You would have thought me mad, dear reader, if you had seen me a few weeks ago on a mountainside in Italy, beside the base of a medieval tower, carting a three-foot disc of ice to and fro and photographing it in interesting positions among bushes and grasses. Up on the rim of the tower, leaning against old stonework. I got this habit by lifting the ice out of our bird-bath when it has just thawed and photographing it set on edge on pieces of limestone or propped in the fork of a damson tree. It looks like a planet come to earth, or a thin transparent moon which has lost its way and set in our garden.
Five years ago when we first came to this place in northern Tuscany, in the foothills of the Apuian Alps, I went up a steep path behind the house, between terraced olive trees, and found the tower. Beside it, a hut for olive workers is equipped with two blue plastic water butts. In the freezing February nights magnificent shields of ice form on the water. Getting them out is difficult because a pipe leads down from the roof and you have to push the ice a foot down into the water to free it from the end of the pipe. In 1999, our first year here, the ice was two inches thick and very strong. I was able to carry a disc up to the highest course of the tower and prop it on a bush. In one photo the con-trail of a jet flying at 38,000 feet makes a white line which exactly touches the rim of the ice. The image looks like some sort of astronomer's diagram.
The tower was the stronghold of a local war-lord who ruled this district until the more powerful lords of Lucca defeated him. What toppled the tower? It has shifted backwards two metres on its base and the upper two-thirds of it lies in huge chunks, still bound together by their mortar, amongst giant heathers and evergreen mountain oaks. The stub is five metres high and affords steep little rock-climbs. Nobody seems to know why the tower fell. A local man said it was shelled during the War. Which war? When our friend Ron de Cambio pointed out that the fighting bypassed this place, the man said 'Oh, it was the first War - it started in 1918.' So myth grows round the facts.
To the west rises the third of the trio of mountains I have climbed with Ron. First came Monte Matanna in 2000, a peak of dream-like beauty, like a wave gathering from the east, breaking in cliffs on the west, naked ash-white limestone, luminous or seemingly transparent according to the light. Last year we climbed Monte Prana, just behind the old hamlet where we stay. Its grass slopes were so steep I almost had to use my hands, followed by a scramble through a girdle of crags to a bare, stoney summit with the inevitable metal crucifix fifteen feet high and, on the ground at its foot, a plastic Nativity scene with donkey, manger, baby Jesus, Joseph and Mary an' all.
| The views from these peaks strikes you dumb with wonder not just at the great brows and flanks and sinuously folded dales of the mountains but at the sight of a whole intricate civilisation laid out before you. The Apennines, white-crested in the east, ripple down the length of Italy. The Gulf of Spezzia, turquoise with a gold sheen, stretches west towards Genoa. Corsica is a mountain-range rising out of the south-western sea. At your feet small hills flatten out abruptly into the coastal plain. The woods and terraced slopes are sprinkled with villages and separate houses - their tiled roofs look like solid orange knitting. The little crofts are already ( late February ) dug over and the light-brown earth is being planted with onions, spinach, beetroot, and greens. |
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Alliano, a few hundred yards below our hamlet, has a small vineyard with perhaps a hundred vines, which look dead and will be laden with grapes by September. In the middle distance the lowland glitters with plastic greenhouses full of tomatoes, salad leaves, and flowers. Beyond you can see the shallow lake where Puccini had his house, writing La Boheme and constantly shooting birds of all sizes.
This year our goal was Monte Gabberi, Witches' Mountain, the lowest of the three at 1108 metres. It's made easier by the road which hairpins up to about 500 metres. Then you climb or contour by the usual maze of Tuscan footpaths. This will always be the most atmospheric thing to me - spending an hour or more in continuous woodland. When could we last do this in Britain? Centuries ago. You move between tree trunks hour after hour, past tiled barns and herds' or woodsmen's shelters, treading on layers of rustling oak and sweet-chestnut leaves. The peacefulness of it - the dappled shadow, the traces of people's usage over many generations, the glimpses of high peaks whose summits are white with either quarried marble or snow - makes up an atmosphere where time doesn't matter and you could be living in any century.
