by John Keahey
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As we move toward Castelnuovo di Garfagnana and its junction with roads north, east, and west, I see the stunning medieval hill town of Barga. We decide to pass the turnoff and stay on course to Castelnuovo, but Barga from its lonely perch intrigued me. A month later with more time at my disposal, I went back to the Serchio Valley with the sole idea of visiting Barga. I was eager to wander through thousand-year-old streets with no idea of what I would find there. Aimless walks often turn into unexpected discoveries.
The walled town has three entrances. A short walk from Porta Reale, a sign on a placard next to the doorway of a stone palazzo announced its name, “Casa Cordati,” the home of twentieth-century painter Bruno Cordati (1890–1979). I walked in, and sitting at a desk at the far end of the room was Giordano Martinelli, Cordati’s grandson.
In impeccable English, Giordano explained that the house contains, on the second floor in seven rooms, his grandfather’s paintings—all open to the public. On floors higher up, the structure holds an apartment and a few rooms available for rent.
The exhibition rooms are grouped by subject or time period: one holds his earliest work; another is dedicated to female themes, and still another shows paintings representing motherhood. Other rooms display paintings from time Cordati spent in Bulgaria, landscapes, and then self-portraits that hang on the wall across the room from paintings of his daughter Bruna, a frequent subject of his work.
I had never heard of this artist. Not well known outside of Tuscany, he came from a poor family, was virtually self-educated, and as a child worked for a sign painter. In that role, he met the famed Tuscan poet Giovanni Pascoli, who had a home two miles to the north in what is known today as Castelvecchio Pascoli. (Tuscans have tended to add the names of famous literary figures to the towns or villages where they lived, even if they only stayed for a few years. Near Pietrasanta, for example, is the suburban village of Valdicastello Carducci, where a near contemporary of Pascoli, Giosuè Carducci, was born. Later Carducci’s family moved to the southern Tuscan village of Castagneto for a few years. Now it is known as Castagneto Carducci.)
But it was in Pascoli’s garden that the adolescent Cordati was commissioned to create a fresco of a stylized coat of arms on a wall. This marked the beginning of a close relationship between the elderly poet, who died in 1912, and the youthful aspiring artist. I couldn’t find that coat of arms in my wanderings along the hillsides of Barga, but I understand it was poorly restored following an earthquake many years ago.
Casa Carducci in Barga was the painter’s studio for many years prior to and during the early part of World War II. He rented rooms in the house, but had to escape with his family from Barga as the war surged northward along the Serchio River. Like so many other Tuscans, they became refugees, and traveled nine miles southeast to Bagni di Lucca. That historic resort town was spared much of the violent fighting along the Gothic Line.
Following the war, Cordati returned to his Barga studio, but he didn’t purchase the building that now bears the family name until the end of the 1960s.
Cordati’s original studio on the palazzo’s ground floor is where I found, behind a large wooden desk and a computer, Cordati’s grandson, Giordano. He is the keeper of everything Cordati: the paintings, furnishings, and the story. Giordano’s mother, Bruna Cordati, wrote a brief history of her father called The House of the Painter, which Giordano sells as part of a small collection of other privately published works. Also included are treatises by Australian artist Peter Callas describing his visit to Casa Cordati, and by art historian Sandra Lischi, of the University of Pisa, who wrote an article entitled “The Rooms of the Painter.”
Naturally, daughter Bruna’s brief memoir is the most compelling of the three texts. She briefly outlines her father’s life as a painter, from the end of World War I—he served in the Italian army for four years, winning a medal for valor along the Piave River—until his death in 1979.
Bruna writes that her father’s early paintings do not leap out at you in vivid colors. They seem restrained but “the human figure prevails: he depicted a contemplative humanity, caught in moments of rest from their daily toil.” I appreciated these human elements and the way they are supplemented with brief glimpses of landscape and rooftops. These images capture the town of Cordati’s youth. This medieval look still remains, despite damage from World War II.
