Benabbio

I recently purchased a home in Bennabio. I was intstantly struck by the serenity, charm and beauty of this magical place. It took me exactly 5 minutes to fall in love with the town and to make an offer on the house. All this occured without my husband( who was at home in BDA working)even seeing the place. I was absolutely convinced that he would appreciate Benabbio just as much. Slightly risky, perhaps…to my amazement when my husband finally visited the town he was even more impressed than I could have imagined. Overjoyed, would even be an understatement. He kept comparing the area to some parts of B.C that he loved and was shocked that the mountains were so accesible from such a jewel of a town as Lucca. The contrast between culture and nature was his favorite part of the experience. Now we both dream of ways to spend more time in our little house in the hills.

I believe the population is 350 or so souls. The town is uphill from Bagni di Lucca, and immediately downhill from a vast chestnut forest with the ruins (mere rubble, actually) of an ancient fortress and an intact, but locked up, chapel.

S/O John and I (along with sister-in-law-equivalent Harriet) spent 3 weeks of 2004 here, visiting our L.A. neighbor and artist friend Bert, who has 2 houses in Benabbio: one to house himself, his S/O, his canvases and paints; and the other to house guests like us.

For tourists, there is very little to do in Benabbio proper except simply to be. Over our 3-week stay, we made day trips to various nearby sites around Tuscany and one weekend foray to more distant Siena, Florence, and Assisi.

Yesterday, I received an email from Bert who is wrapping up a 6-month stay in Benabbio: the longest he’s managed to stay since becoming a local land mogul several years ago. This time, he bought a car, I understand, and took his cat. He wrote me that mint I collected on one of my walks up to the woods has made a resurgence in his garden after a nice rain. (I didn’t remember bringing him mint from a walk, but I like that I did. It must be some wild variety. I am always pinching and sniffing things while on walks, especially in Italy, especially after identifying capers growing wild in the crevices of ancient stone masonry embankments in Sicily. It only makes sense that capers grow wild someplace, but capers were the very definition of exoticism to me when I was growing up in the rural Deep South, so the idea of harvesting them from a living plant—instead of from a jar in the fridge—excites me. Mint, less so, but I do enjoy stumbling across edibles on lonely hillsides.)

And in conclusion, a noteworthy aspect of The Benabbio Experience, for Bert, at any rate it seems, is that his neighbor tends his garden in his absence. Probably does odd jobs, too, around the property, I’m not sure. I am struck by the extended family status his neighbor seemed readily to have assumed in the first place and to have maintained over time.