Over the Garfagnana

Edward Hutton ended Florence and Northern Tuscany with an account of his walk out of Tuscany through the mountains of the Garfagnana.  

 

It is into this country of happiness you come, a happiness so vaguely musical, when, leaving Lucca in the summer heat, you climb into the Garfagnana. For to your right Bagni di Lucca lies under Barga, with its church and great pulpit; and indeed, the first town you enter is Borgo a Mazzano by Sorchio; then, following still the river, you come to Gallicano, and then by a short steep road to Castelnuovo di Garfagnana at the foot of the great pass. The mountains have clustered round you, bare and threatening, and though you be still in the woods it is their tragic nudity you see all day long, full of the disastrous gestures of death, that can never change or be modified or recalled. It is under these lonely and desolate peaks that the road winds to Piazza al Serchio. …

It is very early in the morning maybe, as you climb out of this shadow and receive suddenly the kiss of the morning sun over a shoulder of the great mountains, a kiss like the kiss of the beloved. From the village of Piazza al Serchio, where the inn is rough, truly but pulito, it is a climb of some six chilometri into the pass, where you leave the river, then the road, always winding about the hills, runs level for four miles, and then drops for five miles into Fivizzano. All the way the mountains stand over you frightenly motionless and threatening, till the woods of Fivizzano, that magical town, hide you in their shadow, and evening comes as you climb the last hill that ends in the Piazza before the door of the inn.

Here are hospitality, kindness, and a welcome; you will get a great room for your rest, and the salone of the palace, for palace it is, for your sojourn, and an old-fashioned host whose pleasure is your comfort, who is, as it were, a daily miracle.  He it will be who will make your bed in the chamber where Grand Duke Leopold slept, he will wait upon you at dinner as though you were the Duke’s Grace  himself,  and if your sojourn be long, he will make you happy, and if your stay be short, you will go with regret. For his pride is your delight, and he, unlike too many famous Tuscans, has not forgotten the past…. There all day long in the pleasant heat the fountain of Cosimo III plays in the Piazza outside your window, cooling your room with its song.  And, indeed, in all Tuscany it would be hard to find a place more delightful or more lovely in which to spend the long summer that is so loath to go here in the south. Too soon, too soon the road called me from those meadows and shadowy ways, the never-ending whisper of the woods, the sound of streams, the song of the mountain shepherd girls, the quiet ways of the hills.

It was an hour after sunrise when I set out for Fordinovo on the Malaspina, for Sarzana, for Spezia, for England…. Thence by a way steep and dangerous I came into the valley of Bardine, only to mount again into Tendola and at last to Foce Cucco, where on all sides the valleys filled with woods fell away from me, and suddenly at a turning of the way, I spied out Fordinovo, lordly still on its bastion of rock, guarding Val di Magna, looking towards Luna and the sea….

It was thence for the first time for many months I looked on a land that was not Tuscany. Already autumn was come in that high place; a flutter of leaves and the wind of the mountains made a sad music round about the old walls… And then, as I sat there above the woods towards evening, from some bird passing overhead there fell a tiny feather, whiter than snow, that came straight into my hand. Was it a bird, or my angel, whose beautiful, anxious wings trembled lest I should fall in a land less simple than this? 

 ###

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 426-428.