An artist and much published author from New Zealand, Don Donavan has been working in the city recently filling his sketch book with some wonderful views and thoughts on life here in Barga.
We are sharing three images with our readers but thoroughly recommend that you call in on his blog – (here) to look at and read some of his other views. Not to be missed.
Monet painted the same scenes over and over because the light changed from one moment to the next, continually giving him new subjects.
Barga is like that. When you look down on to the little town that lies between the Apennines and the Apuane Alps it constantly changes as mists drift up the valley of the Serchio River.
This was painted from a low wall a short distance from where we stayed; as I quickly laid the wash a viper came sinuating along the wall and then stopped, looking at me. I finished, half panicked, then the snake and I took off in different directions as if a gun had been fired!
Art is dangerous.
Sitting on a low wall at the back of Barga cathedral I could look down on the suburb of Fornacetta with the best possible view of this ancient church (which may be called Santa Maria, I’m not 
sure) with its charming hexagonal chapel. This really was a high speed scribble but it works quite well, I think.
Fornacetta, by the way, is where the Della Robbias had the studio and workshop in which they produced some of the unique, remarkable, enamelled reliefs to be seen in churches all over Italy.
Late afternoon I was sitting on a bench overlooking Barga’s Parco Kennedy. To the right tall houses form the curtain wall of the centro storico. I wondered how many chamber pots had been emptied out of those windows? I lost myself as I drew them, remotely aware of an audience of two small boys.
© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz www.don-donovan.blogspot.co.nz