A Small Place in Italy (19 page)

Then, after a seven-and-a-half-kilometre ride through the Luparino Tunnel we emerged into the wide plain in which Lucca stands, where the line made a wide bend round the eastern ramparts of the city to arrive at the central station some eighty
kilometres out from Fivizzano – Rometta – Soliera, what now seemed a long time ago.

What did we find after our journey through Lunigiana and the Garfagnana when the train deposited us at the central station in Piazza Ricasoli in Lucca? A walled city standing in what, up to a short time previously, when it was relentlessly built over, had been an open plain, separated from Pisa, its great rival, by a densely wooded hill, the Monte Pisano.

The principal wonders of Lucca were its walls, of which there had been three different sets. The first walls were Roman. They were about thirty feet high and the limestone employed to build them was delivered to the site hewn into cyclopean blocks. Another Roman wonder was and is an immense oval amphitheatre, built with similar blocks, and these walls were honeycombed with minute troglodytic dwellings, whose inhabitants looked down from them into the interior of the amphitheatre, which at that time housed the fruit and vegetable market.

The building of the mediaeval walls was begun in 1260. They endured until 1504 when they were razed to the ground. Work then began on the third and most complex set of walls which took 141 years to complete.

When completed they were almost three miles in circumference and consisted of eleven curtain walls, thirty-nine feet high, built with masonry and faced with six million bricks.

What about the inhabitants; what did we make of them? Well, the truth is, even after twenty-five years or so, not very much. They kept their cards close to their chests and bosoms, the Lucchesi. You would have to live among them, something I have always wanted to do, but not for ever. Nevertheless, together with Parma, Lucca remained our favourite city in Italy.

All we knew about them, the Lucchesi, was as much quoted as
the piece about Petra, ‘a rose-red city half as old as time’, to the effect that it took twelve Jews to make a Genovese, twelve Genovesi to make a Biellese, and twelve Biellesi to make one Lucchese.

According to the presumably non-Lucchesi Italians who spread this
canard
around, it implied that they were exceptionally energetic, very able in business, cool, if not downright cold, calm, self-possessed and parsimonious. In fact as near as any of them could come to being facsimiles of Veneziani without having plastic surgery done on their noses.

However, down there for the day to have a good meal and window shop for an obelisk, which were only two of the things you could do with pleasure in Lucca, we were about as likely to encounter anyone prepared to do his or her Lucchese act for our benefit as we would be to meet up with a Scotsman counting his bawbees on the streets of Aberdeen. Probably the only way of finding out what they were really like would have been to cast ourselves into the Fossa Cunetta, the moat that surrounded the city, and see if any of them attempted to save us from drowning, that is if there was any water in it at the time.

What the Lucchesi undoubtedly were, and always had been, was square as coffee tables. They were also lovers of independence, provided that it existed within some kind of recognizable, democratic, non-egalitarian framework. Just like the Veneziani, they too were used to being members of a republic, and they too had preserved their character, or rather their multiple personalities, for similar reasons. They disliked being pushed about, and having their trade interfered with, and they were able to isolate themselves from the outside world when they needed to do so, although with walls rather than with water and raw sewage as the Veneziani had succeeded in doing.

Until the early part of the fourteenth century they had been put upon by a succession of tyrants, a few of them able, most of
them nasty. In 1369 they bought their freedom from the Pisans at a cost of 100,000 florins, a transaction which, given the value of the florin at that time, and their attitude to money, must have caused them some heart-searching.

After that, apart from thirty years from 1400 to 1430 of absolute rule under Paolo Guinigi, a rich, cultivated humanist, in the course of which art and literature flourished, they maintained their republican independence.

In 1809 Napoleon gave Lucca, together with Massa Carrara, as a principality, to his sister, Elisa Baciocchi, known as the ‘Semiramis of Lucca’, one of whose claims to fame was that, having hastened back to Lucca when it was invested by a flood, she had herself hoisted over the walls into the city by a crane.

