Catarsini and Camaiore

5 – CATARSINI AND CAMAIORE

Catarsini’s presence in Camaiore is a telling one. He loved the town and came here from his youth, along with nearby Pontemazzori (a splendid painting of 1924, Donne alla fonte is set precisely there); another work, from 1933, depicts Le lavandaie along the Fossa dell’Abate near the Ponte di Sasso, together with other views of the Apuan Alps and of the farmhouses along the road to Camaiore, painted in 1938 — all works recently rediscovered and shown for the first time in Lucca in 2022. One could say that if the darsena was Viareggio’s, the landscapes were by preference those of the Camaiore and Massarosa countryside.

From Camaiore, and in particular from the climb up Monte Magno, begins the novel Giorni neri . This is its introduction, pages 13 and 14 of the 2021 La nave di Teseo edition.

Giorni Neri is not meant to be a chronicle of certain grim, terrible days of the last war. Originally this piece grew out of numerous fleeting notes, jotted down roughly on loose sheets during the period of my evacuation, 1943–1945.

The characters are invented outright, and everything told here is the fruit of a pinch of inventive imagination which nevertheless found its match, at the time, in the reality of what happened.

Of the clandestine guerrilla war there are episodes — fictionalised — of the hard life spent in hiding by some evacuees from Versilia, in places in the Lucchesia, precisely between Monte Magno, San Martino in Val Freddana and the carriage road that leads from Camaiore to Lucca. These places stand for the most painful and dramatic points, where there was no shortage of mass deportations, killings of hostages, hangings, informing of every kind, recantations, fires, and the relentless, merciless «manhunt».

I do not know how far I have managed to give a character of its own to each figure treated here; a character that stamps on every good or bad human action the seal of an obstinate will to survive in the face of the snare of a war not felt as one’s own, and in part fratricidal.

Waves of subtle, insidious mysticism, brutal outpourings of passion, abject blackmail built on informing: these were in substance the means by which men sought to win or to die, or to drag their own feelings into the abyss and to push there, too, the feelings of those who wished to stay out of the fray.

I have meant to bring to light some of these sad, wearing episodes; telling episodes that alternated in clashes at times bloody, between men born in the same land and raised under the same flag, and which still today, more than twenty-five years on, make all those who carry sad memories of the war shudder.

Dialogues for the most part harsh, obscure, full of things left unsaid, interweave in these pages among ordinary people whom that devilish hurricane flung from the sea up to the mountains, turning them into fighters for freedom as well, though they stood outside certain compromises of a political order and outside any military formation.

In the town’s hinterland, indeed, took refuge the evacuees who had to leave the coast, or who passed through on their way to other places a little further off but less crowded, such as the Val Freddana.

A place of passage, then, and not only for the ancient Via Francigena. A place that has chosen to keep its traditions: the sawdust carpets for the feast of Corpus Christi, the madonnari on the square in front of the Badia di San Pietro, which made Camaiore an undisputed capital of that art; or the flower garlands that every first of June surround the doorways of Camaiore’s houses. Occasions such as the All Souls’ fair or the Good Friday processions (the Triennial of the Dead Christ). To these events of international reach are added others no less important, tied to the extraordinary traditional cooking, with fine ingredients to be tasted at the various Camaiore food and wine festivals, of which the most awaited is the Sagra del Cappelletto, held in September in the parish of San Lazzaro at Frati.

In short, for Catarsini, Camaiore is a place of the heart, where he also took part in the group and solo exhibitions that followed one another over the years.

During the evacuation he travelled the Camaiore road a great many times: to reach Viareggio and recover things left behind — but also brushes, paints and books — and to go to Lucca and from there to Florence for the pigments he needed to paint his frescoes. Hence the choice to tie Camaiore to the work of 1944–45, the most telling period of his presence in the town and across its splendid territory, on the slopes of the Apuan Alps.