Return to Pontremoli

Our visiting friends had seen the Quanto? Tanto! post from last summer about the mysterious Bronze Age totems in a nearby town and were eager to see these marvels for themselves, so one day we hopped on the train to Pontremoli, which is on the northern tip of Tuscany and about an hour from Fidenza. 

We couldn't find the picturesque bridge our friend C. had led us over when we visited last June, so we blundered around the town's outskirts for a while.We stopped into a bar on the main road for a coffee and encountered this gentleman enjoying a morning glass of wine and intently watching the news with his companion.

When we tried to pet the dog it snarled in a most unfriendly manner. It must not be Italian.

More welcoming was the entrance to a school for dental hygienists we happened upon as we wandered around. 

Eventually we found and made our way across another, equally picturesque bridge...

....that led us to one of the old gates to the town's historic center.

Pontremoli still strikes me as a bit dour, with its narrow streets and lack of any greenery. Even window boxes are scarce. Maybe there just isn't enough light.

We took our friends up the hill overlooking town (via elevator) to the Museo Statue Stele, which they much admired. The little figures are great-looking, but I can't help feeling a certain skepticism about them.

Don't they look like a not particularly sophisticated person's idea of what Bronze Age sculptures should look like? (And here I speak as just such a person.)

However, the museum has photos of similar figures that, centuries ago, were treated as pagan-junk-cum-recyclable-construction-material and incorporated into walls and buildings, even a church. That scotches the idea that they're some kind of modern-day fraud, a theory that still appeals to me for its literary qualities, if not its accuracy.

The castle that houses the museum is interesting in its own right, but we were hungry, so we gave it only a cursory look and headed back down the hill. 

Down below we found a "slow food" restaurant that served us an excellent lunch. Our friends ordered testaroli, the flabby pancakes topped with pesto that are the local specialty, despite our advice to order something less insipid. They both cleaned their plates and claimed to have enjoyed every bite. I was happy to leave them to it while I enjoyed my farro pasta with roe-deer-and-mushroom ragu, but I couldn't help admiring their capacity for enthusiasm. 

Which was even more in evidence during our tour of Fidenza's Duomo, the subject of the next post.