To the Garfagnana

This was a day I was slightly dreading. I'd arranged to go and look at a few houses unsure if any of them were of any interest. It's a long and not particularly nice drive to the Garfangna - that lies to the north east of Lucca - from Florence. Two and something hours of city driving, motorways, a tiresome cut-across on busy roads and then the single main road up the Serchio valley to the Garfagnana (ga -fan-YAR-na).

The Principal was at her workshop early and I drove away in the rental car. The sun shone and it felt warm through the windscreen. I had even had the foresight to pack some supplies knowing how long and lonesome days on the house-hunting road can get.

I had a meeting at 14.00 with an estate agent but first I wanted to look at some places in a valley to the south of Barga. I'd looked at this area pretty closely using Google Earth, Street view and detailed Italian maps.  As I rose up the hills the view of the Alpi Apuane was pretty staggering (Extra). I reached and quickly passed through the little town of Coreglia Antelminelli  which stood stark against steep, snowy cliffs of the Apennines (main photo).

I was surprised by the sheer scale and tightness of the valley with vertiginous wooded slopes with a wild torrent bed in the bottom. Tiny roads that wound along precipitous edges with a fresh litter of fallen rocks and being a sharp reminder of the frequency of landslides and slips in this area.

I edged my way along the thankfully deserted roads which are single track and where passing places are far and few between. Birds sang in a riot of early spring song and hellibores and pale yellow flowers - coltsfoots - scattered the miserly verges and high banks.

I passed through a tiny hamlet and past one house I had taken  a look at on the internet. It was pretty ramshackle, with roofing felt making do for tiles in some places. Someone had even stuck a miniature white cheap porcelain model of Rodin's 'The Kiss' into the cement on the roof- ridge.

It was already 11.00 and the house was still in deep shade. Further, an estate agent's blurb had claimed that the land that went with the house was mainly on the flat. Yes, there was a patch of flat land but most was jacked up at an angle of at least  45 degrees and crashed down towards the torrent with a thin covering of ancient oak trees that someone was brutally cutting down for firewood. At a tiny lay-by a white, Brit registered  Land Rover Discovery had been abandoned, its tyres sunk low on the edge of oblivion - a faded saltire winked balefully from one of the bumpers.

Some new asphalt had been laid, which was comforting as the road began to climb in earnest. I passed old chestnut mills - people used to subsist on chestnut flour in the high Apennines which was ground from chestnuts that were dried for forty days over slow fires in a specially built drying house called  a 'metato'.

The air grew colder and the clear water of the urgent torrents chuckled down falls from icy-looking pools of reassuring clarity.  Then another mill, a bit of a construction site and a large pile of freshly cut timber. A sign said that the road was not open to traffic in 100 metres. I parked up, grabbed some chocolate and trudged up a steep incline of roughly laid concrete.

Above was a sloping open field of withered dry grass that looked as if it had been hammered flat. A farmhouse stood at the upper edge of the field and behind some rather neat chestnut woodland rose in a sheen of ashen greys until it petered out and the cliffs of the central crinale - ridge/arrete - of this part of the Appenines stood like a wall in the hard blue sky (extra).

I walked a bit further but wondered if I had gotten onto the wrong road. I only had a small scale map of the whole of Tuscany - about three times the size of Kent - and there was not, perhaps not surprisingly, any mobile signal. I had stepped over a chain across the road and ignored the sign that said I was entering private property. I wondered if a big fierce dog with a spiked collar to ward off the wolves that perhaps still roam in the high Apennines  might come bounding down from the distant house with wild eyes and fearsome teeth.

So I reluctantly turned and went back to the car and drove slowly away. Later back in Edinburgh I realised that I had been very close to the mill I was looking at over 1000 metres of altitude.

I pootled along having not seen a soul since the one man in the distant hamlet. I found the little smallholding I was after down in the bottom of the high valley. I had missed it on the ascent because the avenue of pine trees in the multiple estate agents' photos on the internet was no more: it had been cleared out and a huge pile of trash had been pushed over the bank.

I liked the look of the place on a bastion above the torrent which must rage at times when heavy thunderstorms hits the crinale and surrounding valleys. I then continued down over a cast concrete bridge over the wild tumble of the river bed and proceeded along tiny roads with frequent repaired landslips until I eventually reached Barga.

By now the weather was deteriorating rapidly and the valleys of the Alpi Apuane had taken on a dark threatening palette of bruised greys while clouds jumbled above the crags and threatened a storm. (extra) I thought of Turner struggling by horse and coach through the real Alps two hundred kilometres further north with his sketch book in hand catching the dark majesty of it all.

I was now a bit behind schedule and had to push on to find the tiny place at 850m under the bulk of the Alpi where I had rather foolhardily arranged to meat an estate agent. I got there, passing through another slightly forlorn village at 950m before dropping down another narrow winding road to the village sitting on the edge of a south facing rampart with the most stunning views (I had been told) of the soaring mountains (from whence comes all that marble that fuelled the Renaissance and sculptors ever since).

The house was interesting and after a quick coffee in front of a hurriedly made open-fire - many of the houses in the mountains are rarely used summer houses that belonged to long or not-so-long dead relatives - I was chasing the estate agent's Jeep back down the road, along the Serchio valley and up onto another steep, but less slightly less dizzy slope.

This bit I did as a passenger in the agent's Jeep. He was a most interesting guy. We saw another house - owned by a Danish couple.

By now it was raining and had grown thoroughly miserable. We chatted on and I got the feeling that he would have really liked me to buy this house for some reason - agents often act for both buyer and seller which is complicated. Lorries down on the main road ground up the incline and put me off the house for ever.

Eventually we drove back to where I'd left the rental and I started the long haul back to Florence. The drive had its moments and towards the end, as I made my way up tiny, high-walled lanes that skirt round the back of Florence it had grown dark, an impatient car was blazing away behind me and at a ninety degree bend I managed to just clip the back of the car of the hard enduring rock of Renaissance Florence.

The cheap Chianti I had picked up in a rare, Penny Wise, supermarket came in handy as a salve and rescue remedy for my wounded pride after a long and adventurous day.