Barga

The town sits on the Colle Remeggio above the Serchio river, the Apennine ridge rising to the east as a counterpart to the Apuan Alps on the western side of the valley. The walled centro storico climbs the hill from Porta Reale, its stone houses narrowing as the streets rise toward the highest terrace, where the collegiate church stands. The Colle di Caprona, a separate rise from the walled town itself, holds the house where Pascoli lived out his last years and the chapel where he is buried.

The town also carries a Scottish thread: a wave of late nineteenth-century emigration sent generations of Barga families into the chip shop trade in Glasgow, and their descendants' festival now fills the streets every August with fish and chips rather than any dish more expected of the Tuscan hills. A hill town built in stone around a Romanesque church, with a poet's house on one rise and a Glasgow-born sagra filling its streets each summer, holds more than its size would suggest.