As we enter the last weeks of February, the winter is still making itself felt up on the mountains – with snow covering most of the tops but further down the valley, spring does not seem all that far away.
But the air still has that unmistakable scent of wood smoke as household stoves and fires are stoked against the chilly evenings.
The wood piles are gradually getting smaller as the season progresses and for some people they needed to look elsewhere for their wood to burn.
Recent renovations in a house in Barga Vecchia included three floors of wooden beams which were removed. Probably dating back hundreds of years, these beams were too rotten in places for the wood to be reused but sawed up and chopped to a decent length made perfect firewood.
It was during that process that the saw encountered a problem – lumps of heavy metal embedded deep into the beams – what turned out to be shrapnel from explosions or shelling during the last world war – a little reminder of Italy’s recent past.
Shrapnel is named after Major-General Henry Shrapnel (1761–1842), a British artillery officer, whose experiments, initially conducted in his own time and at his own expense, culminated in the design and development of a new type of artillery shell.
