Walking in the Marble Mountains

Looking across to Mt Corchia

It's a bit of a ritual for us to go for a Christmas Day walk in the mountains, whatever the weather.  We've been out in hurricanes, monsoon rains, Lake District mizzle.  I've got a whole album of photographs taken cowering behind walls, under trees, almost invisible in thermo-fleece and Berghaus!  But this year the sun shone - bitterly cold at 4,500 feet, but clear, blue and sunny.

The marble quarries stop work at christmas, so it's a good opportunity to get up into the high mountains using the tracks they've built for the gigantic rock lorries without risking one's life.  This year we went up to the Henraux quarry on the highest flanks of Mt Altissimo, whose summit is getting lower year by year.  They are literally slicing it off.

Tough environmental call for a sculptor who loves working with the stuff, watching the environment be altered so drastically.  But it's not sculpture that's done this - a few blocks here and there for statues etc can be accommodated - no, it's the public appetite for bathroom tiles, fireplaces and table tops that's eating it away at this rate, helped by the ease with which it can now be quarried.  Once it took months to cut a marble block by hand;  now it takes minutes.  And you don't have to take it down to the town by buffalo sled (which took days).  A lorry can do the trip in half an hour.  How much of the mountain will be there when we walk back next year?  I suppose that depends on what happens to Italy's economy.  The machinery is idle at the moment.

Tomorrow we're off to an Italian town further south - Orvieto, near Perugia - for New Year.  It's the birthday of  jazz musician Stan Tracey and Neil (who used to run a jazz festival in England) has been invited to the party.  I'm really looking forward to seeing another part of Italy, as well as the music and the festivities.

Oh, and this year's Christmas picture?  Muffled up to the eyebrows for the sub-zero temps, but at least it wasn't raining!  Auguri and Buone Feste everyone!

Perched on the ledge of Altissimo, Mt Corchia in background

Boa Constricting at the Ceragetta!

Yesterday I took a day off from the Work in Progress and Neil played truant from the marble yard. Warned that the beautiful weather was about to break, we went up into the Alpi Apuane for lunch. We have a favourite place for special treats - La Ceragetta. It’s high in the mountains - over 3,400 feet - with spectacular views over the alps and down to the glacial lake called Isola Santa.

view from the terrace

down below

 It’s also cheap - 23 euros (about £20) buys you the fixed menu with 5 courses, plus as much alcohol as you can drink. We had antipasto - seven different kinds of meat and savoury - followed by pumpkin soup, then two sorts of pasta (one with salmon, one with bacon and porcini mushrooms), then the main course - a huge platter of pork, chicken and beef grilled over an open fire, followed by three types of dessert (chocolate mousse, cherry tart and custard pie) plus coffee, all accompanied by sparkling wine, chianti and sweet sangria. We somehow staggered to the car where we sat like a couple of boa constrictors, and lay in the sunshine looking at the mountains and sleeping it off.

It’s lovely walking territory, with a maze of old packhorse routes across the mountains which we love to explore. There are shrines everywhere, and crosses and madonnas on every pinnacle of rock.

the madonna of the rock

 This was partisan territory during the war and every now and then you come across plaques erected in the memory of those who died - a story behind every one of them.

Shrine to the madonna

Partisan Plaque

I wondered who this young man - nicknamed ‘the bayonet’ - had been and how many times he had lead people to freedom along this path to the Allied Lines. The elderly lady who owns La Ceragetta is over 90 and old enough to know the story, but my Italian isn’t good enough to ask her - yet!  I'm doing an on-line course in an effort to improve it.

Today we have a huge thunderstorm, snow on the mountains and torrential rain and hail at lower levels. I’m curled up indoors working on my new (and rather secret) project and Neil is chipping away at his huge chunk of the mountain in the marble yard.

Goodbye Italy

It’s back to England tomorrow so just time for a last walk in the high Alpi Apuane. Everywhere you go here is dominated by the towering, 6,000 feet high, snow-dusted peak of Santa Croce.

We began our walk after a good lunch in the fortified hill-top village of Pruno, which is already at around 3,000 feet.

