Today was the culmination of a year-long dream for Nigel Hawkins, whose home is Dundee, Scotland. Nigel bought the white house that is so visible in the front row of houses on the barganews live video camera on Sommocolonia, and has been renovating the house for about three years, recently completing the project. Nigel is a founder and the former Executive Director of the John Muir Trust, a well known environmental and wild land preservation organization in the UK – site here
A year ago on his way back to Dundee from Italy he stopped by a large Garden Center in Perthshire, and while there was quite attracted to a large (5 feet tall) stone statue of Romeo and Juliet, which weighed over six hundred pounds!
He decided that it was the perfect statue to complete his house and garden renovation in Sommocolonia. He bought it on the spur of the moment without giving much of a care to how it might be transported to Italy, much less Sommocolonia. He asked them to store it until he could figure out the transportation plans.
A year later he contacted a company which transports large objects and goods from Scotland to mainland Europe. They had a very large lorry which was scheduled to make a substantial delivery to Rome and indicated that they would be willing to transport the statue of the two young lovers – portal to portal – for an appropriate fee. They had no idea where the statues destination actually would be and what portal to portal might mean.
This morning the lorry drivers phoned Nigel to say they had left Lucca and were on their way to Barga. Nigel rushed to the Bar Onesti to await their call upon arrival in this area. When he contacted them by cellphone, it turned out they were stuck with their huge lorry on a Barga side street off the Via Roma in Barga. Nigel figured out where they were and rushed to their aid. Back on the Via Roma and taking all of the space between the trees, with Nigel leading the way in his car, they passed up through Barga and on to Ponte di Catanagna to the shop of the Angelo, the falegname there; and when Sommocolonia was pointed out to them far above, they realized they could go no further. There was no way to off load the statue there, so Angelo led them to Castelvecchio Pascoli where a parking lot made it possible to off load the very weighty statue of the two lovers onto the back of a much smaller vehicle, which Angelo owned. [The lorry, with its remaining cargo of one large automobile scheduled to be delivered to a man in Monaco, headed off down the valley, apparently none the worse for wear for the day’s experience.]
Angelo then handed the two lovers over into the capable hands (and unique machinery) of muratore Guido Guidi and his strong and able crew of men. It was placed with great difficulty on the front of a very small but incredibly sturdy and powerful tracked vehicle and thence it traversed up and down the tiny streets of Sommocolonia, through a large metal gate, along garden walls, up steep terraces, through a tall fence, across Nigel’s new terrace, and on to their final resting place in Nigel’s garden.
And not a fig leaf was displaced!
Additional reporting and images by Lawrence Downing
John Muir may have been born in Scotland, but he was a wee lad of 11 when his family moved to Wisconsin. There, and later in California, he was one of the fathers of the U.S.-born environmentalist movement — most notably the Sierra Club.
monacu — I have a strong feeling that Lawrence Downing might just be aware of that fact 🙂
Speriamo, caro editore. Mr. L era grosso pesce da Sierra. Fa parte della mafia sanfrancischiana a Sommocolonia, nonostante il fatto che il capo di tutti capi sarebbe Don Lenzuole.