His daughter wrote that he was rarely satisfied. He would discard paintings and, while working on a new one, an assistant, armed with sandpaper, would scrape away paint to recycle the expensive canvas of Cordati’s rejects.
Today, grandson Giordano has ambitions for Casa Cordati. He rents the single rooms and the apartment to tourists stopping in Barga for a few days, but he wants to turn the house into an artist retreat. “There is plenty of space for painters to work, and a garden,” he explained. Then he shrugged. “It is a new idea; it will take time.”
Barga, a tiny village of only eleven thousand souls, certainly is a destination for travelers looking for a place where they can enjoy Tuscan springs, summers, and autumns. Views of sienna-colored tiled rooftops and impressive mountain peaks are abundant, and there is a satisfying array of restaurants—I ate in three of them during two visits and was never disappointed.
Like elsewhere in the region, Barga boasts the traditional cathedral and its impressive square, and the old walled town is nearly devoid of automobiles; except for a very few with special permits, cars are corralled in lots flanking the town’s three gates.
Long rows of medieval stone buildings flow along narrow streets that quickly widen into small piazzas filled with small fountains and restaurant tables. There often are narrow stone stairways to lead the walker higher up into the mountains. And near the top, views of the Serchio River valley are spectacular.
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But for the April journey along the Serchio with Filippo, we bypassed the exit to Barga, where I would return later. Our only intention that day was to stop farther north at Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, one of the larger walled medieval towns on the east side of the Apuan range. Here, you can choose to cut east up and over the Apennines on small provincial roads that follow ancient tracks, into the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna and then on to Modena and eventually Bologna. Or you can continue north to Capanne di Sillano, a tiny village near the headwaters of the Serchio. Or you can turn west and work your way over the Alpi Apuane, into the high marble quarries of Massa, and down to the coast north of our starting point, Pietrasanta.
This last choice would cover three distinct areas of northwestern Tuscany: the coastal area around Pietrasanta that is known as Versilia, the deep mountains of Garfagnana and the Serchio River, and the area closer to the coast and north of Versilia known as Lunigiana. This third area sits high in Tuscany’s northwest corner, dominated by the marble quarries of Carrara and Massa.
Castelnuovo is a busy town and is part of the mountainous area known as Garfagnana. It is an inviting stop on this Saturday morning. We enter the fortified walls of the castle that had its origins in the tenth and eleventh centuries. It was fully developed throughout the sixteenth century when it became a seat of power run by provincial administrators from Lucca. There are a lot of people wandering the medieval streets, which are jammed on both sides by interconnected original structures dating back more than five hundred years. A lot of people speak German and Dutch, likely the dominant nationalities of the tourists; the only English I hear exchanged is between Filippo and me.
We stop at a tiny shop that sells bread, various types of salami, and cheeses. The selection is vast. Because the people of this mountainous area are far from the sea, their cuisine focuses on meat and only a few species of river fish.
We sample various meats, including two types of ham: one salted and one without salt. I prefer the salted one. We also ask the friendly shop owner to make sandwiches panini, to have for an improvised picnic farther down the road. He recommends peppery slices from a round of salami cured locally
, along with slices off a ham that had been aged for months by hanging in cool, windowless rooms. Added to this sandwich are thick chunks of a light pecorino cheese, local of course, with everything jammed between halves of rich, crunchy, and wonderfully fresh bread made in the uniquely Tuscan way, without salt. The shop also has a homemade version of short, stubby biscotti; I buy a quarter kilo for later.
With our panini con salame, prosciutto, al formaggio wrapped tightly, we walk within the town’s castle walls one more time before moving on, turning west on a route that would take us east to west through the Apuan range, down into Massa and Carrara, and along the coast to Pietrasanta.