Then up into the alps using the ancient tracks made of carefully laid stone which have been used possibly since Etruscan times, to reach the summer pastures high above the villages. This is where, until the middle of the 20th century, the villagers drove their cattle, sheep, and goats to take advantage of the cooler, grass-covered slopes during the hot Tuscan summer months.

The alpine ‘caselle’ (little houses) are mostly ruined now, but some have been rebuilt as Rifugios.

These are open during the summer (from around the 1st of May) and on holiday weekends to provide food and drink for anyone prepared to trek up here for the view. Supplies are winched up from the nearest car parking point using a pulley system.

I didn’t make it above the Rifugio - just lay on the alpine slope trying to absorb as much of the warm sunlight as I could before I have to return to cold, damp England.

The Six Hour Clocks of Italy

Although I’ve been coming to Italy for more than ten years, I didn’t know about 6 hour clocks until we found one yesterday. They were apparently common between the 15th and 17th centuries, but very few survive. There is only one hand and the numerals go from one to six, dividing the day into four parts to regulate the monastic ‘hours’ of prayer.
Spring has suddenly arrived in Tuscany - rather later than usual. The sun has real warmth now and the cool wind from eastern Europe has stopped competing with it. This seems very unfair when I’m packing up to leave. I hate packing and this time it’s an impossible task - there’s so little you can take on a Ryan Air luggage allowance. So I have to decide what I need immediately, and what can be stored to bring back in the car in a couple of months time. Then there’s the house to clean and restore to its original pristine state before the summer visitors arrive ....
So yesterday afternoon, with temperatures of 24 degrees, we played truant. The nearby Lucchese Pass, which goes through the Alpi Apuane to the Garfagnana, has been closed since 2001 because of landslides. But recently, after a lot of work by the Commune, it’s been opened again and we decided to go exploring.
As the crow flies the distances aren’t great - we probably travelled no more than 15 miles or so inland - but the roads wind up and down the hills in endless hairpin bends and it seems to take forever to reach the other side.
We found a little hillside village called Convalle - a typical mountain settlement in the chestnut forest. You have to park your car outside the village and walk. Inside the original cobbled pathways lead you around a maze of alleyways and courtyards, always upwards, to the church at the top.

Many of the houses are empty and shuttered. They are summer retreats for wealthy owners in Florence or Rome. Recently they’ve been bought up by Germans, Swiss, and people from eastern europe. Most of the permanent residents we met were elderly. Young people don’t want to live so far out. There’s no shop here and no bar. The residents are ‘contadini’ - country people who live by harvesting the chestnuts and cultivating the narrow hillside terraces with the help of study mountain ponies.

On the way back we stopped at Pescaglia, only three miles further on, and found the six hour clock on a very old bell tower. Then we went to the little bar for a much needed prosecco - which probably explains the photograph below!

The Beach in Winter

This morning we took the dogs to the beach, which is about thirty minutes drive from where we're staying. The sky was grey and overcast, with the mountains just emerging from cloud in the distance, white-capped and unreal. The sea was almost as grey as the sky, but with big waves rolling in - very unusual for the Mediterranean.

All along the coast, the road is lined with beach clubs - you have to pay to go in and use their facilities. In summer it's nice to have an umbrella, a steamer chair, a shower and a bar! But in winter they're all closed and boarded up and you can stroll wherever you want.

Today we had the beach to ourselves, shared only with a couple of men exercising horses. We were surprised at the amount of debris. Apparently this is the result of the Xmas floods, which have washed down a whole forest of trees - they estimate it will take months to clear.

It was cold, but very beautiful. I feel very lucky to be here.

A Walk in the Mountains

It seemed a shame to waste such wonderful weather, so yesterday we went for a walk in the mountains with the two dogs we’re looking after for a friend. Elly is a small Italian terrier who spends all day chasing after sticks and pine cones and anything else she can persuade you to throw for her. Frank is a Spinone - a pedigree breed, large and shaggy as a sheep, and rather similar to the English Lurcher. He’s good natured, but enjoys chasing and biting people on bicycles, so he has to be kept on a lead near pathways.
The views were spectacular as we climbed up towards the ridge of Mount Prana, and we could see far out across Torre del Lago (still swollen by flood water) and across the Mediterranean as far as Corsica.
These ancient pathways through the olive groves are punctuated by shrines, still decorated with flowers and candles, however high up or distant.
There are wild flowers everywhere - we found some small orchid like plants with flowers like cobras, spectacular funghi growing under the chestnut trees, hellebore along the edges of the paths, daisies and cyclamen.

