by Mike Towler
So I’m standing at La Croce, contemplating all the little houses sprinkled about the Middle Serchio Valley far below. I’m perched on a rocky platform jutting into space about two-thirds of the way up the sheer front face of Monte Penna and a few miles to the North, smothering the summit of its own little hill, I can see Barga, home of barganews.com. As you’d hope someone has carted a huge metal cross up here, and I’m holding on tight to it as it’s a hell of a long way down and the wind is blowing my hat off.
I turn round and make my way back to the main path where I go right and head north again. I’m looking for a cave. Not the Tana di Cascaltendine, well-known and about ten minutes behind me, but another one. See, on a wooden hoarding in San Luigi, there’s this rough map of the Turrite Cava valley and dotted all over it are caves (the circular black and white splotches):
The trouble is - apart from the famous one I can’t find any of them. Who cares? Well, I got interested in this sort of thing a while back when I found an old manuscript about an 1880 expedition to the Cascaltendine cave by a priest from Barga and his mates from the nineteenth-century equivalent of Ariosto’s Bar (see my translation). There’s this footnote near the end:
Two others caves exist in Mount Gragno (he means Monte Penna) above the Fosso di Bolognana, one of which was visited by some of our party including Ferruccio Salvi. He has made a sketch plan of it which he has kindly forwarded to me along with the two sketches in this pamphlet, and we hope to publish a description of it in the next summer season.
As far as I can tell no such thing was ever published and so after more than a century I thought I’d have a look for these other caves. There’s two of them marked on the display board in San Luigi car park. I’m interested in the one I’ve marked with an arrow (the one next to the green number 2 is on private property and I don’t fancy getting shot today):
I’ve got a couple of proper maps of this area from proper map shops that show this cave but the maps are completely different from each other and from reality. I picture the surveying guys “Uh.. yeah. We did that area, boss. It kind of looks like this” handing over the made-up sketch they scribbled down in the pub because they couldn’t be arsed and they never quite figured out how to handle a theodolite.
Anyway, one of the maps has got the cave sitting at the top of a stream bed. There’s no obvious ones, so I pick a depression in the ground that could have been formed by running water and head up. The slope is steep and it’s an uncomfortable scramble up a mess of leaves and loose soil. I get close to the base of the upper cliff. Nothing. No cave. But then I realize that to the left there’s something like a path climbing upwards. It’s got to be the one that heads up onto the summit plateau of Monte Penna. I tried to find that last year trying to get down off the plateau from the other direction, and the undergrowth was so thick I couldn’t find it. So I figure what the hell - might as well explore something today. Sam said I had to be back in two and a half hours or she would call the police (she worries like that).
The sun is pretty low in the sky - I reckon I’ve got about half an hour’s daylight left. Rather than retrace my steps or go round the regular footpath at the base of the cliffs to the north I decide to head up the overgrown and maybe long-abandoned path, get up on the plateau and see if I can fight my way through to San Luigi, from where I can get down the road to where I left the car in five minutes or so.
Nice move though. You really don’t want to get lost up there at night without a torch. It’s overgrown like the Amazon, on three sides of the plateau there’s huge vertical cliffs that you can walk straight off in the dark, and these days nobody ever ever goes up there.
Let’s go. A big old tree has toppled over and slid down the hill, blocking the path. I have to climb up and around. A disturbance down below to the left, and there’s a family of three wild boar crashing through the undergrowth. I bet they haven’t seen a human for a while. It’s the first time I’ve seen them in the flesh apart from on my plate, though sometimes you can hear grunting and crashing noises from far-off parts of the forest. I finally get to the plateau where, helpfully, the path disappears. Somewhere behind Monte Matanna ten miles to the west the sun is plunging into the Mediterranean and gloom is gathering. I start to jog.
I figure that as I know the other side of the plateau pretty well I just have to keep going west and finally I’ll find something I recognize. After ten minutes I stumble upon the clearing where somebody is growing dope plants because like me he thinks that nobody ever goes there. Relieved, I head over to the path I know leaves the clearing to the west and follow it. I go past the old ruined metato which belonged to our neighbour Delma’s family when she was a little girl. I get on the main track and ten minutes later I’m at San Luigi. This is an old pastoral hamlet - current population around ten - which is the highest place you can drive to on the road from Fabbriche di Vallico. I start to run down the road from San Luigi towards our car which is waiting at the hairpin bend in the road from where you take the Cardoso footpath - the one that goes down past the Cave of Cascaltendine and on to La Croce. Before I get there in the last few minutes of daylight I linger at the point on the road where the panorama of our new world is laid out underneath me. First the village of Vallico Sopra - the church of San Michele curiously apart. A few hundred metres down from that is Vallico Sotto - our village, where Sam is waiting - and way below is the bottom of the Turritecava valley where the local metropolis of Fabbriche di Vallico lies hidden behind a ridge.
My eyes focus on the highest building in Vallico Sotto. Despite the gathering gloom I can see that the roof has a lot more moss than neighbouring buildings and it needs a bit of work, and there is a cross and an old bell on the ridge beam. That’s our place. This is, or was, the Oratorio del Santissimo Crocifisso. Il Collegio. It’s been there for half a millennium, at least. It has served as a monastery, a church, a hospital, a school, and the Lord know what else. For the last few years we’ve called it the Towler Institute. When we’re dead and gone somebody else will call it some other name.