About three miles west of Castelnuovo, Filippo points to a cluster of stone-gray buildings way down in the gorge below. We decide that’s where we will eat our lunch. But there does not appear to be a road down to the tiny village. We stop in the parking area in front of an abandoned restaurant, nearby where the way down must be. To the side of the abandoned restaurant, however, is a level, tree-lined walkway that leads a few dozen yards to a well-kept cemetery. Next to this walkway is a narrow dirt track that drops suddenly down the side of the small gorge. Way below, we see the buildings Filippo had spotted from the road.
Before searching for the way down, we decide to eat our lunch in the shade of trees lining the cemetery walkway. Except for the occasional roar of a passing car or motorcycle, it is cool, pleasant, and quiet there. We pack what remains of our lunch back into the car and head back to the steep path to walk to the town below.
Filippo, who has traveled throughout the American West, said he thinks the village below must be a “ghost town,” abandoned long ago but revisited by descendants who make use of the well-maintained cemetery. As we head down, the narrow trail opens up to a wider view, showing an abandoned church on the shore of what appears to be a man-made lake—its modern-day dam, perhaps 150 yards away, holding back the water of the stream known as Turrite Secca.
The village at the bottom of the trail has, ahead of us, what appear to be crumbling, deserted buildings. But buildings farther back, in the heart of this small cluster, seem to be occupied—laundry is hanging outside of high windows. These structures are packed onto the tip of a small peninsula that juts into the cool-looking, deep-blue water.
“This is Isola Santa,” Filippo offers. I check my map. A village by that name is on it, perhaps three miles west of Castelnuovo. We then hear voices, speaking Dutch or German, as two elderly couples appear on a walkway just ahead of us. They obviously are reconnoitering the town just as we are. As I turn the corner at one building, I spot a well-maintained shop with a coffee bar and shelves of wine bottles. Off its outside wall hangs a sign: CASA DEL PESCATORE—ACCOGLIENZA—HOSPITALITY (House of the Fisherman—Reception—Hospitality). It is a bed-and-breakfast. Inside the shop are a few tables, and on the far side is a tented structure where a man is sitting at a table and tackling a plate of pasta. Guests must park in the lot at the abandoned restaurant above and then are driven down in a vehicle capable of maneuvering the narrow, steep trail. (During a second visit, a few months later, I discovered that guests could no longer enter the village that way. They must drive a few hundred feet farther along the main road and park on the shoulder, taking a narrow stone stairway down into the cluster of buildings.)
We go inside and are greeted by Antonella Tardelli, one of the owners, who serves us cold drinks and tells us that the village is not a ghost town at all. There are forty people who live here year-round, about ten families, and they are slowly restoring the village—the abandoned church, its gutted interior once used to house sheep, has scaffolding filling the interior.
People started leaving in 1949, when a dam was built across the stream and a lake started backing up, threatening the buildings’ stability. The restoration effort is designed to bring life back to the tiny village that got its start nine centuries ago. It has been a stopping point for travelers since the thirteenth century—a place that offered “hospitality” then as it does now.
And, yes, many people stay in the B and B, about fifteen hundred a year, Antonella tells us. Most are Europeans, with the majority coming from the Netherlands. Even a few Americans have been guests there, she says. She provides meals, and guests can fish from the shore of the lake, or just enjoy the solitude. There are plenty of places for long walks, and, within the valley we are driving through, there are trailheads leading hikers to the tops of several Apuan peaks. This all sounds mystical, magical to me. I vow to return for a few days of Isola Santa solitude and try out Antonella’s cooking.
For now, I’m content to just look around. The deconsecrated church, the one with the scaffolding, is Chiesa di San Jacobo. A sign indicates it was first mentioned in documents dated in AD 1260. Early in the seventeenth century, the villagers raised funds to expand the church, build a parsonage, and convert an ancient tower into a belfry.
