Forgotten photos of il Poggiolo...
The wreck of a house cleaned-up before the four-year re-build…
Spring 2022, when travelling resumed after two consecutive years of Covid-19 Lockdown…
When an Italian friend heard I was going to be in Charleston, South Carolina, where she lives half the year with her American architect husband… of some note, I might add… and the other half of the year perched with him in a terraced villa-with-pool high above the Mediterranean Sea outside Genoa, she asked if I might like to give a talk to her Italian culture group, the Dante Alighieri Society. They’re everywhere in the world, like mushrooms in forests after a rain. I said, No. A typical knee-jerk reaction. Probably hadn’t had a glass of white wine yet. Always improves my receptivity. While I am at it and FYI…
Do not hazard to chat-me-up before I have given the International High-sign that I have sipped dry my second cup of coffee of the morning.
The Italian friend did not take my reply as even remotely acceptable. She remained undaunted. Adamant. Pursued a change of heart with the following flattering enticement… Hey! You could tell the story of your fantastic house in Tuscany. The members will eat it up. You’re living The Dream, you know? Yes, I’ve been previously informed…
A cousin of mine, alighted in fair Codiponte from Addis Abeba on his way to his home in Boston after attending a three-week international conference on Health Care, took one look at me leaning against a beat-up and dusty Hyundai SUV with our Weimaraner hanging out a back window and parked below il Poggiolo, only to holler… Look, dude! You’re living The Dream. Have not been able to shake it since.
The tide did eventually turn in the desired direction on the Italian friend’s fantastic flattery. Still, I equivocated for an extra few moments for dramatic purposes. I like suspense, especially when I have fatto una brutta figura… have embarrassed myself. Yet, perhaps, I just wanted to savour the reverberations of my No before relenting with an enthusiastic… Yes! Actually, the clincher was I had had a congenial idea sprouted during negotiations between that No and Yes! An idea on how-to. What was it? Well, I could draw My Italian House Story with Magic-markers on a big newsprint pad while simultaneously projecting pictorial documents, ie photos, from my vast archive off my laptop. By the way? Where could those photos be?
When did you last take a photo with a roll of film? I haven’t since 2009 with a handy-dandy pocket-sized Olympus film-camera dangled from my neck. Bought it just before You & I had purchased il Poggiolo. I was interested in shooting trash & billboards along the streets of Genoa. Found a better subject personally documenting every phase of restoring the wreck of a Tuscan farm-house we had put money on towards a second life as Our Home in the Lunigiana. How Times have certainly changed with the advent of the iPhone and its camera. Happened mid-stream through our adventure of funnelling €€€’s to builders, electricians, plumbers, painters, etc.. The hard-core construction photos, however, were in print-film and I wanted them for the more mouth-watering part of my talk in Charleston. Somewhere in the house were piles of them. Eureka! happened when I successfully unstuck a drawer of a desk in the Casa Grande, the main part of il Poggiolo.
What a shocker. Apparently, I had DELETED them from my memory. I had to sit down. Then, a question barrelled to the fore as I leafed through the pics… What were we thinking?
Taking a large step backwards to 2009, I want to share a few glimpses of what You saw on his first visit to il Poggiolo a Codiponte on a cold Saturday, the 10th of January 2009. I had had my first visit on the previous Thursday, ridiculously forgetting the Olympus in Genoa. We made an offer after the tour that Saturday and it was accepted on the Monday after…
A second salvo from a overlooked photographic Memory Lane were the those pictures taken in late May of 2009 after the Builder’s Boys had cleared il Poggiolo of all the trash, litter, debris, filth, and icky other stuff… in and around the house & courtyard… and had carted it off to A Somewhere I don’t ever want to know about…
2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 were the years devoted to re-building il Poggiolo…
And now for you to see the fruits of those labours or, what the dream is all about…
And so, a tasting of the past and present, of forgotten and remembered, of a house and home, il Poggiolo a Codiponte.
A view with histories...