Down in the city, below the ramparts, in the narrow streets there were shopfronts as black and shiny as the coffins in the
pompe funebri
at Fivizzano, some of them in what Italians call
Stile Liberty
and some call
Art Nouveau
, and the Lucchesi, shopkeepers male and female, and men of business, lived much as they always had. Once they were bankers and merchants who travelled widely. Some used to traffic in woollen goods and olive oil; others in superb silks, a manufactory introduced from Sicily in the fourteenth century. These silks, many of them used for furnishing and curtains, were gorgeously dyed in blues and strawberry pinks and imperial yellows, and they were embellished with beautiful, multicoloured ribbons which were still being woven on a set of looms in the city when we first went there, and may be still.

And there were numbers of impossibly expensive antique shops whose owners, quintessential Lucchesi, would mail you one of those aforementioned
obelischi
, or a
sarcofago
, at the drop of a traveller’s cheque.

But what really kept Lucca going, and able to retain her self-assumed title as Lucca l’Industriosa, were small industries which,
hidden away in the surrounding countryside, produced anything from fly-fishing rods to moccasins. Agriculture was also important. There was still a big business in fruit, wine and olive oil, the best of which was already difficult to find and was very expensive.

This was still one of the great rural centres of northern Tuscany and here, in Borgo Giannotti, a road that led to the cattle and horse markets outside the walls, you could buy articles from a pre-plastic age: wooden hay rakes, with a handle and tines that together formed part, before they were cut, of a single tree that had been grown in the form of a hay rake, forks that are still being made; big green umbrellas, made from waxed canvas with handles painted red that stained your hands for the first few years after you bought them, widely used by
contadini
working in the fields; bill hooks of all shapes and sizes; brooms, made with twigs, that looked as if they were intended to be ridden by witches, others made from the stalks of the millet, a sort which almost every Italian housewife possessed;
preti
; copper and terracotta cooking pots; chairs with rush seats, some of them for children with a trap door and a secret place underneath which concealed a
vaso da notte
.

Eventually, once it got out of the environs, Borgo Giannotti became the main road to Bagni di Lucca, known in the tenth century as Bagni di Corsena. Its springs, which contained salt and sulphur and varied in temperature between warm 39°C and downright hot 54°C, were to be found in several small villages in the valley of the Lima, a tributary of the Serchio. Back in the nineteenth century, and long before that, they enjoyed a great vogue, especially among the English, and later the Americans. Montaigne, Lamartine, Byron, Shelley, Mary Godwin, Heine and Elizabeth Browning took the waters here; but not all at once. The first recorded royal visit was that of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen in 1248 or 9, which scared the
inhabitants stiff. In the 1900s there was a whole clutch of luxury hotels in Bagni di Lucca that are now no more.

And in the English cemetery (there was also an English church served by a chaplain from Pisa and an English chemist) there was the grave of Ouida, otherwise Marie Louise de la Ramé, the bestselling novelist who spent most of her working life in Florence and died in Viareggio in poverty in 1908, covered with a recumbent Carrara marble effigy of the writer with a dog at her feet. It was Ouida who was reputed to have written, when describing a race at Henley Regatta: ‘All rowed fast but none rowed faster than stroke.’

After eating in Lucca, usually in a restaurant called Da Giulio in Pelleria, we used to climb up on to the ramparts and flake out in the shade on what was known as the Cerchio Arborato, the Arboreal Circle, the enfilades of great plane trees that lined them.

The view inwards over the city from the walls was more rewarding. From this dizzy height of thirty-nine feet you could look down into people’s back gardens, a rather good one being the secret garden of the seventeenth-century Palazzo Pfanner, and look out over the rooftops of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other
palazzi
, and overhead lift your eyes and look up at towers and belfries so numerous that it was rather like looking out across a forest of giant, fossilized trees. One of these towers actually had a small grove of ilex sprouting from the top of it.

However, most of the towers were those of churches; and almost all of them were difficult, if not impossible to get into because they had long since ceased to be churches, and no one knew where the keys were anyway. In fact we never met anyone who had the slightest idea how many churches there were or had been in Lucca.

The Cathedral of St Martino (sixth century) had works by Lucca’s greatest sculptor, Matteo Civitali, displayed in it. One of these, his masterpiece, was an octagonal chapel, Il Tempietto, built in 1484 to house
Il Volto Santo
, the Holy Countenance, a
simulacrum of Christ at Calvary by St Nicodemus, who is said to have witnessed the crucifixion.