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The afternoon is moving along. Filippo and I make the climb back to the car and head deep into the eastern flank of the Apuan range, putting the western slopes of the Apennines behind us. Within a mile or two, the landscape quickly shifts. The tree-and-vine-covered foothills disappear as the car begins to climb on an even narrower roadway. Coming into view are the jagged, treeless peaks that mark the beginning of western Tuscany’s marble mountains—Michelangelo’s mountains. We pass the sharply pointed pinnacle of Mount Sumbra (5,728 feet above sea level) and move deeper into the now-barren range whose uppermost peaks are turning marble white. There, near the little village of Arni, is a quarry with a French name, Henraux, that Filippo says was developed by the French during the time of Napoleon III’s rule over northern Italy. It still operates today, but with Italian owners.
More small quarries appear, some operating, some not. We cut through long, dark tunnels that were bored directly through marble outcroppings. Some of the road surfaces through these tunnels, made up entirely of marble and no asphalt, are rough and broken—the result of decades of oxen-pulled carts, and eventually huge semi-trailers, hauling harvested marble blocks to ports on the coast below. In one long, narrow tunnel—we can see only a tiny speck of daylight at the other end—we are met by a roaring semi, heading uphill, its flatbed empty. It squeezes past us on the hummocky, rock-strewn surface. When we emerge into daylight, the whole series of valleys high above coastal Massa appears before us. The white of these shaved mountain peaks is dazzling.
This is the road to Massa and, beyond, to Carrara. We don’t go into Massa but continue over a ridgeline that divides one town from the other, and end up on a road above Cararra, which is spread out below us. We continue a ways north and then turn onto a road heading uphill. On our right side, around a sharp curve, a major quarry appears. We stop, get out of the car, and wander toward a screened-in platform overlooking the huge operation. Heavy machinery is operating. There are fresh cuts exposing still untapped marble next to a weathered wall of decades-earlier work. A few hundred feet toward the mountain face is the opening to a large cave.
Quarries are referred to in Italian as cave (pronounced “cah-vay” in the plural), but most do not tunnel deep into their mountains. Harvesting is usually done off marble faces out in the open. But this quarry is a man-made cavern, in the English sense of the word.
“They cut the marble from inside the mountain,” Filippo says. “Tour groups can sign up to go there, but it is a private operation and has to be reserved in advance.” Perhaps I will do that on another day. Today, the scope of what I can see on the outside of this operation is, in itself, huge. Large blocks of cut marble, some with graffiti indicating Communist sentiments, line the roadway here. I don’t know if they are there as a permanent barrier or if they are waiting for the right buyer and will eventually be cut into slices for countertops, stairways, or facings for someone’s villa high on a hillside, or made into a magnificent statue to be carved by a sculptor in Pietrasanta.
After we explore the quarry, we visit one or two of the smaller villages set along
the steep hillsides. Eventually we drive through Carrara and into the coastal suburb of Avenza, which was the port from which Michelangelo shipped his marble to Pisa or to a port serving Rome.
Now, as was the case with Pisa and the Arno, Avenza’s historic center, where Carrara’s port once was located, is perhaps a mile or so from the beach of the Mar Ligure. This littoral has been filled in over the centuries by silt deposited by the Carrione, a stream with water made milky by the dust of marble quarries twelve miles away. This narrow waterway tumbles through the city and, at a point, flows parallel to the larger Magra River that enters the sea a few miles to the north. Driving along these rivers one can see scattered along their edges for miles and miles white-marble chunks brought down during spring floods from high in the mountains.
We can take the autostrada from here to Pietrasanta, perhaps twelve miles to the south, and avoid stoplights. But true to our plan, we stay on the blue highway. This strada, the Via Aurelia, is now lined with huge marble processing plants and storage yards stacked with giant blocks alongside racks of thinly sliced marble waiting to be turned into steps or countertops. It has its own history that began long before Michelangelo rode his horse up into these valleys. Nothing but the highway’s name hints of Rome these days; the road is a thread that ties together Carrara, Massa, Forte dei Marmi, and Pietrasanta in a remarkable world of marble harvesting launched long before the birth of Christ.
SIX
Sant’Anna di Stazzema
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.