Treasure! (A little piece of history)

(This post covers 7-13 August 2017)

With our guests having departed at the weekend, it was back to something more like normality this week - but not before taking a day out in recognition of my birthday. Having been preoccupied with visitors for the whole of the preceding fortnight, we hadn't even considered what to do on my birthday until the day itself was upon us - after very little debate, we plumped for a visit to Pistoia and in particular a visit to the Pistoia Sotterranea (underground Pistoia) museum that some of our recent apartment guests had told us about.

Having missed out on the trip to Pistoia when our visitors were here, I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the streets of the very pretty, historic, and amazingly quiet town - it has all the beauty of places like Lucca, but vanishingly few tourists.

We spent a couple of hours wandering around and stopping off for a lovely lunch at a bar in a small market square before we headed to the museum for the afternoon tour.

Time for lunch in this market square.

Fruit & veg.

More veg.

Carob. (My sister will fully understand that I resisted the urge to buy any.)

Birthday lunch - entirely vegan, and IPA to drink...

...And of course, with the best company!

An old cinema turned into a shopping arcade.

The underground tour starts beneath the old Ospedale del Ceppo (the "tree stump" hospital). The hospital was originally founded (and run by nuns and monks) in 1277 - and continued to function as a hospital (clearly with several extensions and additions) right up until 2013. The tour guide led us off initially down a long, deserted corridor, which had clearly been part of the more modern hospital until just a couple of years ago (there is now brand new hospital on the outskirts of the city, and the only part of the old hospital that remains in use is the dialysis centre, which is in a modern building surrounded by empty hospital wings). I must admit I found it slightly spooky walking around an abandoned hospital - and we hadn't even got to the old stuff yet!

Ospedale del Ceppo.

Ospedale del Ceppo. The frieze represents the seven works of mercy.

The frieze was painted by Santi Buglioni between 1523 and 1529 - with the exception of the last scene, which was done by Filippo Paladini in 1586.

Before we headed underground, we stopped off to visit the anatomical teaching room of the Filippo Pacini Medical School of Pistoia, where the Pistorienses gladii instrument was invented - the forerunner of the modern scalpel. The beautifully decorated little building, with the feeling of a small chapel, is the world's smallest anatomical amphitheatre, seating just 15 students along the tiny pews (complete with graffiti), with a marble slab in the middle where the cadaver would lie. Our guide also showed us a vice, explaining that when they examined the brain, the head would be cut off and placed in the vice. Quite gruesome!

Intimate teaching room.

Beautifully painted.

One student must have been bored in 1834!

Next, the tour dropped down into 'proper' underground tunnel system - where the temperature was blissfully several degrees cooler than above ground. The route follows the bed of the old Brana river, which used to flow underneath the old Ospedale del Ceppo. Indeed, in medieval times, those caring for the sick in the hospital above simply made holes, which can still be viewed in the vaults above, through which they would throw all the used crockery and other hospital waste into the stream below, much of which was discovered during the restoration project. Of course, the infected items floating off downstream wasn't such a great idea given that the city's wash house was just downstream - evidently many people who used the wash house became ill and ended up in the hospital themselves, particularly during the outbreak of the plague. Clearly this was in the days before disease, infection, and their transmission were properly understood.

Hospital crockery.

Mill wheel for olive oil production.

Tools.

The one-hour tour under the buildings and streets of Pistoia was fascinating - although only 650m of the underground tunnel system is currently open, there is work to extend the part that is accessible to the public, so in the future there may be more interesting discoveries and things to see.

After the tour, we grabbed a much needed cold bottle of water and wended our way slowly back to the station where we'd left the car. A great birthday day out!

If Monday's trip to Pistoia had been fascinating from a historical point of view, there was much better yet to come.

Stuart decided to take the opportunity while I was still working at a desk in the bedroom (having not quite got around to moving back down the office yet) to scrape out the old mortar from between the ceiling tiles in the office, replace it with a silicon-based product, then re-paint. All in an effort to stop the frequent showers of sand/dust/stones that I (or anyone in that room) endure whenever someone walks through the bedroom above.

Ceiling in need of some TLC.

This is generally what happens when anyone walks across the floor of the bedroom above!

Joints re-filled.

Looking smart and painted.

It was while he was working away at the ceiling that he decided to pull off the rather ugly and badly fitted (and disintegrating) piece of wood that had been put up covering the old window lintel. It was as he did this, that he spotted a tiny, folded up piece of paper, stuffed into the original lintel.

Intriguing!

On extracting the up piece of paper, he carefully unfolded it, to find what is, for us, the ultimate piece of treasure: a note written in 1774.

Treasure.

So far, the history of our house has been a complete mystery to us - we don't know anything about it, not even its age. While Stuart had some success finding the property on old maps at the local archive in Pescia a few weeks ago, he had been unable to go back any further than 1825 - we need to go to the archive in Lucca to go back further than that (which we still plan to do). However, the house is clearly old - and for that reason it has been something of a disappointment that in all our time toiling on the terraces we have not discovered anything more interesting than an old umbrella and some broken crockery (and lots and lots of modern rubbish). To find this note, therefore, was beyond exciting for us - something that is hand-written seems somehow so personal, even if the message itself isn't.

We have spent several hours trying to decipher both the 18th century hand writing and the language, and think we pretty much have the gist of what the note is about. It seems to be some sort of notice regarding the payment of a mill tax (tassa di macina) owed to Pietrabuona (probably a charge for using what would be a communal mill in the village to grind chestnut flour), also mentioning a "rate of retaliation", which we take to mean some form of interest rate, payable to the community of Pietrabuona. Frustratingly, we haven't been able to decipher every single word, but we're confident that we understand the general gist of it. So not a charming love letter, not a gruesome confession (thankfully!), but a mundane invoice of sorts. Nevertheless, we are thrilled at the discovery and feel that little bit more in touch with our house and its history.

We ended the week with a couple of lovely social events - on Friday evening we had been invited over to our good friends Mara and Franco's for grilled baccalà (salt cod), along with the young German couple who were currently staying with them. Clara and Janos - both medical students - were lovely and very easy to get along with, and we spent a highly entertaining evening chatting, joking and laughing in a mixture of Italian and English (sadly no German!) and tucking into the delicious fish grilled by Franco on the wheelbarrow-come-barbecue.

Saturday saw us with our Italian friends and our new German friends once again, as we had all been invited to the celebration of mutual friends Claudia and Massimo's 25th wedding anniversary. The evening started with a very moving ceremony involving a combination of traditions that seemed to have a native American theme, continued with lots of eating and drinking, and finished up with some hilarious folk dancing (in fact, the teacher, who had been invited to come and give instruction, took it pretty seriously, but we all fell about in fits of giggles as we stepped the wrong way, struggled to hold onto our flip flops, bumped into our neighbours and generally exhausted ourselves with a combination of physical exertion and laughter).

Claudia and Massimo looking forward to the next 25 years.

Poliziotto Franco.

The chilli was pretty good!

Dancing.

...and more dancing.

Finally, we finished off the week with coffee with our friends Paul, Kathy and Sarah at the Da Sandrino bar on Sunday morning (David and Donatella both being busy with work), followed by a lovely impromptu pasta lunch in the sunshine back at David and Sarah's house when we dropped her off. A lovely relaxing way to finish the week.