by John Keahey
Just north of Seravezza, the blue highway sign with its arrow pointing across the Vezza River beckoned me to head up the steep mountain slope to the village of Gallena. I was curious because a local historian had mentioned that Gallena might have been a starting point for one group of German soldiers, sixty-eight years earlier, to follow a narrow footpath to Sant’Anna di Stazzema on the morning the villagers there were massacred.
Gallena is slightly more than a mile up, and deep into the mountain. The steep, twisty road, overhung with giant chestnut and oak trees, makes for slow going. It took about fifteen minutes to get there. The road suddenly ends at the bottom of a cluster of stone houses planted firmly on the hillside. As in the comune of Stazzema, there are no streets wide enough for automobiles leading up to the houses themselves. Here, one simply parks in a large open space at the road’s end, in front of a church dedicated to Saint Barbara, and hikes a few hundred feet along paved footpaths between buildings.
The hillside below the cluster of buildings is spotted with a few acres of grape vines and small groves of olive trees. There appears to be no commerce here, just the homes. This is an area rich in minerals; mines are located near here, and an active marble quarry sits across a gully higher up and near the summit of the hill to the west. The quarry is small when compared with the giant quarries farther up the road from Seravezza, or at Massa and Carrara well to the north. It is stunning with its freshly exposed slabs of white marble. The site sits below the brow of a massive overhang of uncut stone perhaps one hundred feet tall. One day, if the market for marble holds, this overhang will be gone, its stone lining countertops and paving floors and stairways.
Standing before the church of Saint Barbara, facing south and hidden in the mountain’s overgrowth, is a series of ancient pathways, or mule trails, spilling over the mountain and down into Sant’Anna. I can imagine the Germans congregating at road’s end in this wide spot before the church and then being led along those trails by Italian supporters of the deposed Mussolini. I do not see signs here pointing the way. This particular trail, a Sant’Anna historian told me, is nearly lost to modern memory.
The drive back to the main highway, now all downhill, takes only a few minutes. A few miles east along the highway, at the village of Rousina—another launching point for those German soldiers seven decades ago—a road leads south into a wider Versilia Valley lined with numerous other villages I want to briefly explore: Pruno, Volegno, Cardoso, Mulina, and Farnocchia.
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On the top of the steep hillside that plunges down to the Vezza River where it flows past Cardoso is a line of stone walls and the backs of buildings. This is the hamlet of Pruno, with perhaps fewer than a hundred residents and is yet another village with narrow walkways and a parking area at its base. It sits overlooking the villages strung out along the Versilia Valley, like a doting mother looking down on her children gathered around her skirts.
In medieval times, pathways were barely wide enough for carts. If today’s residents don’t park in the lots at the towns’ lower reaches, they park along the narrow road and walk uphill using steep wooden or stone stairways to rough-stone houses high above.
Pruno’s buildings—homes, a small church, and only a shop or two, plus a small bar serving coffee—are made of raw stones, from light yellow to dark gray in color. The exterior stone walls of only a few houses are plastered. And most buildings are joined together like unique, one-of-a-kind medieval condominiums. During my midday visit, which corresponded to the usual hours of siesta, a couple of housewives swept the stoops and the stone walkways of their homes while engaged in intense conversation. My ear, attuned to school Italian, could make no sense of the overheard conversations; a local dialect is used here.
A shirtless man sat on one stoop, smoking a short, black Tuscan cigar, nodding with a welcoming smile as I passed by; a woman watering numerous plants placed around her stoop, in her alcove, and on windowsills quietly sang to herself. It is August, and windows are open. It seems, from the lack of compressor noise, that there is very little, if any, air-conditioning here, just fans rustling window curtains.
While cars were parked in the small lot below the town, light Vespas were stowed in tiny alcoves next to most houses. Occasionally, a gap appeared between the joined buildings, offering spectacular views of the mountains and the Vezza River below and the faraway cluster of Cardoso’s buildings strung out along the now-placid stream.
