Thanks for the entertaining post. We will be in Barga this Saturday (our third visit)and a drive up your valley and a hike to Monte Croce(or Nona or Forato)is tentatively on the agenda. Maybe we’ll try the cave, too.

Your place sounds fascinating. Good luck with the quantum physics. Have you heard of the Jefferson Lab’s Continuous Electron Accelerator Beam Facility in Newport News, Virginia, USA? That’s where I live.

I enjoyed Adalino’s post about the cinemas. I was a projectionist through high school and college, in California, and it was fun being the guy who showed people all those great movies. Mostly great, at least. And every place I worked had old Simplex projectors, like in Cinema Paradiso. I saw lots of movies, obviously, but always missed parts while I rewound and threaded reels every 20 minutes or so. Sometimes I’d see the full movie later and say, “Oh, now I get it!”

Here’s an idea, taken from the old Italian neighborhood in Baltimore, where they project movies onto a building’s brick wall, al fresco, on summer weekends. Neighbors bring folding chairs. That might work in one of your villages. Better yet, project onto one of your cliffs, if you can find the right combination of natural screen and natural cliff and natural projection booth. That idea comes from a college roommate/photographer, who used to project slides from our roof onto a San Francisco hillside neighborhood. It was amazing how much detail you could still make out in the photos.

Anyway, thanks again. Maybe I’ll run into you next week.

Dan

It always surprises me when old people tell me how many cinemas there used to be in even quite small towns in those times, though I guess in the absence of telly it’s only to be expected… I love your story of the ‘Cinema on the back of a Vespa’. I bet it wouldn’t take too much effort to make a viable business out of that even now. Unemployed people! Get a Vespa, a white sheet, and a projector and tour round all the mountain villages this summer..

As for the cinema at the Institute – it does feel a bit of a fake because I’m just playing DVDs and projecting them onto a big screen rather than having whirling wheel projectors playing proper cans of film like in Cinema Paradiso. And if you read all the threatening blurb after the credits at the end of DVD disks, it says that they are for personal use and may not be used in cinemas, so I guess that means that anyone who comes to watch a movie has to do so for free.. At least that fits in with the non-profit making ethos of the Institute. Anyway, I was thinking of putting on a weekly free show this summer – as I said in the blog all our friends in Vallico seemed to really enjoy the opening night. Keep an eye on our ‘Public Events’ page.

I’m intrigued to see if I really can say that ours is “the only cinema in the Apuan Alps”? I know that round here there are cinemas in Castelnuovo, Fornaci, and Barga but being in the valley I’m not sure they count.