This image, which is kept in the chapel, together with a solid gold candelabrum weighing twenty-six pounds (presented by the inhabitants in 1836, in order to avert an onset of cholera), is in fact a beautiful and very moving cedar wood crucifix of the eleventh or twelfth century, with the likeness on it, and may be a copy of an earlier one.

According to legend the image was put to sea on the shores of the Holy Land in a vessel without a crew or any means of propulsion, either oars or sails, by Guifredo, an Italian bishop, while on pilgrimage there and in 842 it grounded at Luni.

Once they discovered it the Lunesi, not unnaturally, claimed it for themselves. However, the Lucchesi, even at that early date already living up to their reputation for smartness, said that the Bishop of Lucca had already dreamt of its imminent arrival, which therefore gave Lucca a prior claim to it. And the matter was decided beyond question when the Bishop ordered two bullocks to be yoked to a driverless cart with the crucifix in it at the place where it had come ashore. This having been done, without hesitation, the animals set off for Lucca.

These miraculous happenings are remembered each year on 13 September when the procession known as La Luminara takes place. In the course of it the
Volto Santo
, clad in the
colobrium
, a long Gothic shirt worked in gold, is carried through the streets of the city which are illuminated by thousands of candles.

In some of these narrow streets in Lucca the dwellings on the ground floors were like dark caverns, in which very old ladies, also in deepest black, used to sit hour after hour making lace or crocheting, so that all one could see of them were their skeletal white hands working the whiter than white material, and their white, lined faces, like an under-exposed photograph in black and white.

Up to now anyone reading this book may be excused for thinking that the picture I have been endeavouring to paint of our life at I Castagni is an altogether too arcadian one and the characters who have been depicted are altogether too good to be true. It was some time in the early 1970s that a cloud at first no larger than a man’s hand appeared on the horizon, in reality considerably larger than a man’s hand, in the form of Arturo Baldini, a farmer who was to have a baleful influence on our lives for many years to come.

He owned a property some distance up the hill from I Castagni and just like a number of other farming families, such as the Dadà, he had a number of outlying fields, one of which, a large
vigneto
he had planted some three years previously, overlooked our property on one side.

Arturo also owned the barn downhill from our house to the west which was such a fine feature in the landscape, and behind which the sun used to set so spectacularly. This was the building we had been so keen to buy in order to prevent it being knocked down at some time in the future and rebuilt as a modern house, which was a highly probable fate for it, given the sort of local authorities which held sway in these parts. At the time Signor Vescovo was negotiating the purchase of I Castagni on our behalf
he told us that Arturo was adamant about not selling it, and the mere thought of trying to buy two different properties belonging to two different owners at the same time, one as indecisive as Signor Botti and another, Signor Baldini, an unknown quantity, was quite sufficient to stop us pursuing the matter further, at least for the time being.

In fact we had already been warned by a man who chose his words extremely carefully, that Arturo was, as he put it,
‘l’uomo più stupido della zona’
; but at that time we interpreted this as him being a bit slow on the uptake. It was only later that we realized that we had to deal with someone in whom gormlessness, cunning and sheer bloody-mindedness were more or less equally compounded.

At that time Arturo was about forty years old. He was married and had two grown-up children. Physically he was large and his trousers, which were supported by a wide, low-slung belt, always gave the impression that they were about to fall down.

He was an ardent communist and whenever there was a Festa dell’Unità he and his family were always in the forefront. A Festa dell’Unità was a very mild, rustic sort of Party reunion at which no speeches ever seemed to be made and politics were hardly ever mentioned. It took place in the open air and lasted all day and far into the night, with dancing and eating and drinking. The food and drink were simple but excellent. We always thoroughly enjoyed these festivities: there was nothing sinister about them. A large part of the population still voted Communist, although how they could bring themselves to support what was by then such a run-down, ramshackle creed was a bit of a mystery. It was probably because all the other political parties in Italy were also run-down just as ours are in Britain today, and it didn’t appear to matter very much which party you voted for, or if you voted at all.

Signora Baldini was a personable, trim, young-looking woman
of about the same age as her husband, and with an enigmatic smile. We normally used to see her a couple of times a day on her way down from her house to her barn and on her way back again, invariably with a basket on her head which she used to take home laden with various vegetables from a plot she cultivated.