In the other direction, and perhaps just fifteen hundred feet along the road into Pruno, sits an even smaller village, Volegno. Home to perhaps fifty people, it is only half as large as its bigger sister higher up. And like so many of these small villages, Volegno is simply a neighborhood—just a cluster of interconnected buildings well over a century old. There are no stores, post offices, or banks.
I head back toward Pontestazzemese, but before that larger town is a junction that leads to two other villages on my list. I turn sharply south, and within a few miles come to Mulina, named for a medieval mill that still stands. This is the village where the first victims of the German massacre associated with Sant’Anna were killed—a priest and members of his family. Soldiers moved on from here to Farnocchia to join colleagues who had burned the town four days before, scattering those residents to the nearby hillsides. Some of those Farnocchia residents, including their priest, had followed a mulattiere, or mule trail, through the mountains and over the ridge to take what would be a disastrous refuge in Sant’Anna, just a few miles away.
The company of SS troopers, led by local Italian Fascists and with the smoldering village at their backs, started early in the morning of August 12, 1944, along that same narrow ancient mule track.
The road from Mulina to Farnocchia is narrow and curvy, requiring the liberal use of the car horn to warn out-of-sight drivers heading downhill. The village, which has a parking area in front of the local church, Pieve di San Michele, like most of the others in the area, is not drivable. Cars are tucked here and there amongst stone buildings that look like they have been there for centuries. Following the German-torched fire, residents must have cleaned the stone and rebuilt as it was before.
It took perhaps fifteen minutes to walk around the tiny center, up and down stairs that make up the pedestrian lanes. A few have signs proclaiming VENDITA—for sale. There seems to be only one business: a combination tobacco shop–bar–tiny restaurant. Outside the door with large hanging beads gently swaying in the entrance is an outdoor seating area with umbrellas and plastic chairs. Here I sat, enjoying a fresh homemade cream-filled pastry and a double espresso.
Just up the road, perhaps fifty feet away, I noticed the start of a narrow trail, first cresting a concrete retaining wall and then disappearing into the deep woods beyond. The bar’s owner, Roberto, confirmed my suspicions: this was the trail to Sant’Anna.
“Everyone here knows about the Germans. A long time ago, it was horrible,” he said, speaking of the burning of Farnocchia. “And then,” he paused, “of course there was Sant’Anna.” The Farnocchia refugees who made it there were caught up in the massacre, along with their priest, Don Innocenzo Lazzeri.
Despite these depressing thoughts, I sat outside the Farnocchia bar, appreciating the well-made espresso and watching a young family at another table enjoying the afternoon. The temperature, despite it being a blistering Tuscan August along the coast, was quite comfortable in the mountains. The mother was pointing to the different colors of her son and daughter’s clothing, giving them the colors’ names in English. “Yellow!” the boy would happily shout. “Red!” repeated his sister. “Pink.” “Blue.”
Ahead, at the start of the trail over the mountain, I saw a twentysomething couple, her in a sundress and him in slacks and a golf shirt. They had no packs, no apparent bottles of water, and were wearing street shoes. Perhaps there is a house farther along, I thought. The couple, talking and laughing quietly, disappeared into the deep hardwood forest.
I remained in that spot for about an hou
r, enjoying the afternoon and its sounds of birds high in the surrounding forest. The family had left, and a group of friendly older men, smoking those stubby Tuscan cigars, was sitting on a bench outside the bar door. I bought a small box of Toscanello cigars and asked if I could join them. “Si, si,” they said. But we could not engage in deep conversation; their mountain dialect and my basic Italian quashed all my efforts at communication. Still, we smoked the traditional cigars and smiled at one another a lot, as the comfortable afternoon passed slowly. My mind wandered: Was the apartment I saw for sale in the gray-stone building in the town center affordable? Did Farnocchia have any Internet access? What a great place this would be to settle down and work without many distractions.
FIVE
The Great Loop
He was inclined toward mobility, he tended to sink deeper and deeper, to look ever more closely, lingering on the details: “I would like to be a plane tree,” he used to say, “standing still, extending my roots.”