We passed through a small mountain village called Torcigliano, perched precariously on the slope of the hillside - the streets accessed only by steps. Like most of these villages it still has the communal washhouse in the centre, fed by a spring.
All over the hillside, in the olive groves, are ruined, abandoned homesteads whose owners have migrated to the valleys, to big cities like Milan, or even to America, in search of an easier life than the subsistence farming these houses represent. We look at them longingly - dreaming of owning one and restoring it. We imagine sitting on the terrace, drinking our own wine, nibbling our own olives, looking at the views of mountain and sea on summer evenings ....... But the reality is that these ‘rusticos’ as they’re known, are very sought after as holiday homes for rich Europeans who drive down from France or Germany, or further east. Even in ruinous condition in an isolated location, they fetch 150 to 200 thousand euros. We had better keep buying the lottery tickets!

On the way down, against the red sky of a setting sun, we found these skeletons of wild clematis.

Il tempo fa bello - ma ........

The weather is beautiful in Italy at the moment - the sun warm enough to have coffee on the terrace in only jumper and jeans. The nights are cold - down to 2 degrees, but it’s worth enduring them for the clear skies studded with stars. Mars is visible at the moment, large and very, very red. Mars, the planet of War and human aggression, of which there is plenty. No doubt, if I knew where to look, Saturn is out there too, spinning its rings of misery-dust.
It seems unfair to be in such idyllic surroundings when there is so much suffering in the world - and I’m thinking continually of Haiti, where people are still being miraculously plucked from the rubble. What I can’t bear to think about are those who survived the quake and then perished, buried alive, for want of rescue.
The numbers of dead and missing are staggering. Somehow it’s always the poor countries, the deprived areas, that suffer most. Those rich enough to be able to afford to get out of such places have gone long ago, so only the poor remain. They can’t afford good, well-built housing, earthquake proof, and they don’t have the political power to force their government to build it for them. And, as in the Chinese quake, they are vulnerable to corruption. We don’t live in a fair, well-balanced world, but one that sometimes makes me ashamed to be human.
Here in Italy there is a great deal of sympathy for the Haitians and the Italian mobile phone companies have set up a text-and-donate service, asking everyone for 2.50 euros - a small amount, but multiplied by a million or so .......
The earth we live on doesn’t conform to any health and safety regs, as the Italians know very well. All around us there are examples of the earth’s violent activity - Italy is literally being torn in half. In the mountains we found a ruined tower - no idea how old - medieval perhaps, though some ruins date back to the Romans or even to the Etruscans. But, though the walls are several feet thick, the tower was destroyed centuries ago by an earthquake that no one now remembers. People still live in this area, though the settlement around the tower has long since vanished. I sometimes think that we humans manage to live in disaster zones only because living memory goes back so few years, relative to the passage of geological time.
When I look at the tower I wonder what happened to the houses that once surrounded it, to the people who lived in them and what their stories were. So much of our past history survives only in myth and legend - come down to us as stories; Atlantis, Noah’s flood, the Iliad, the Norse sagas, the Welsh Mabinogion. And I wonder what will survive of us in story 2,000 years from now?

Back to Work

Xmas is over now and all the offspring have returned to their own homes, despite snow, ice, delayed and cancelled flights and other obstacles. So there’s no excuse for not getting down to work again. Neil has returned to the marble yard where he’s converting a plaster maquette into a glittering white marble sculpture. He has bought a block of ‘statuary grade’ Carrara marble, which looks rather like Kendal Mint Cake. You can see it above. The man standing is Pietro who is providing the marble and the blue overalls belong to Anat, an Israeli sculptor who owns the marble yard.

Marble yards are filthy places - white dust everywhere like snow; pieces of marble piled up haphazardly among the machinery; fork lifts and hoists. Even a small piece of marble weighs a ton - quite literally.

Since Monday Neil has been attacking the block with an angle-grinder and diamond blade. I would be terrified of sawing off the wrong bit - unlike writing, once something’s edited out, it’s out for good! But his block now looks something like this.

