May 13th - Travel to Barga

Travel today from San Albino north and west past Arezzo and Firenze to Lucca. Tourist info and lunch in beautiful, old walled town of Lucca then north up the river valley into the Garfagnana. This is a beautiful area between two ranges of mountains. Over the range to the west is the Mediterranean, and over the range to the northeast is Parma and Milano and Verona. In between is a steep valley of mountains and small towns. Tourists don't go here much because of the roads and lack of attractions. This is our hotel - scanned from an old postcard.


Barga is a medievil town originally tied to the defence of Florence. It was made an independent city-state by Florence on condition of continued allegiance. There is still an annual cerimony to proclaim and re-affirm this allegiance. You need to know all that for the May 14th post. There will be a quiz.

The Albergo is run by Roberto, a lovely man with limited English (making his English far better than our Italian) and a great attitude. His food and wine are superb. Our room is one of two with a balcony. The kids arranged to have flowers sent to Penny at the hotel for Mother's Day (confusing Roberto). Penny was presented with the flowers as we entered the dining room around 8:30 pm. She was completely blown away! And then we had the first of our Roberto dinners. We ate here as often as possible, the man makes wonderful meals.

These are morning and evening pictures from our balcony. The morning sun highlights the marble mountains to the west and the evening sun picks out the old Roman outpost on the hill to the northeast. And we hiked up there on the cobble stone mule road the Romans laid in around 800 or so. But I am ahead of myself, that happened tomorrow.

Wonderful little town with the old town and church at the top, and the new town with the two brothers running the aliementare (local food shop with meats, cheese, wine, detergent) and the little wine shop and the jewellery shop and ...

I am playing fast and loose with history here. These pictures come from our hike tomorrow, but they put Barga in context within the mountains and history. Besides, I need the space tomorrow for the festival. The two broad scenes are Barga - old town and new - from the hiking trail, sort of. The one with the grape vine is from someone's field as we were completely lost on the decent. And then there is Barga in the background from the top of the hill with the very old church.