Barga | The Scottish Accent
A medieval walled town in the Serchio Valley, and what happened when a Tuscan diaspora came home
We were trying to get to Garfagnana. That is worth saying at the start, because the best afternoons in Italy are the ones you did not plan. It was July, the coast was unlivable, we pointed the car at the Serchio Valley with a vague idea of chestnut forests and cool air, and somewhere on the road up we took a turn we should not have taken and ended up at the gate of a town I had never heard of. This happens to me often enough now that I trust it. Let the accident lead. You end up in places you would not have found on purpose.
Barga was today’s accident.
It sits at four hundred meters on a ridge above the Serchio, and the Apuan Alps rise behind it in a way that changes what a Tuscan town is allowed to be. Most of Tuscany is gentle. Rolling hills with cypress-lined approaches, the kind of landscape that made a thousand tourism posters. The Apuans do not roll. They break. The towns they build are vertical, stacked, pressed inward against their own stone, and Barga is a real medieval town, not a village pretending to be one. Ten thousand people. Three gates. A cathedral at the top. The buildings go up, and the streets go up, and there is no horizontal in the whole place.
I parked at Porta Reale and we walked in.
The first thing you notice, and the thing nobody mentions in any of the Tuscan hill-town literature, is that Barga is flying the wrong flag. I saw a Scottish saltire hanging from a window somewhere in the first fifty meters. Then another. Then a tartan pattern in a shop, woven in red and green, which I did not yet know was the Barga tartan, the town’s own, in the colors of the Italian flag. I stopped and Googled. This is how I learned what I was walking through.
The story is this. For most of the nineteenth century, Barga was a town of figurinai, itinerant plaster-figurine makers who walked across Europe with baskets of painted saints and miniature emperors, selling door to door. When Italy unified, and the economy collapsed under Napoleonic debt, the craftsmen walked further. France first. Then Germany. Then, for reasons nobody has fully explained, a large number of them ended up in Scotland, mostly on the west coast, mostly in Glasgow and along the Clyde. They opened fish-and-chip shops and ice-cream parlors. They married Scots. Their children grew up with Glasgow accents. Their grandchildren opened more shops. Eventually, somebody in the fourth generation got curious about the village in Tuscany their great-grandfather had walked out of with a basket, and came back. Many of them stayed. The current estimate is that between 40 and 60 percent of Barga’s residents have Scottish relatives. The town is twinned with East Lothian. There is a red British telephone box in one of the squares that functions as a book exchange, billed as the smallest library in Tuscany. In August, the Sagra del Pesce e Patate runs for three weeks and serves fish and chips to 300 people each night.
We had walked into a festival. I never got the name. Young girls were dressed as witches, with black hats and brooms. Boys were dressed as medieval knights with painted wooden swords. I asked a group of teenagers what the festival was, and they told me, and I forgot immediately, because I was looking past them at the light on the stone and the streets climbing and the old women on balconies with their arms folded, watching the witches and knights pass below them with the specific patience of people who have seen their children do this every year since 1975. The Italian relationship to tradition is not American. It is not a performance for outsiders. It is the village doing what the village does, and if you happen to be there, you are welcome to watch.
We climbed. It is the only direction Barga offers. The streets narrowed and then narrowed again, and finally opened into the flat green lawn at the summit, the Arringo, where the Romanesque Duomo di San Cristoforo has stood since the eleventh century. The church is not pretty. Pretty is the wrong word. It is heavy and plain, and the color of old bone, and the little blind arches at the top of the facade stand against the sky like a line of closed eyes.
In front of the Duomo’s side door, on the green, someone had installed a small exhibition of contemporary sculpture. Five or six white marble pieces on simple plinths. Abstract, mostly. A few figurative. The artists had English names. I did not visit the exhibition properly. I did not read the cards. I stood for a while and looked.
The marble was Carrara, or something close to it, quarried an hour away in the Apuans. British and Scottish sculptors had come down to Barga, carved Italian stone, and placed their work against a facade that a Lombard mason had carved in 1100 using the same material. The lunette above the door showed a Last Supper in weathered relief. A contemporary bust sat on a plinth three meters in front of it. A thousand years of people working the same rock.
You could have written the whole piece about that lawn.
On the wall of the churchyard, two teenagers were kissing. In my head, I call them pigeons, Italian teenagers, because they coo at each other on walls and ledges and do not care who is watching. They were not watching the exhibition either. They were watching each other, and the witches passing below, and the light on the valley, and nothing in particular. This is what a Tuesday afternoon in a small Italian town should contain. Old stone, new marble, a festival nobody needed to explain, and two kids in love against a seven-hundred-year-old wall.
We went into the church. You go from July into a stone coolness that stops you for a second while your skin adjusts. The nave is almost black. The windows are small and high and medieval, designed to protect stone from weather and bodies from heat, not to let in light. Your eyes take a minute. When they adjust, the church opens above you, higher than it should be for its footprint, held up on columns that have not moved since before the First Crusade.
We stayed a long time. You do not plan to. The cool air keeps you. The dark keeps you. Eventually, I walked toward the main door, which was open, a crack of white July light splitting the dark wood vertically from top to bottom, and the floor in front of me lit up in a single stripe. Sophia was behind me with the camera. I stopped in the stripe and she took the picture.
It is the only photograph I have from Barga that I will keep for the rest of my life. A man walking out of a medieval church into summer. The threshold is the photograph.
By then, it was half past two and Italy was closed. Every shop front down the steep streets had the rolled-metal shutter, the handwritten torno alle 16:30 sign, the siesta that foreigners always misread as laziness, and locals know is actually discipline. You learn, after a while in this country, that the closing is the point. The whole day is built around it.
We found one place open. A café at the bottom of the old town, near Porta Reale, where the owner had either miscalculated his break or forgotten it entirely. He served us pasta with wild-boar ragù, classic in the mountains, and a pizza we had not ordered but which arrived anyway, probably because it was easier than explaining in English that the kitchen was technically closed. The ragù was good, the way afternoon food in mountain Tuscany is always good: dark, slow, a little bit sweet, with the gamey edge that wild boar keeps even under four hours of cooking. We ate it, looking up at the town we had just walked down from. The witches and knights had dispersed. The teenagers were probably still on their wall. The light had started to soften.
I thought about Scotland on the drive home. I have lived in England for years, but have never made it up to Scotland, which I regret and still plan to fix. I thought about the men who walked out of this place with baskets of plaster saints and ended up in Glasgow, and about their great-grandchildren coming back in rental cars and buying back the family houses, and about the kind of diaspora that is patient enough to return in its fourth generation. Most emigrations do not end. The people leave, and a hundred years later, the village is empty, the church is closed, and the language is gone. Barga’s emigration ended. The loop closed. The descendants came back and brought the accent with them, as one of the town's sounds.
I think the stone did that.
I think the stone the Italians carve from the Apuan quarries an hour down the road is the same stone the figurinai were carrying out of Barga in baskets in 1870. The saints they were selling in Glasgow were made of the rock of the mountain behind their own houses. When their great-grandchildren returned in the 1990s, they found the stone they had inherited without knowing it. You do not forget the mountain your family is made of. You just take a while to find your way back.
