind Chiesetta. I dash for my camera and as I emerge from the green gate there they are, a foraging platoon coming over a rise in the path, hesitantly trotting forward, stopping to eat foliage, then darting forward again. The leader, an old billy with a curling beard is condemned to live his life with the clank of that black bell below his throat.

The goat herd in black baggy trousers held by a thick leather belt with an enormous brass buckle emerges through the back-lit silvery dust raised from days of aridity. He wears a striped, collarless shirt and his face is weather worn with black-tufted, rouge-pink cheeks. I hold my camera up and call out to him above the goats ‘Okay?’.

He points at the camera and himself ‘Me?’.

‘Si, si, okay?’ I ask again.

His face breaks into a gappy grin as he nods his permission. I photograph him and his goats as they approach to fill the frame, then surround me, then move beyond me towards Renaio and summer grazing on the Appenine slopes. I’ve shot 36 exposures; delighted. Now that’s something you’d never see in New Zealand.

 
From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

© DON DONOVAN

Fiesole is a hill town eight kilometres north of Florence where the familia Medici used to weekend away from the vengeful Savonarola and the smelly proletariat. Driving up the wide curves of the Via San Domenico past stately houses in terraced grounds I can feel the air clearing and see clarity emerging as the sunlight penetrates the thinning filter of Florence’s air. It gets prettier: the sloping green fields on either side silvered and shimmering with olive groves. Fiesole is older than Florence. It was founded by the Etruscans, who seem to me to have had it all over the Romans but don’t get quite as positive a historical spin.

In the plane-bordered, sun-beaten, sloping square there is one of the nicest statues I’ve yet seen of the much memorialized Garibaldi. On horseback in this 1906 monument he’s in expansive mood, greeting and meeting King Victor Emmanuel II at Teano, north of Naples, in 1860. They’re a genial pair, it must have been a great encounter for them: Garibaldi had conquered Sicily and Naples and presented Vittorio Emanuele with half of the kingdom which would come fully into being in 1870 when Italy, ending fifty years of risorgimento, became unified.

In the Zona Archeológica are the excavations of the Roman theatre where a guide tries to summon up the past to a group of visitors seated on the auditorium’s curved stones. I wonder how much history seeps up through their bottoms from the grey granite that must have supported thousands of others in its time? Beyond are the Roman baths and earlier, Etruscan, remains of a third century BC temple. Notwithstanding the age of the remnants I feel no ghosts here, just a pleasant park to walk in; but I’m grateful for Fiesole, it lifts my spirits after the miasma of Florence.

From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

© DON DONOVAN