Author
Jacopo Cecconi
When you take someone to see fucecchio, you have to show them at least two things.
There’s the tour of the town centre, Piazza Montanelli, the statue of Caalibri, which you’ll now see being cleaned, the theatre, which you mustn’t look at like that, then you’ll see that when they open it, you’ll see how beautiful it is (you don’t believe it as you say it, but you say it anyway), the Montanelli Foundation, the museum, parco corsini, Eloisa, which everyone has criticised but I love, Poggio al Vento, where if you turn around you can see the skyline of the Collegiate Church and San Salvatore, with Monte Pisano behind it, the padule beyond and the vineyards on this side. In short, it’s typical Tuscany, but even more typical, because Fucecchio, as I once heard someone who had never been there say, is to Tuscany what Duckburg is to the Ducks.
And it seems to me that Fucecchio really does live up to this definition on its own.
But then, as you pass by, there is another Fucecchio to see, to experience and to talk about. And that’s where you have to be good.
There are also some photos, stored on websites or hard drives belonging to who knows who, which you can go and look at if you want, but above all it’s up to you, how much you want to talk, and those with you to listen, how much you can still draw on those fragments of images, lights, sensations and music that once, one evening, made you think that yes, it was really worth being here and nowhere else in the world.
So, you begin, this place is now called Piazza Vittorio Veneto, but almost no one calls it that because there used to be a statue in the middle commemorating the fallen of the First World War, so many, look, hundreds, an impressive thing for a place that must have had no more than 10,000 inhabitants, and then they moved it down and left this space free. Oh well, free, full of cars. But you should have been here when Firenza Guidi did the show based on that American’s book, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Actually, the show was called Dog Tags, like the tags soldiers wear around their necks, so that if at some point they get burned or torn apart, they still have something to send home to their mum, say in southern Minnesota, and say, ‘Ma’am, we’re sorry, you must be proud of your son.
Anyway, it must have been 2005, imagine that there was nothing here, no cars, no motorbikes, nothing, imagine this square as it had been for 500 years before cars, before 1915-18 and before the war memorial. Except that in the middle there was a kind of pool, yes, a small pool with shallow water, and you should have seen it, there were three dancers dancing in it, sliding around, it looked like their kneecaps were going to pop out at any moment, music blaring. People could hardly breathe, they didn’t know where to look, they were surrounded. Because you arrived here from the Salamartano hill, where at first they didn’t let you see anything, and then when they let you down the steps of the Collegiate Church, you were struck by how beautiful it was. On the central staircase, there was a whole row of plastic shoe lasts, you know that everything here is shoe factories and tanneries, right? And so there were these hundred, what am I saying, a thousand pairs of shoes, I mean, shoe lasts, I don’t even know what they’re called, all lined up in a row, red, it seemed to me, it really seemed, at least to me, that it was like what the American bombers saw when they approached Dresden, hundreds and hundreds of little houses and villas, all the same, serene and peaceful, with red roofs. Yes, because Dog Tags, like Vonnegut’s book, was about a massacre, if I hadn’t told you, something absurd and gratuitous, like a carefully planned act of terrorism, in which, in a couple of days, the Americans had melted a hundred thousand people with incendiary bombs, cremated along with their houses and everything else, which you wouldn’t have been able to find even if they had had tags around their necks like dogs. And anyway, whose mothers would you have brought them back to? They were ashes too.
Anyway, at a certain point, in total silence, someone from here, from the bottom of the stairs, took a string and pulled, and then you realised that all these shoes were tied together by these strings and suddenly: TRATRATRATRATRA! Everything came down.
Goodbye symmetry, rows, lines. A thousand shoes rolling down the steps, mixing, merging like bodies and houses in Dresden, with this harsh sound in the midst of this silence, which I would have made you hear, that silence there, with the last lights of twilight over the Collegiate Church and the still heat of July.
And then that one there, you see, that one that was my high school, that window there from which we used to shout at brides on Saturday mornings and throw buckets of water at teachers on the last day of school, well, those windows there opened and turned red. Red lights behind people leaning out of the window, and meanwhile on the other side, that other building where the high school’s art and science labs were, the one facing the church, there too the windows opened and were all coloured, green, blue. It was something you really had to be there for, and the next time there’s a show in firenza, I’ll invite you and you can come and see for yourself how everything changes here.
Because he’s done a bit of everything over the years, more than you could ever imagine. Do you know the hostel in Cappiano, there on the bridge? You should have been there when he did Ovid’s Metamorphoses, when he built another bridge of boats two hundred metres further on and there were two tenors singing opera, calling out to each other, their voices rolling over the Usciana. Eight hundred, a thousand people there on the embankment, with nowhere to put them, old people, women and children: oh, you could have heard a pin drop.
And then there was parco corsini: once there was a wooden bed with wheels, seven metres by seven, which turned on the threshing floor while Claudio and Gertrude spent their wedding night, with Hamlet swearing to them. My calves still hurt when I think about how heavy it was to turn that bed, with eight strong lads. I was twenty years old, eh, and I always played football.
But then, still there, when they did Bianco, from Saramago’s Blindness, there was a ramp from which all the actors came down with their faces smeared with white paint, which was scary – really scary, people didn’t know where to hide: firenza’s order was to sing loudly in front of the audience.
And the Bombicci gardens, the Auditorium la tinaia, the Frantoio, Marea – the palio pit, you know? – and the roof of the Coop, and the gym of the sports hall and that of the Pascoli, and the museum, before there was a museum. You should see the underground passages it has.
And do you know what’s great? There are more photos of these shows than of fucecchio itself. So in a hundred years, when we’re no longer here to tell how cool it all was, people will look at the photos and won’t be able to believe what fucecchio was like a hundred years ago, and maybe they’ll recognise their great-grandfather in the crowd, terrified by someone else’s great-grandfather shouting in his face, ‘I can still see Bianco! (they sang this as they descended that ramp in the farmyard of parco corsini).
So, of Piazza Vittorio Veneto, which was first called Maggiore, then dei Caduti and then Vittorio Veneto again, this memory will also remain: forty actors jumping and dancing in costume, surrounded by amazed people. And so the people of Fucecchio in the 21st century will think that this town was a wonderful place in their great-grandparents’ day. And in the end, all things considered, we must also let them know in writing: it was. The splendid, imaginative Duckburg of Tuscany.