Barga has been on my mind for a decade so finally I went. When I first heard of it over the internet I was a university student with no money living in a small seaside city in Western Canada, and when I moved to Japan, Asiatic adventures seemed more appropriate.
For most people cities like Paris, New York, or where I live, Tokyo, remain on peoples’ to go lists. However as the internet spreads information it allows places like Barga to enter the minds of people far away.
Tourism is a kind of plague. An invasion of fat people with noisy suitcases whose wheels clatter across the cobblestones of the world’s streets. Places thrive on enabling goofy tourists to act bizarre – to eat foods and buy t-shirts at prices they wouldn’t pay in their own hometowns. However as tourists it’s been decided that this is the appropriate way to see the world.
Barga is far away from this. In March it is a quiet place with its own clocks that don’t move so quickly. The people who live within the castle walls work at the cafes, restaurants, and interact with each other. The shops serve the community, to act as watering holes the way ponds attract animals in a very natural way.
I have visited other people (in Singapore and Liverpool, UK ) who have visited Barga, and when asked about the Tuscan city, they pause and say, “It’s a nice place.” It’s a nice place may sound drole, but with the emphasis on ‘nice’ it makes it sound as if Barga is a place that travellers look for but rarely find. It suggests that the visitor to Barga didn’t have to elbow his or her way through scrambling crowds in order to take a photo or to wait in line for hours to get into a restaurant. Indeed Barga, in March, definitely is not this kind of place.
The small city in Western Canada where I am from thrives on tourism, and I worked in the industry for awhile. The tourist section of town is a construct. Streets of ice-cream, take-away sandwiches, and horrible t-shirts. Tokyo is a city which doesn’t have a major tourist industry. Rarely do brightly coloured buses plow through the town and explain facts to travellers. There are tourists, and there are some touristy spots, but these areas tend to be for the locals as well as the tourists. This makes Tokyo an authentic place.
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Barga and Tokyo different in almost every way imaginable, but what they share in common is that it’s a place for people. The streets, houses, and shops serve earthy, organic functions. Both places are also welcome to travellers. The people I met in Barga were more than willing to have a drink with me and speak in English, and the mountain flowers opened themselves up to my camera while I was hiking by my lonesome. There is also a thousand years of history within walking distance and no toothless miscreants preying on naïve visitors. The food was cheap and delicious and the place remains a highlight of my travels in Europe.
There are QR-codes posted on businesses and shops throughout the city. When accessed via cellphone the codes inform the phone user about the shop or business. This is an ingenious idea as the shop interacts directly with the visitor, but unfortunately as my phone is under a Japanese contract, it would have cost me dearly due to international charging rates. So I was left tempted, but I could see this idea taking off in other parts of Europe as it removes the travellers embarrassment of having to march around a new city with a dog-eared guidebook. (this project iBarga can be seen here)
It can take a long time to find a place like Barga, but thanks to the internet it’s becoming easier to learn about and visit small mountain towns in Tuscany. Hopefully it doesn’t become too easy.
Matt Bigelow -- Tokyo Japan
