Auguri to everyone - from Italy

I'm having a bit of a blog holiday at the moment - travelling to England for a few days to see my children and grandchildren, and then back to Italy again for the beginning of a new year.  It's 18 months now since I came to Italy to live and I love it more every day.  I realise how lucky I am to live in a town dedicated to the arts and where working in some kind of creative discipline is completely normal!
 
The Piazza has fewer lights this year, but the tree looks very elegant in white.  The light projections on the paving and the walls are lines from poetry in different languages.


Poems are being projected onto the streets too.

And the walls of buildings.  On Sunday a Chinese poet will be reading his poems live in the Piazza - sadly I'll already be in England.

Pietrasanta's past is being commemorated too - with photographs of people who used to live and work here - many of them now dead.

It gives a sense of the layers of history in this town - you walk around the streets and you're very aware that you're walking among the ghosts of the dead - artists and artigiani, writers and poets, priests and nuns, shop-keepers, restaurateurs, marble merchants, their wives and children.  There are reminders everywhere - a tower designed by Michaelangelo, a piazza dedicated to Giordano Bruno, a niche in a wall to Carducci, a church decorated in 14th c frescoes by an unknown painter - and there are less obvious homages - a local shop-keeper has a shrine to Mussolini in the back room.  The photographs of the ordinary people who once crowded these streets, complete the sensation of walking back into the past.

I wish everyone Tanti Auguri for whatever seasonal celebrations you observe and all the traditional hopes for Peace and Prosperity in the coming year.  Neil and I will be having our traditional anti-commercial-christmas, somewhere out in the landscape, cowering behind a wall from the bitter December wind (and northern rain)  eating mincepies and drinking coffee (probably corretto!) out of a flask.  No presents, and the hills all to ourselves.

Comments

  1. What a wonderful form of decoration.
    Painting the past over the present in light, inspired.

    Enjoy your family time!

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  2. Just dashed in from Christmas shopping to have everything put into perspective by your lovely post. Oh, how I long to live in a town that projects poetry onto pavements and the walls of buildings. Having said that, I'm just about to start a year-long blog on my own town - 'My Tonight from Shrewsbury' and am much inspired by yours and can quite see why it's growing on you. There's nothing so grand as Michaelangelo here, but it's interesting what you CAN find if you look...

    Hoping that the cowering isn't beneath too bitter a December wind and northern rain - all good wishes for a Happy Christmas.

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  3. Thanks for your good wishes Al - will be thinking of you over in Oz!
    Pauline - your blog sounds really interesting - let me know the link so that I can follow.

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