Today is the 5th April and it’s 12 degrees outside, scattered rain with a chill wind blowing in off the snow covered mountains around the city.
Spring seems like a long way away somehow BUT this afternoon the first swallow arrived in the skies above Barga.
The phrase here is “one swallow does not a spring make” but hopefully there are more just behind the solitary one circling the Duomo.
The swallows in Barga are an annual feast visually and aurally with their coming heralding the arrival of spring and their leaving for the warmer climes of far away Africa, the rather dismal foretelling of the approaching winter.
There has been a particular group of swallows who nest each year under the Volta del Menchi below Palazzo Pancrazi in Barga Vecchia.
Their acrobatic flying through the open arches and walkways in the Volta has been one of the glorious sights of Barga in the summer.
Later on in the summer we get to see their young swooping noisily around the Volta del Menchi and then soon after, the bitter sweet melancholy bit where they will sit in line on some of the wires strung through Barga Vecchia and then one morning they will all just disappear again.
The cycle repeats itself each year and never fails to amaze.