Introduction to Castelnuovo

We're back from Italy, and there's so much to tell that I'm not sure how to tell it. Perhaps the best way would simply be to post a few of the best photos from each place and explain something about what it was like. So, first of all, let's go on a tour of the small town where we stayed for two weeks, Castelnuovo di Garfagnana. It's important because it sets the stage for everything else.

As with all small Italian towns, we start in the main square:

The square has traffic, but there are no clear lines, so people watch out for pedestrians as they drive. There is an order to it all, but it's not expressed in rules. In fact, all of Italian life works somewhat the same way.

The 11th C. castle, called La Rocca (pretty much all town castles in Italy are called that) is the main landmark, and gives the town its name, Castelnuovo. Garfagnana is the name for the general area, and it gets tacked on because there are "Newcastle"s all over Italy. The town is in a river valley surrounded by gentle mountains. A little to the west are much starker, higher mountains.

And the man with the violin case walking through the town square is Dmitri Berlinsky, CZ's teacher during the festival. He is on his way to one of their lessons.

Once you walk under the castle arch, the Centro is off limits to cars. In fact, there are plenty of Italian towns that are too narrow for cars at all, but more about this later.

The top photo is the main street in the pedestrian area. After a short walk (where you see the sun dipping down into the shadow), you turn right and find yourself at the Piazetta Ariosto (second photo above), which is where you enter La Rocca. It was also the main site for all things related to the festival, so during the time we were there you could usually hear someone playing in one of the upper rooms. Great acoustics!

La Rocca's entrance is more Baroque than medieval, and the red stucco gives a rosy hue to all activities within the piazzetta.

The fact that there's a pasticceria right there in the square helps with the rosy feeling, too. Here's Bob having his morning cappuccino. He never, ever orders one after noon, though! The chocolates in this pasticceria were works of art--little wrenches, paintbrushes, puzzle pieces, Mayan symbols, and of course, for the festival, violins and music notes.

As you keep walking, there are a few more town streets and a Duomo with a campanile, or belltower. As with most Italian towns, you could hear the bells all over town. And the swifts, of course. All Italian towns have screaming swifts.

If you keep going through the town, you soon come to a little stone garden and an arch (right) which is actually part of the city wall, and leads to a bridge. (One of the photos below shows the other side of the wall, and from that angle this garden is inside the wall just to the right of the gate.)

As you pass through the arch, you find yourself outside the town walls, overlooking the Serchio River:

There's more of the town on the other side of the bridge, but not much. That over-the-river section, though, happens to include our favorite restaurant in Castelnuovo, Triti, and a 19th century theater with box seats, where the festival held some of its performances. But the main reason I took this particular photo was to show how the Italians built up every available space within a town. The spot shown below is also a picturesque place to watch the sun set behind the river, though I never happened to have my camera handy at sunset.

Here's a view of the city walls from the other side of the bridge. I read on a sign that the walls were remodeled in the 18th century. I think the originals are from the 11th century. From some photos in Triti, the restaurant, I could see that there used to be buildings on either side of the gate, but those were lost in the bombing during WWII.

And this brings me to my last point in my introduction to Castelnuovo and Italy in general. There are still signs here and there of all periods of history, and the slanting walls in the photos above are no doubt also remnants of the bombing. But generally, no one was interested in restoration until recently, so they would just remodel as they went along in whatever was the current style. La Rocca is medieval and Baroque. Many churches reflect four or five periods of architectural history. And one can usually find remnants of the previous periods in the basements. Italian towns are very archeological, very layered.

Our landlord, Sr. Bertolani, told us that he thought Castelnuovo was too busy. "You go up into the small mountain towns, and there are old people there. They say, 'Let's go have a drink and talk about the war.' Those people won't be around for much longer, and what they have to say will be lost." He spoke a combination of Italian and English, so I'm paraphrasing, but I'm sure that was the main idea. He says these things without bitterness, even though the building we stayed in, part of his family estate, was bombed. No one is even quite sure which side did the bombing, and the area, which is in the mountains, was a haven for the resistance.

When the Bertolanis asked me what I thought about Castelnuovo compared to New York, I had to answer very simply, because I was speaking Italian. So I said, "New York is to Castelnuovo as Castelnuovo is to the small towns in the mountains." They looked very thoughtful after I said this. I was thinking that the Bertolanis always had time to talk to us, and we learned all about the area from them, the same way they learned from the old people in the mountains. In New York, few people have time to talk, and most people are more interested in what's going on now. An ample sense of time and hospitality are typical of Italy and form the basis for everything else I'll write and post.

Next, our hosts and our house...