When she made these trips the Signora followed the same route as Arturo when he came down to his
vigneto
, either on foot or with a tractor, a track which wound down the hill from where his farmhouse was situated, no part of which was on our property at all. Up to the time when we arrived on the scene Arturo had never attempted to make use of the track past our front door, even on foot. This was the track which led from I Castagni across the torrent and up past Signora Angiolina’s place to the main road where the Dadà farmhouse stood, all of which was a right-of-way, but for pedestrians only.

Once the various
esperti
had done what they had contracted to do at I Castagni, and had been paid and had taken their departure, we had more time to repose and look about us. The only one who didn’t take his departure completely was Renato who always made himself available if any crisis developed connected with the fabric of the building, becoming, like Attilio, a sort of semi-permanent major-domo. It was about this time that we began to realize that Arturo was taking far more interest in our affairs than our brief acquaintanceship with him seemed to warrant; and this eventually became just one source of what were to be a number of minor and not-so-minor irritations.

For instance, what became one of his principal pleasures, which he took care not to indulge in when his wife was around, was to stand on the highest point in his
vigneto
, a rural version of Stout Cortez on a peak in Darien, and look down into one of our fields, which was out of sight from any other quarter, which was the reason why we used it for sunbathing.

Reclining in it, anointed with insect repellent, we took particular care not to expose ourselves completely. We both wore shorts and kept shirts handy so that we could put them on quickly if we heard anyone coming down the hill to visit us. We both knew, from long experience, that
contadini
, especially older ones, had a real horror of nakedness; to such an extent that, according to Wanda, who had female informants, many male
contadini
had never seen their wives unclothed, even in bed.

And if we had been in any doubt about this it was Signora Angiolina who, when speaking of a friend of hers who had had her first sight of a bikini, said to Wanda, as if unfolding some incredible secret, ‘You know, Signora Wanda, that there are women and girls at Bocca di Magra who bathe in the sea and wear nothing but
mutande e reggiseni
[knickers and bras].’ And we ourselves had once seen at Sistiana, near Trieste, a whole coachload of female
contadini
from the interior of Slovenia disporting themselves in the sea with all their clothes on.

But Arturo was not really interested in observing the Newbys lounging around in shorts, although he still continued to get some sensation from keeping an eye on Wanda if he could only surprise her shirtless. What he really enjoyed, and took advantage of whenever the opportunity presented itself, was to look down on our female guests, friends of my daughter mostly, one or two of whom, in spite of our imploring them not to do so, persisted in lying about in the most minimal bikinis in what were highly provocative postures.

Eventually, to save what remained of our reputations in the locality, we were forced to put an absolute prohibition on the wearing of bikinis in this field, or anywhere else at I Castagni, after it filtered back to us that Arturo, who in this case was not entirely to blame, had been heard to say, having seen a girl of truly amazing proportions wobbling around in the field,
‘Darei uno dei miei campi per un culo come quello!’
(‘I would give one
of my fields for an arse like that!’) Although what he would have done with it, other than frame it, was not clear.

Arturo also had an artistic side to his nature which manifested itself on one occasion when, uninvited, he came down from his perch in his
vigneto
and stood immediately behind a distinguished artist who had come to paint at I Castagni, craning over the unfortunate man’s shoulder, where he sat at his easel, gazing at the canvas and uttering a series of sounds that bore an unfortunate resemblance to derisive laughter.

One autumn, Wanda gave an enormous dinner for all our neighbours, among them the Baldinis, whom we invited only after considerable heart-searchings, although the Signora could not be blamed for her husband’s voyeuristic tendencies.

I, rather stupidly, was at some pains to buy some ‘good wine’ for the occasion from one of the expensive shops in Sarzana. When the evening of the dinner came, which was a great success with fourteen people sitting down to eat it, including Attilio, almost everyone brought their own wine with them, ostensibly as a gift, but really because he or she would only drink local wine made by themselves or their neighbours. They all refused to drink the labelled wines from Sarzana on the grounds that they were almost certainly
lavorati
, mucked about with, which was almost certainly true. Eventually, with some misgivings, I produced our own wine which they all said was
buono
.

