Walking back to health and happiness

The following article was published in The Times, London, on August 9, 1997. The author stayed in a farmhouse very close to La Torretta.

What do I remember best? Wild flowers in a Coca-Cola bottle at a tiny shrine for the Virgin, beside a mountain path; trees hung with cherries and red geraniums in window boxes; an aching bottom from riding a mountain bike too fast down a long track newly-surfaced with small limestone boulders; the Gothic windows in the apse of the cathedral at Barga, glazed with thin sheets of coloured marble; fireflies lighting up a hillside, like Harrods at Christmas, and fields of long stemmed wheat, each one, said a cynic, waiting, for its cheque from Brussels.

We stayed between the Apuane Alps and a spur of the Apennines. "Chiantishire" is far to the south and, when English is spoken in the Garfagnana in northern Tuscany, it may well be with a Scottish accent. In the depression at the end of the last century many people emigrated to Scotland. Many have come back. The apparently Italian manager of the Villa Libano hotel in Barga, where we ate on our first night, had played rugby for Scotland under-16s.

The base is in an old farm a few kilometres from Barga. The stone outbuildings have been converted into comfortable bedrooms. No group is bigger than 14 and there are always two guides for the walking or biking. With one guide at the front and the other at the back, everyone can go at his or her own speed. Northern Tuscany can provide some rugged walking, but nothing beyond the ability of the reasonably fit and well shod. Biking can be more demanding. Particularly if the last time you cycled was a decade or three ago. But old skills reassert themselves, although mountain-bike gears, which make those on a four-wheel-drive truck seem unsophisticated, can take a morning to get used to. Muscles, unused and forgotten, can complain for days.

I prefer to walk. In early June the countryside was still full of wild flowers. Valerian grew out of dry stone walls, there were showers of dog roses in hedgerows, blood-red poppies, wild lupins, broom and, in the mountain meadows, tiny orchids and pinks. We walked up through chestnut forest, then through beech to the meadows above the tree line. Like many Italian hills, the Pania di Corfino has a cross on its highest point. We sat around it and looked out over the Serchio valley to the distant Apuane Alps.

The limestone tops of the Apuanes are almost bald. The white in many north-facing gulleys was snow, even in June, but the largest expanse of white was a marble quarry. The stone is cut into 20-ton blocks, each priced at about £20'000, and today almost all of it goes to the Middle East. Michaelangelo got the marble for his statues of David from the Apuanes, and it stands in the Galleria dell'Accademia in nearby Florence.

The Apennines, on the northeast side of the Serchio, are older, softer and more forested. Reafforestation has been going on for decades. Later in the year, guides will keep much of the walking within the tree line, but in June the sun was hot but far from unbearable. In February and March they will be leading snow-shoe walks along the high rides. On a summer day it was difficult to imagine.

I go on walking holidays determined to lose weight. Exercise puts an edge on appetite, food is good, drink plentiful, and I end up telling myself that muscle weighs more than fat, as an unconvincing explanation of weight added, not lost. We ate simply but well. A typical picnic lunch was potato bread, salami, cheese, quiche, porcetta, prosciutto, tomatoes and fruit. Dinner was usually antipasto, soup, pasta, a meat dish, salad and a pudding.

With one notable exception, the Tuscan white wines we drank were good and so were the reds. One red was memorable. We drank it on the terrace of a small restaurant in Albiano. The label on the bottle was stuck on with tape and read "Vino delle Colline di Albiano" (wine of the Albiano hill), a modest enough bush. It has a rich blackcurrant colour and had a thick, earthy taste. We sat on the terrace, with antipasto and crostini, and the old bottle went to and from the barrel from which it was filled.

The awe-inspiringly bad white wine was made almost acceptable by the setting in which it was drunk. And, to be truthful, we got through quite a lot of it. We were eating at a table outside a farmhouse. The sun had gone down, fireflies glittered and, here and there, a glow-worm switched itself on or off to announce its availability to any other interested glow-worm. Dinner was a huge, filling farm affair. The wine was thick, acrid and smelt of apples.

Every hill in Tuscany has its own town, or village, or hamlet "which, hid by beech and pine, like an eagle's nest, lies on the crest of purple Apennine", as Macaulay wrote. The town of Barga is bigger than most, partly walled and best entered through the Porta Reale, or Mancianella. From the old gate steep little streets, hardly altered in centuries, climb up to the cathedral set on a small plateau at the top. It commands not just Barga as it tumbles downhill, a jumble of red-tiled roofs, but the whole Serchio valley, and the far mountains.

The cathedral has an early 13th-century pulpit, which is a masterpiece of carving, in near-perfect condition. The 13th-century Gothic apse should be seen, as I saw it, with its great doors open, the sun going down, and shadows beginning to darken the Apuane Alps across the valley. Of all my memories, perhaps that will last the longest.

David Whitaker