Archive post May 25, 2019…
I published the above photo looking out our main entrance at il Poggiolo on Instagram the other day. Miraculously, it got 21 likes. No one bothered to comment beyond liking. Naturally, this tally pales considerably against the 10,723 likes for an Instagram post the very same day of a red Vespa parked in front of a contrasting wall of ochre stucco, probably last slapped-on 250 years ago. Degrado fa bellezza. Might it be more the wall than the Vespa? Chissa? Does rather indicate what people are keen on. Stone ain’t it. But, hey! There’s a lot of histories in my photo…
Hundreds of years ago, Our Favoured Village of Codiponte was nestled on the other side of the Aulella River from where it and Our il Poggiolo stand today and where now stands the Pieve di Codiponte… AKA The Village Church… and a row of houses, one giving refuge to the Scuzzy Bar… at the base of that big, lumpy mountain in the background. That Big Lumpy Mountain… no one has ever mentioned if there is a name attached… is missing good part of itself. Long ago, perhaps at the beginning of the Christian Era, though certainly after the Fall of the Roman Empire, the mountain’s mass above the tree line of olive groves and forests slid down after days and days and days… and days of torrential rains. In a jiffy, old Codiponte was wiped out. Obliterated. Gone. A truly catastrophic occurrence.
The mountain is kind of bald looking, isn’t it? The forests below the tree line, apparently, are inhabited by cingiale… or, boars. Hunting is very important in these parts. A sport every Wednesday & Sunday of the weeks between October & February. Occasionally, a hunter and part-time pyro-maniac, sets fire to those forests to flush out the cingiale from their dark eyries. These jerks… for lack of a better and gentile title… never take into consideration the local winds. The fires do not destroy the forest but, rather thanks to the local winds, burn up and incinerate what greenery has cropped up above the mountain’s tree line since the last incendio… or, forest-fire. Lots of excitement though when a fire erupts. About every two to three years. Helicopters, Canadair turbo-props and lots of fire trucks & vans from Aulla… 30 minutes away… arrive to combat the fiery menace. These various services create a kind of wonky ballet on the ground and in the air but, they do save the day.
Codiponte is in a nearly enclosed valley but for the Aulella River. It meanders to the Mediterranean Sea through a species of canyon the locals refer to as la Gola… or, the throat. A dirt track which follows the river was transformed into an asphalted provincial highway in the 60’s after the devastating floods of ‘66 & ‘67. Are you old enough to remember Florence in 1966? The government sagely saw fit to bring the Lunigiana into the Modern Age with the new infrastructure. Before, you had to drive twisty-windy roads, often only well worn dirt roads, over the mountains between Codiponte and the Mediterranean Sea. The village’s valley makes a wide open bowl. The part towards the course of the sun has olive trees, as shown in the photo, and the part in the shade, chestnut trees. You made you money off the former and lived off the later. Both important for the folk, once-upon-a-time. Not so much today.
The closed up stone house in the photo and opposite our entrance arch was not always so spiffy. Typical of Italian village houses, it’s on two floors. The Ground Floor for the animals… out of view and now has the main entrance to the house, its kitchen and a microscopic seating & dining area… while the Second Floor… its secondary entrance gate is seen in the photo, which today has the house’s only bedroom & bath … is where the inhabitants lived, ate, slept, other. Before the current owners… a unpleasant couple who begrudgingly say Buon Giorno to You & I, if they don’t bolt in the opposite direction when they see us!!!… bought the place and spiffed it up. Sometimes the owner’s grown son from a previous marriage comes with his dog for long holiday weekends and for Codiponte’s sagra in September. He’s nicer. Way nicer, thanks to his Mother. The previous inhabitants were a woman who raised her two children in the house. It was a dump. Dilapidated, leaky roof, cardboard stuffed in the windows, dirty and unkept. Gossip describes her and her family as the poorest in Codiponte. Hard life. Not helped by a job-less, ignorant AND violent husband. He took His Stuff elsewhere.
The ramp, which climbs past the spiffified house and il Poggiolo’s rock retaining wall on the right in the photo leads up to the Borgo Castello. The Codipontesi got smart after the disaster of the sliding mountain and built the new town of Codiponte on top of a hill behind il Poggiolo, along with a castle and a perimeter wall. The later maked up part of il Poggiolo’s courtyard. Over time, the village outgrew its perch and slowly built down to where the village stands today. Progress. In stone.
That’s about it. Now you know more than you did before. Isn’t history fascinating?