The following morning, while we were still clearing up from the night before, Arturo arrived at the house and without referring to the previous evening said, without any other preamble, and in a hectoring manner, that from now on he was going to use the footpath in front of our house as a
diritto di passaggio
, a right-of-way for agricultural vehicles and instruments, which could be tractors, bulldozers, trailers, ploughs, harrows and anything else he could think of. One of the vehicles he said airily he might well
want to use was something called a
furgoncino
, a sort of three-wheeled delivery van, although he didn’t actually own one. And he said he would go to law to enforce his right.

We were taken completely by surprise by all this, and we told him he only had the right, as did everyone else, to pass in front of the house on foot, and if we allowed him to do what he asked a general right-of-way would be created which, up to now, had never existed. How, we asked him, could anyone have used the bread oven which was built at least a hundred years ago, at the same time as the house, if wheeled traffic had been permitted to use the path, at this point only a few feet wide. If he drove his vehicles in front of our kitchen door they would run bang through the middle of our al fresco dining room.

He said that there had always been a general right-of-way and that it was he who had employed a bulldozer driver to help repair the bridge over the torrent so that it could once again support agricultural machines.

‘What do you do now when you want to drive your tractor from your house to your barn and up again?’ we asked him, knowing that up to now he had always used the other track, but he didn’t answer.

We then offered to let him use the way round the back of the house, as a favour, which was a pretty silly thing to do, but fortunately it didn’t sink in.

‘He’s mad to go to law,’ Wanda said, ‘but that’s no consolation. We’ll be dam’ lucky if we aren’t ruined. In Italy a thing like this can go on for ever.’

The following day Arturo appeared with a cow on a length of rope and in order to give it room to pass picked up our dining table and plonked it down outside our bathroom door. He then waited for the animal to produce an enormous cow flop on the paving stones.

By now we ourselves were both pretty angry, and so was he; and we told him to go back to where he came from, which he did, rather surprisingly, leaving us this steaming cow flop as a memento of his visit. Whether a cow was a
mezzo agricolo
was not clear.

That day we went down to consult Signor Vescovo as to what we should do. He said that Arturo had no such right-of-way, and neither had anyone else, and that we should get ourselves a lawyer. In the meantime we should drive a couple of poles into the ground near the torrent, suspend a chain across the track and put up a notice to the effect that this was
Proprietà Privata: Soltanto Passaggio Pedonale
, Private Property: Pedestrians Only – but still allowing enough room for people to pass on foot.

Having done this we set off for Sarzana to find ourselves a lawyer, one that Signor Vescovo had recommended to us; but when we eventually ran him to ground we discovered that he was a criminal lawyer who might be of use to us in the future if we actually did away with Arturo, something which I often contemplated doing during the ensuing years (by pushing him down our well – the water wasn’t drinkable anyway); but was not what we wanted at the moment.

Fortunately, we were able to find a civil lawyer and after we had explained our predicament to him he agreed to take us on.

That same afternoon, when we got back to the house from Sarzana we found that someone, presumably Arturo, had taken the chain down (there were no padlocks), pulled up the poles and chucked the
Proprietà Privata: Soltanto Passaggio Pedonale
notices into the torrent.

The following day we received a letter from Arturo’s lawyer enclosing an order signed by a judge, ordering us to remove the obstruction we had put up immediately and that Arturo had the right to pass with
mezzi agricoli.
This for us was a shattering pronouncement.

The next day our
avvocato
came to see us. The weather was appalling, the sort of
scirocco
weather we had the day we bought the house when it poured all the lime; but Wanda gave us a lovely lunch with lots of
vino.
He was a nice humorous man and later, while I was showing him the boundaries of our two properties, Arturo found us standing under a couple of umbrellas peeing against one of his olive trees and roaring with laughter, which upset him. It wasn’t really very much of a satisfaction, upsetting him; we seemed to be in the soup. Our lawyer told us to take photographs of Arturo using his own track for the passage of agricultural vehicles, and also to keep a journal giving a blow-by-blow account of the various humiliations he would undoubtedly heap on us before we could stop him. He also said that cases such as this one could drag on indefinitely because, judicially and monetarily speaking, they were unimportant and no one could be bothered to bring them to a conclusion. He was only too right. In fact, the length of time this one dragged on for exceeded everyone’s wildest expectations.