'LIBERTY' HOUSE DETAIL

This is a "Liberty" house, for which read art nouveau. They are called Liberty because Liberty's of London was the place to buy items designed in the art nouveau style. By the same token, tee shirts are still called "fruiti" because the first ones imported into Italy were made by the American firm, Fruit of the Loom.

I spent an hour removing the cable and wires from the picture only to discover there were areas of the building that looked as if they had been photo shopped by an elephant so I went back to the original. This is straight from the camera. There are two of these faces at each corner, eight in all.

The city of Lucca must have enjoyed a period of affluence between 1890 and 1914 because a large number of houses in this style were built. Some are modest and some are elaborate. They are difficult to photograph because most of them are well hidden by trees planted at the time of their construction, huge iron fences with enormous gates and much shrubbery.

They say there is a distinct difference between the people who live inside the walls and those who live outside them. The ones inside are meant to be mean in the Scots sense (tight fisted) whereas those, such as the people who live houses like this one, are meant to be generous. There's a joke, which may lose something in the translation, but here it is:

Three men were having a glass of wine at a bar. A fly dropped into the glass of a man from Florence. He said, "Eeew, bring me another glass, waiter." Then a fly dropped into the glass of the man from Pisa. He picked it out and knocked back the wine. Then a fly dropped into the glass of the man from Lucca. He gripped the fly by the wings, held it over the glass and said, "Now, spit-it-out!"

Detail of faces. I see one face has a fly on it. You see I can focus if am not being honked at by irate drivers. Faces.

Detail of a flashier art nouveau house. Flashy house.

I always wanted to see inside one of these houses and got my chance when we had to sign some documents at a lawyer's office which was in one of them. I was doomed to disappointment. He had done it up ultra modern. It was so modern that the wash hand basin in the loo was of swoopy glass and the loo seemed to be floating in the air. We sat at a conference table made of thick glass through which knobbly knees could be seen. (It was summer, people were in shorts.) The chairs were black, high backed, witch-like bum busters. The lawyer's chair, however, was a positive throne. The walls were covered with his wife's abstract expressionist paintings, none of them good.