Italy’s leading travel and free time magazine, DOVE has just published their February edition which includes a comprehensive 14 page article on Barga and the Serchio Valley by Loredana Tartaglia and photographs by Gilberto Maltinti and Alessandro Puccinelli
Local newsagents quickly sold out of their copies this morning as people flocked to get their hands on the magazine.
As can be seen from the images above, the article centred mainly on Barga with ample coverage of many of the centres of excellence to be found in Barga Vecchia.
Also two on-going projects from barganews were featured – the long running ibarga project and the newcomer – barganews cultural geocaching.
barganews cultural geocaching – more articles here
GEOCACHING is an outdoor recreational activity, in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or mobile device and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called “geocaches” or “caches”, anywhere in the world.
A typical cache is a small waterproof container containing a logbook where the geocacher enters the date they found it and signs it with their established code name. After signing into the log, the cache must be placed back exactly where the person found it. Larger containers such as plastic storage containers (Tupperware or similar) or ammunition boxes can also contain items for trading, usually toys or trinkets of little value.
The cultural geocaches of Barga are somewhat different as they in fact do contain objects of value.
The caches contain signed original artworks, drawings, charcoal drawings, prints and etchings by 40 artists working in this area.
There are also mini poems and short stories in Italian and Latin
Professional musicians have prepared a series of cards containing QR codes which when scanned by smart phones will play music specially written for the project. The music includes classic, jazz, piano, tango, rock and folk.
The project is an attempt to “raise the bar” on the level of objects which can be found and exchanged in geocaches.
We hope that the people who find these objects will enjoy them as much as we have in preparing them. (the map for the first and second cultural geocaches can be found here)
iBarga – from the barganews archives 2010 – more articles here
This site has been on line, in various versions since 1996. Over those 14 years we have been following the philosophy written under the main site heading; that of ” busily putting Barga on the map since 1996″ Many people have arrived in Barga after reading the articles and stories on these pages, one or two of them seemingly better informed about events and people in Barga than the actual inhabitants but even though we have been very successful in getting people to come and see Barga for themselves there has still been a small problem once they arrive. Information for visitors once inside the city walls is sometimes difficult to get. There is an information office in the Barga Vecchia but it is not open every hour of the day or staffed by people with multi-language abilities and so another information system is needed to fill that gap. Please welcome, what we hope will be the answer to that problem.
Back in April 2008 we published a cartoon (here) containing a black and white square design and asking the question, just what do we call these things ? Datamatrics, sematags or 2d barcodes? Over the next couple of years they ended up with another name – that of QR codes but whatever the name, 2008 was the start of a definite project here in Barga using those designs which after two years of preparations and field trials was finally officially released to the public this week under the name of iBarga.
The Palazzo Pancrazi in Barga Vecchia was where the project was unveiled at a press conference called to publicise the first ever medieval historic centre in Tuscany to be connected to the internet via 2D barcodes and cell phones. All the restaurants and bars in Barga Vecchia, all the churches, all the piazza’s, all the statues and all place of interest for visitors to Barga have been tagged with a small white ceramic tile with a printed individual two dimensional bar code which can be read by any of the new smart phones.
All the visitor has to do is point their cell phone at the tile, which then brings up on the screen of their phone information about the area. So pointing it at the tile on the Duomo will bring up information about the Duomo, if they point it at one outside Palazzo Pancrazi, it will be information about Palazzo Pancrazi etc. etc.
More than that, they can also decide in which language they want the information. For the moment the iBarga project is running with eight European languages plus Arabic, Chinese and Japanese and with more languages available shortly.