Casoli | The Village That Decided to Be Interesting

A mountain commune above Camaiore in the Apuan Alps, and the case for small places doing something

I grew up in a village in Hungary with a handful of streets, and I know what small looks like, and I know the specific silence of a place where nothing has happened for a long time and nothing is planned to, so when I tell you Casoli has maybe five streets, that you can walk all of them in under an hour, and that most of the houses belong to people who are not in them, I am not romanticizing, I am describing a kind of place I recognize from the inside. What I did not recognize, when we finally drove up one Tuesday in the spring of our second year on this coast, was everything else.

We had lived in Versilia for a year before we heard the name. A line in Paspartù, the free cultural monthly I picked up in a café in Pietrasanta one morning over a coffee I was letting go cold, mentioned a graffiti festival up in the mountains. I missed the festival that year. I kept the name, wrote it on the back of the magazine, and forgot about it until the following spring, when Sophia asked me on a Mond…