And I’m back to the editing of the book - now working on the end notes and references, which is a long and frustrating process. Will my reputation as a biographer really be ruined if I can’t read my handwriting when I jotted down a reference 5 years ago? I don’t believe it will, but my editor has other ideas! Thank goodness for the internet.

The weather here is still cold and often wet. We are staying in a large, unheated house with marble floors, high ceilings and draughty doors. Last night it was cold enough for two duvets, a pair of fleecy pyjamas, a cardigan and the electric blanket. But at lunch-time I went outside and ate my lunch on the terrace in the sun. Miraculous!

Epiphanic Mayhem

January the 6th was Epiphany, or 12th night. In England it means you take down the Christmas tree and all the decorations or you will have bad luck all year. But in Italy it seems to have a much wider significance that mixes pagan and Christian in a very interesting way. It’s not just the anniversary of the arrival of the Magi at Bethlehem, or the descent of the holy ghost, but a public holiday with celebrations and music. Children are given stockings filled with sweets and a witch - La Befana - flies on her broomstick.
We were having a pizza in our local bar when suddenly the door opened and a group of musicians and singers arrived, visiting homes and restaurants like carol singers and playing strange eastern European music. It’s fascinating to live in a place where local traditions are still strong, spontaneous and not just something trotted out for tourists.
Neil did a small video of the music, which I will put up here, though the quality isn't very good because it was filmed in a very dark bar!

A Picnic on Monte Corchia

We’ve been having a series of lovely autumn days here - too good to stay indoors. We try to stick to a routine of working in the morning and then going out for a walk in the afternoon. Yesterday we decided to head up into the marble mountains just behind us - a short distance as the crow flies, but longer on the tiny roads that slalom up and down the slopes. Monte Corchia is quite high, but you can drive up the quarry road to about 4,000 feet - 1300 metres before it turns into a 4x4 track. The views are spectacular.

We ate a late lunch (4pm!) at the side of the road, next to the shrine, and stayed to watch the sun go down. It was bitterly cold - ice on the road - but the view is so wonderful it’s worth suffering for. You can see across the Mediterranean as far as Corsica. The sea seemed to go on forever beyond the glare of the sun.

On our right was the marble quarry of Mount Altissimo. The summit of the mountain has been eaten almost completely away by centuries of mining. It’s a visible reminder of the way human activity has affected the landscape.

As the sun goes down the colours change and the whole landscape glows. We drove home in the fading light, reminding ourselves how lucky we are to be here. Tonight the weather is changing - there’s a cold wind from eastern europe rattling the windows and storm clouds gathering over the mountains, so probably no walk tomorrow.

Driving in Italy

This is Pruno - one of my favourite hill-top villages in the Alpi Apuane and it’s about twenty minutes drive from Pietrasanta. The driving here is not for the faint-hearted, though you do get used to it. Italy has one of the highest death rates in Europe, due to a combination of speed, bad driving, and a lot of machismo. We’ve witnessed some unbelievable behaviour since we’ve been here. And it doesn’t help that the roads are not as well maintained as elsewhere in Europe. Italy has a large network of tiny mountain roads and it struggles to keep them up to scratch - this one is typical of Tuscany. They were never built for motorised traffic and are only wide enough for a small car, with steep gradients and right angle bends you negotiate with your front bumper among the flower pots and your wing mirrors scraping the corner of someone’s house!

It’s wise to hoot very loudly before beginning the ascent/descent because there’s nowhere to go if you meet another driver. The metal safety barriers are a recent innovation. Locals tell hair-raising stories of coming back from the bar late at night in winter and being found next morning hanging from a branch, completely sober but minus a vehicle.

Tourists aren’t expected to tackle the chicanes. They can leave their cars in the car park and walk the last few yards. When we first started coming to Italy we came across blurb which read ‘We will collect your luggage with the Ape’ which produced much hilarity. This useful animal is pronounced ‘Apay’ in Italian and isn’t a gorilla, but a narrow vehicle constructed around a motor bike frame like this.

There are no easy options in this part of Tuscany, but the tranquility of the mountains and the views are worth any amount of effort to get up here.