Pontassieve

It was a morning of transcendent beauty. Cooler air had moved in overnight and the clarity of the light and detail was stunning.

It being Pasquetta - Easter Monday - Italy was in it's most relaxed mode. I went out looking for bread and milk to no avail. A Chinese emporium was open in Sieci but sold no food. I went to the eponymous Firenze Co-op in Pontassieve but it was closed. Everything but for a shop selling cakes was closed.

I took the opportunity to walk around Pontassieve's old town. As it says in the name the town is where there is a bridge (now four bridges) over the Sieve river which drains down from the Mugello and joins the Arno at Pontassieve.

The town was badly bombed by the Allies in the war as the Gothic Line moved north after the Nazi's had invaded Italy. The main Florence-Rome train runs through the town and the bridges were strategically important.

To be honest it is not the finest town in Tuscany being rather workaday with its industrial zone running into postwar medium rise flats. But it felt pretty nice today as kids played in the parks and people walked their dogs by the river. The old town has some nice tiny streets with little houses all hugger-mugger rising from the bank of the river. There is a main piazza and an old towering stone gatehouse. Two boys were using two of the trees in the piazza as goalposts as if they knew they were in a retro Italian film.

I stopped for an excellent cappuccino in the central bar and withdrew some money.

On the way back to the car - parked under an avenue of short pollarded lime trees already in glorious and full leaf - I passed a memorial in marble that I took to be a commemoration of the war - an inscribed perspex panel said that the panel commemorated the Strage di Via D'Amelio ('strage' is a massacre).

It turns out this commemorated a different war - that between the mafia and the progressive forces within the state. This massacre was the blowing up of an anti-mafia judge, Paolo Borselinno and his six bodyguards, in Palermo in 1992. Borselinno and five of his guard were killed by a massive car bomb.

The memorial (see extra) had been erected in 2012 to record the 20th anniversary of this monstrous and epoch changing attack on Italy's progressive judiciary.

(Boresellino 'tended towards the right' and was a  friend of Giovanni Falcone from the same neighbourhood in Palermo. Falcone was also a judge and had been assassinated by the Mafia 57 days previously).


Later I returned to base camp here we had a delightful lunch in the garden in the shade of a walnut and cherry tree. A siesta was taken and a couple of episodes of House of Cards were watched on Netflix.

Later it clouded over as the spring storm coming down from the north east approaches. Snow is predicted on the Apennines down to 900m.

We took a walk and heard what I would like to think was a Golden Oriole. The sunset did it's thing and the ranked hills lost their brilliant hues (see extra) as the hilltop monasteries caught the last light. As it turns out this is not a monastery at all but the Convent of Monte Senario.