For many visitors to Barga and Tuscany in general, there are a couple of sights and colours which are an absolute “must see”
They are the red tiles on the houses and the green wooden shutters at the windows.
No photograph album of Tuscany would be complete without at least a couple of images of one or the other.
There are strict laws governing what kind of roof and tile can be put on a house and also the colour and type of shutter that can be put up on the windows.
Somewhat along the lines of Henry Ford’s infamous “they can have any colour as long as it is black” the majority of shutters in this area are green (although there are some which are brown) and all are supposed to be made of wood although some modern aluminium are gradually making an appearance.
They cost much less to produce and are much less time consuming for maintenance but still officially not acceptable inside Barga Vecchia and other places of historic importance.
Its that maintenance which is the main problem.
With the extremes of temperatures up here in the mountains, the wooden shutters deteriorate over time and need to taken down at regular intervals, scraped down and given a new lick of paint.
The maintenance is time consuming, expensive and these days sometimes difficult to find people willing to do the work.
People like the constantly working handyman and craftsman Sacco who died three summers ago are greatly missed in the city.
So, when shutters come down, quite often they remain down and never again end up back in their vertical position either side of the windows. Their time is done.
This morning workmen from the Comune removed four large wooden shutters from Palazzo Pancrazi in Barga Vecchia which over the years had been neglected and had deteriorated so much that they were in danger of falling off the wall onto the heads of people underneath.
In fact during the operation just that did happen as one of the shutters broke free from the restraining rope and crashed into the courtyard below narrowly missing one of the workmen (and the photographer covering this story)
Luckily no damage was done but it remains to be seen if we ever see those green shutters back up on the windows above the courtyard in the future.
The chances of that happening in the current economic climate are pretty slim.
Watch this space.
It would be nice to be proved wrong.