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, n…