‘It was another world, the world of the eagle, the world of fierce abstraction. It was all clear, overwhelming sunshine, a platform hung in the light. Just below were the confused, tiled roofs of the village and beyond them the pale blue water, down below; and opposite, opposite my face and breast, the clear luminous snow of the mountain across the lake level with me apparently, though\u00a0really much above.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The man, on reaching Italy, was sick.\u00a0Suffering from pneumonia, he\u00a0had been chasing the sun for months, pursuing its life giving rays down from his native England throughout Europe. Following the advice of so many Victorian doctors, he was seeking warmer climes. This man later referred to this, his voluntary exile as his ‘savage pilgrimage’<\/em>. But he was looking for more than just warmth. It is strangely cyclical that one hundred years prior to today he was fleeing what he saw as the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation.<\/p>\n Gargnano, Lake Garda<\/p><\/div>\n A virtually lone voice in expressing anti-industrialisation sentiments, he spoke of and bemoaned factories in which he saw men as tigers chained to their machines, much as we might do of offices and computers today.<\/p>\n ‘It is horrible to see machines hauled about by tigers’, he wrote of factories visited in England. ‘We have become inhuman and unable to help ourselves. We are but attributes of the great mechanised society, we have created our own way to perfection. And this great mechanised society being selfless, is pitiless. It works on mechanically and destroys us, it is our master and our God’.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n On the shores of Lake Garda this man found more than just sunshine. He found himself transported back in time, surrounded by centuries old lemon groves. The village, Gargnano, the Northern most place in Europe capable of all year round lemon growth, had been doing so since legend had it, St Francis brought lemon trees with him on his travels in the 13th century.<\/p>\n Gargnano Lake Garda, Today<\/p><\/div>\n Now, the glory days gone,\u00a0 literally hundreds of limonaie<\/em> (lemon groves) stood like ghostly ruins all the way from the lake shores, high up into the steep hills above.<\/p>\n ‘All summer long, upon the mountain slopes steep by the lake, stand the rows of naked pillars rising out of the green foliage like ruins of temples, white, square pillows of masonry, standing forlorn in their colonnades and squares, rising up the mountainsides here and there, as if they remained from some great race that had once worshipped there.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n These were the lemon groves of Gargnano, today one of the hidden, virtually unknown treasures with which Italy is so blessed and which I urge you to discover. Andrea, who has set up an appreciation society in honour of this man Il Comitato Per Gargano Storico, who first stepped ashore in his village a century ago, acted as my guide for the day.\u00a0 He talked of how his ten man committee has plans for commemorating the sites this man visited during his roughly three month stay. Ultimately this authors’ experiences in Gargnano formed the basis for his book ‘Twilight in Italy’<\/em>, by no means his most read, but a work still honoured and loved by all residents of this little Northern village, with\u00a0so many references to their village and way of life that impressed its author so. Anyone who has done more than scratched the surface of Italian culture should find this a fascinating book with so many passages that could have been written yesterday.<\/p>\n ‘His wife disappeared as if dismissed. We must drink…’<\/em> he writes after Signor Paoli comes with his wife to fix a door in the part of the house he has rented. ‘Cedro’<\/em> is brought out – limoncello, to you and I.<\/p>\n Hero of History, Andrea Creator of The Comitato Per Gargnano Storica<\/p><\/div>\n This week marks a small but significant step in the continued, re-vamped and much hoped for future appreciation of this author in Gargnano. The Comitato, headed be Andrea has organised a series of semniars, walks and exhibitions to commemorate, his arrival on Lake Garda exactly one hundred years on.<\/p>\n Also today only one man continues the tradition which once, before the 1860 unification of Italy flooded the Northern European market with cheap Sicilian lemons, brining about the slow decline described in Twilight in Italy<\/em>, sustained an entire village. Aged 69, this ‘hero of history’ has painstakingly restored a limonaio where he irrigates lemontrees with the incredible 300 litres of water each tree requires every two or three days in traditional fashion. People come from as far as Austria to taste and buy the best limoncello I have tried anywhere in Italy – home made in his lounge, which now looks more like a distillery than a living space.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/2ndcupoftea.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/gargano-old.jpg\" "\\"Gargnano")
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