Barga

In 1341, after years of sieges by Lucca and by Pisa, Barga chose to submit to Florence — and Florentine it stayed for the five centuries that followed, while everything around it was Lucchese or Estense. The result is an anomaly on the map: until the nineteen twenties Barga was an exclave of the province of Florence, a piece of Florentine territory that bordered on no other Florentine territory. The choice paid: the Medici drew important raw materials from here and granted privileges and tax exemptions, and with what came in the town built itself Renaissance palaces all through the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — in one of them, Palazzo Pancrazi, is the town hall, and another lodged the grand dukes when they passed. Barga has held the title of city since 1933.

In the bell tower of the duomo of San Cristoforo hang old bells, the smallest of which carries the date 1580: it was their ringing that gave Giovanni Pascoli the poem called L'ora di Barga. Inside the church there are a marble pulpit of Comacine school of the thirteenth century, a medieval wooden Saint Christopher, Robbia terracottas and a fifteenth-century crucifix of Bolognese school; and the pieve of Loppia, down in the valley, has traces going back to 845. After the unification of Italy the town went into a slow decline and a considerable part of the population emigrated, to the United Kingdom and to the United States. For many it was not for good: from the end of the nineteenth century they began to come back, and they put their savings into land and into building villas in what was then the immediate outskirts of the town. In the last war Barga found itself on the Gothic Line and saw the front pass over it.