The richness in Tuscan villages

Last week I went to Sommocolonia again. Staying with one of my oldest friends in the Garfagnana region of north-western Tuscany I decided to revisit the small village where I spent part of a long summer holiday between my first and second years at university. A group of maybe 12 of us had rented a tall stone house high on an Apennine ridge above the little cathedral town of Barga. I remember being surprised by how green everything looked at the end of summer - Sommocolonia is surrounded by chestnut forests - and by the dramatically pointed peaks of the Apuan Alps across the Serchio valley.

A few other memories survive; an excruciating walk along a bucolic path with a girl I had become close to at the end of the summer term, who seemed to have been transformed into someone completely different in the space of three months, 20lb lighter, suddenly way ahead of me in emotional time: a gulf opened up between us.

Otherwise I suppose we did the usual things - cooked suppers in a long kitchen with plenty of cheap wine, went for mountain walks, had the sort of conversations you have at that age, and drove into Barga. I still have a photograph of my friend Robert enjoying breakfast in bed with his roommate, the future editor of a national newspaper.

Going back to Sommocolonia I didn't know if I would recognise the place, or the house, or how much everything would have changed. Not much had altered, physically. A couple of new, rather suburban villas had sprung up along the road out of the village. It wasn't difficult to find the tall stone house, shuttered and empty-looking, above the village square with its spreading plane tree.

Fortunately, perhaps, the past did not seem to have much hold on the present. I was not especially oppressed by the passing of time, or lost opportunities, or youth (though my friend Nick's eldest son was there for the first night with his girlfriend, exactly the age we were in Sommocolonia). The place we were staying, in the even smaller village of San Romano, had much more reality for me than the ghostly memories of 30 years ago. It also had a rather splendid swimming-pool.

Every morning on this recent trip we would walk down to the village to collect bread from the bread van, which did a circuit of small mountain communities without bakers. This little social ritual was not just about bread. It was an opportunity for meeting and greeting - "Buon giorno!", said not just mechanically, but as if it really meant something, from the heart. One morning the bread van had moved about 50 metres, and we received detailed directions, just in case we missed our loaf, which came in a paper bag marked "inglesi".

There is not much to see, in a touristic sense, in San Romano - ordinary village houses huddled round an undistinguished church. "The architecture is poor, and many of the houses falling down and for sale," says the local guidebook with undisguised scorn. Historically, I knew, the Garfagnana was the poorest part of Tuscany. But I found myself thinking that the poverty or richness of the architecture is not the whole story. The warmth of a greeting can mean more than the splendour of an escutcheoned doorway.

Four kilometres beyond and above San Romano is the much more picturesque village of Motrone, perched on a high saddle. We made our way up there, looked around and tried to communicate our appreciation of the village's austere beauty to a trio of elderly residents. "Non e bello", said one of them. Winters must be hard there, I ventured. But I think she had meant more than that.

Then another memory of Sommocolonia came back to me. Walking round the village, 30 years ago, we had met an engaging character called Jock, who invited us into his home and regaled us with grappa. Jock was part of the postwar Garfagnana exodus to Scotland: many Garfagnanini had earned a living, better than the poor one available from their stony soil, selling alabaster figurines of the Virgin Mary to the Catholics of Glasgow. He had married a Scots wife, who smiled at us from an armchair. Communication might have been smoother if Jock's combination of Glasgow accent and Italian syntax had been less pungent, or if his wife had been able to interpret (she was completely deaf).

All the same, the warmth and human essentials came through. Jock told how Sommocolonia had been the centre of fierce fighting in December 1944, captured by the Americans, retaken by the Germans, taken again finally by the Americans, with considerable loss of life. Jock's sister, aged 12, had been killed, in the room where we were sitting sipping our grappa, by a ricocheting bullet.

Suddenly, on this return trip 30 years later, I realised that people make places. Sommocolonia was Jock and his wife, and his sister who had died 35 years before that first visit. San Romano was the greeting extended to foreigners. The poor architecture glowed with an unextinguishable human warmth.

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harry.eyres@ft.comMore columns atwww.ft.com/eyres

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