—Bruna Cordati, writing about her father, Tuscan painter Bruno Cordati
MY FRIEND Filippo Tofani and I slide out of Pietrasanta on a bright, cloudless day with temperatures finally warm enough for us to shed light jackets and vests. Since my arrival in Pietrasanta two weeks earlier, it has rained almost daily and maintained, for coastal western Tuscany in late April, an unseasonal chill that mocked my decision to turn off the heat in my apartment.
But I got by, and on this day, basking in the warmth, Filippo and I will make a great loop, from Pietrasanta to Lucca and then into the mountains through the valley of the Serchio River. This valley, which in medieval times provided Rome-bound pilgrims an alternative, more-inland stretch of the Via Francigena by following the Via Cassia, separates the coastal Apuan range from the Apennine Mountains. The Apuan range ends just before Pisa, while the Apennine, referred to as the “spine” of Italy, runs nearly the length of the peninsula, north to south, ending when it drops into the Ionian Sea where the Aspromonte massif dominates Italy’s toe.
Our route for this daylong journey avoids going east into the Apennines where we could have continued on to Modena and Bologna on narrow provincial roads that follow tracks first carved by medieval travelers. That’s for another time. My focus is western Tuscany, and the eastern slope of the Apuan Alps is as far as I want to go.
We are traveling “blue” highways and staying off the autostrada, Italy’s version of the U.S. interstate highway system. It is possible, I believe in nearly all cases throughout Italy, to avoid the autostrada, and its occasional tolls, for a more leisurely drive from village to village, town to town, city to city on roads marked with signs painted blue. With the marvelous valley carved by the Serchio, we have no other option but slate and provincial roads.
We leave Pietrasanta and roll onto a provincial road numbered SS439. This narrow, two-lane byway through coastal foothills follows the original medieval route to Lucca, the provincial capital of those who long ago ruled the area around Pietrasanta. Of course, at various times Pietrasanta and its surrounding villages that make up Versilia also were ruled from Florence, farther to the east, and others from the north had their shot at control as well—until Italy’s unification in 1861 changed all that.
At Lucca we turn toward the north on SS12 and, within a few miles, stop at the village of Borgo a Mozzano.
We want to see an ancient bridge over the Serchio. It was commissioned in early AD 1100 by Countess Matilda of Tuscany for merchants and pilgrims traveling to Rome via the eastern route of the Via Francigena, to provide them an easier way to cross the river.
Built of rough, gray-stone blocks carved from the nearby mountains, the bridge’s unusual design features a high arch, flanked on the east side by three lesser arches, and on the west by an arch added in the early 1900s to strengthen the ancient bridge against potential flooding and to accommodate a railroad line. There is a definite shift in the light gray hue of the stones used to extend the bridge over the rails and the older, darker stones of the twelfth-century bridge.
The bridge, with its footpath of medium-size pavers, was wide enough for the donkey, mule, and horse carts of Matilda’s time. Today, it is a footbridge. It must make for a thrilling bicycle ride down the highest arch over the slippery stones. A crash on damp, weathered pavers would be painful indeed; there are no soft spots here.
The river is deep at this point, backed up by a low-slung power-generating dam perhaps five hundred yards downstream. There are many such dams on this river, all operated and maintained by Italy’s power consortium, INEL.
The bridge has stood for nearly a millennium; it is beautiful, and, with its combination of high and low arches, it remains an engineering marvel, particularly when you consider it was constructed in the early 1100s by a society just emerging from Europe’s Dark Ages.
Officially, Matilda’s bridge is the Ponte della Maddalena. But people commonly refer to it as the Devil’s Bridge, ponte di diavolo. As the local legend goes, the medieval engineers were stymied over how to build the highest arch, which bulges upward at least two times higher than the other arches in order to allow for unimpeded river traffic. The builders reputedly appealed to the devil for his help; he agreed, but with the demand that he get the soul of the first to cross the structure. They agreed, finished the bridge and its tall arch overnight, and then sent a pig across. (A Cadogan guide published in 2010 claims the villagers sent over a dog. Either way, the deception was well played.) The devil was so frustrated that he jumped into the fast-flowing deep waters of the Serchio and disappeared.
