Castelnuovo di Garfagnana

Originally this show was going to be two separate broadcasts, one focusing on Castelnuovo and one on the Fortezza and the tiny hill town above Castelnuovo of Eglio-Sassi. Then I felt that I would be stretching out a story a bit too far, so decided that it would be more appropriate to combine the albums. This was actually the way we visited all of these places on that lovely day in May when Lidia so graciously drove us all over the area of North Western Tuscany. I would have been hard pressed to find enough material to last for the better part of an hour for two separate shows. As it was this show was only 41 minutes long making it among the shortest broadcasts we ever did.

Ever since our aborted trip to Castelnuovo right after our stay in La Spezia while we visited Cinque Terre in January 2009, I have longed to return. However, the bitter taste of driving on winding roads with hairpin turns made me believe that the best way to revisit the attempt to get there was to have one of our friends with far more experience on such byways drive us up. Returning the car we rented in 2014 in Lucca, right near where Lidia lives in Chiesina Uzzanase seemed the best chance as, after we returned the car, Lidia drove north permitting us to visit first the Devil's Bridge in Borgo a Mozzano, then Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, then serendipitously the Fortezza, and Eglio-Sassi. I say serendipitously because had we not had pizza in that great place in Castelnuovo, we may never have discovered these two amazing locations.

Thus the stage was set for a show on a large swath of North Western Tuscany. I tried in vain to make contact online with someone from the town of Eglio-Sassi first just goggling the town and then following the leads through Facebook. The latter bore the fruit of obtaining some stunning images of Eglio-Sassi in the winter as well as some mundane scenes of a footrace through the town into the countryside. When the three of us first visited the town, we found precious few people around that day. Lidia and I spoke with an elderly woman who told us she had been around the world, but having been born in the town expected to now die there by choice. One can easily see why, amid those beautiful mountains and quaint streets lined with centuries old stone houses. We should also have performed an interview on video, but while Lidia and I spoke with the lady, Laura was nowhere to be seen, off somewhere photographing. Then when Lidia and I sat on the bench overlooking the mountains, there were two men on the bench next to us, but by then I was too exhausted to brother. I think it was a mistake not to bother to interview either the elderly woman or the men; that would have rounded out the show perfectly. Nonetheless, it was a fine show, albeit a bit too short. At this point, having broadcast 107 shows, it doesn't really matter how long the show is so long as it is the better part of the hour.

We are now fully immersed in the Tuscany part (and final segment) of our May/June 2014 trip to Italy. Having consumed the material from Cinque Terre and Lake Como all that remains are two shows, one will be on the day Lidia took us to two of her favorite local towns, Montecarlo and Seravalle, and the next on my request for a return visit to San Miniato to the south of Lidia's house and Vinci to the north east. Both are stunning hill towns and both unvisited by Laura during our many trips to Tuscany. Then, after shows 108 and 109, I am back to scrounging until we again venture back to Italy in late May/June 2015, a trip that will bring us to Florence, Venice, and back to Lake Como. From Florence we intend to again ask Luca and Lidia to take us to Tuscan towns, and then Laura and I will venture south to visit our friend Franco in Civita di Bagnoregio. I have two shows on the drawing board, both begun probably a year ago and both of great interest to me, a show on shopping in Florence and one on my favorite streets of Rome. Then if we still need additional broadcast material, I will have to again try to revisit my creative side (as I did for first two years in 2012 and 2013) and conjure up some new ideas. I could always just have another show called my Favorite Photos of Italy, choose about 25 of the thousands of stunning images we possess and voila, another Alan's Italy original show. We shall see.

The First Tuscany Show, Lucca

When we returned from the last trip in June 2014, we had a lot of material on Tuscan towns including a solo trip we took to Lucca and three days with Lidia. The first day of that part of the trip occurred before we arrived at Lidia's house in Chiesina Uzzanase. On the way from Cinque to Lidia's house we made a stop for the day. Laura selected Lucca, on the way to Lidia's and a town where she had been in 2009 when we both were ill and couldn't see much of the place. I decided that this series of shows on Tuscany should be a chronological tour beginning at our first destination. Using the 2009 visit as a jump-off point, going back briefly to the solo trip I took there in 2001, when I was between marriages, off we went through a very thorough, but not totally complete tour of Lucca, one of the really special hill towns in Central Italy.

The studio end of the experience went more smoothly than anything I have experienced with relation to Woodstock Public Access Television since early last fall. There were no snags at all, the trailer was well heated, and there was not the faint hint of a glitch. Smooth as silk. The show displayed much of the material we had accumulated during the 2014 visit including a view of four churches, two great and well known piazzas, Napoleone and San Michele, lots of views of side streets (with an overwhelming number of bicycles parked along the way), some nice shots of the town's medieval walls, the great outdoor restaurant where we had lunch, and some very great looking gelato. I even showed how we had photographed the actual street on which we parked so as not to lose the car when we returned from the day. All in all an excellent tour of a wondrous Tuscan town.

So now that Lucca is "out of the way" we now take a close look at several "obscure" Tuscan towns, places where the vast throngs of tourists rarely visit. Lidia selected most of them with input from us. We suggested Castelnuovo di Garfagnana (a place where we almost got to in 2009 and always hankered to return), and then the almost totally esoteric village of Eglio-Sassi, where there are few internet references, and the close by to Chiesina villages of Montecarlo and Seravalle. Then to San Miniato, a town I always wanted to return to after Lidia had taken me there in either 2001 or 2002, and then a return visit to Leonardo's birthplace in Vinci. All these will consume the next three shows and bring us to end of the material garnered from last year's trip. After that, who knows? I have some material from old ideas, mostly about Florence, but by then, we return to Italy.