Leaving the bridge, we take a short stroll through Borgo a Mozzano on the river’s west bank. We pass a building, now housing a doctor’s office, which is identified as a former convent, likely one that would have offered Rome-bound pilgrims a place to spend the night. A short ways on, we spot a narrow, stone-paved walkway that cuts straight up the steep hillside to what appears to be an upper portion of Borgo a Mozzano. Filippo, who knows well the history of his beloved Tuscany and whose well-worn knowledge never led me astray, suggests that these walkways were actually the original medieval roads, which were replaced by what cars use today—modern paved streets that slowly wind their way upward in gentle curves and sharp switchbacks. Miraculously, these ancient “roads” were left in place.
We choose the medieval way, straight up. This pathway, no wider than four feet, is bounded on each side by a tightly fitted rock wall, holding back the edges of wide-open fields and clusters of olive trees. It is hard going but worth the journey.
We reach the top and step onto the pavement of a small neighborhood street leading us to a church that likely also was a featured stop for pilgrims. Clues inside—a high, painted ceiling and figures showing tendencies toward the Baroque—tell us it must have been heavily expanded, perhaps in the seventeenth or later centuries, from its smaller, earlier state. We never became certain of its name, but references inside and out indicated it was named after San Giovanni; the parish is Battista-Cerreto, or the Parish of Saint John the Baptist.
After admiring this little church high above the Devil’s Bridge, we trace our path back down, passing on the steepest part a middle-aged woman lugging plastic bags from the shops below. Even she preferred the steep climb to the gentle, but far longer, twentieth-century paved roadway.
During World War II, Borgo a Mozzano also was, in this narrow valley, a key spot in Hitler’s Gothic Line, which ran in a two-hundred-mile irregular line from coast to coast. Renamed the Green Line in early 1944, this roughly ten-mile-wide belt of fortifications—concrete tank barriers, minefields, and reinforced gun emplacements—began just north of Pietrasanta on the Ligurian Sea. It stretched through the mountains past the marble quarries of Massa and Carrara, to just north of Ravenna on the Adriatic. Remains of some concrete fortifications and tunnels constructed during 1943–44 still exist, including an anti-tank wall at Borgo a Mazzano.
These fortifications ultimately did little to stop the Allied troops from moving up the Serchio fr
om Lucca in September 1944. Their relentless advance, and the fact that the Gothic line was breached farther east in the area around Bologna, pushed the retreating German defenders northward along the Serchio, where they destroyed the rail line and bridges as they went. The Devil’s Bridge, too narrow and fragile for motorized vehicles, survived. The war ended seven months later.
* * *
Moving beyond Borgo a Mazzano, we are presented with a choice: turn east into the foothills of the Apennines for a short distance to Bagni di Lucca, one of the earliest spa towns to attract members of the European upper crust in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or continue north through the Serchio River Valley.
Legend tells us that the game of roulette was invented at Bagni di Lucca, and that it had one of the earliest casinos in Europe. Such visitors to the village included English poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. They moved to Italy when they were married in 1846, first living in Pisa and then in Florence. They went to Bagni di Lucca three times between 1849 and 1857 and would stroll along a walkway, today named for them, on the bank of the Lima River—a walk I took on a later trip. But making the choice to go north or east is easy. To follow the loop we wanted and to end up back in Pietrasanta via Massa and Carrara by late afternoon, we must continue north along the Serchio.
During our drive through this verdant valley thick with chestnut trees, we see various clusters of hardwoods covered with giant vines, groves of olive trees, and the ruins of numerous castles on hillsides. Matilda or her ancestors built many of these structures, and some are long abandoned. Villages that seem to teeter high off the Apennine slopes flank some of these medieval fortifications.
The hardwood forests alternate with open spaces that in late April were flowering with broom plants, an ever-present shrub with bright yellow flowers that I have seen throughout Italy, particularly in the south, and in Sicily on the slopes of Mount Etna. The land also shows off large clusters of herbs that looked to me like rosemary and thyme. The river slides past all of this beauty, flowing from the north, where one might see the faint tips of mountains that hint of the Italian Alps farther along.