By These ancient hill towns were built for defence.
Old houses in this one have two entrances
side by side: one wide for friends, one narrow
for foes – la porta dei morti.
A platoon of the retreating Wehrmacht
stopped here to murder forty partisans
at the bottom of the town by the high road,
in the square where the tourist buses turn –
Piazza dei Martiri Quaranti.
Though this is Umbria and February
is mild, wood smoke seasoning the windless air,
the cold in the Duomo is wintry still,
its paving chilling the bones of our feet.
Hanging above the ornate stone altar
is a wood carving of Christ crucified.
We emerge into brightness, and imagine,
in the eastern haze, the Adriatic.
Christ CrucifiedGubbiola porta dei mortipartisansPiazza dei Martiri Quarantithe door of the deadWehrmacht
Jeff Teasdale
April 27, 2024Once in Kilpisjärvi high up in Finnish Lapland I was outside the hostel where we, on a trekking ‘adventure’, had stopped for the night, beer in hand, sitting in the late evening sunshine. Paradise (if you could walk the walk faster than mosquitoes can fly!).
A bus to Norway stopped and an elderly man got off with a younger woman. He broke down in tears. She was his daughter, and explained to us that this was his first visit here since 1945. On that occasion, in this same remote and stunning landscape, he was the ‘last man standing’. A group of young men had set off from his village days away (no road up here then – now called The Road of the Four Winds right across the roof of our continent) armed with only hunting rifles, doing their bit to rid their country of the German forces, who were razing every village and town to the ground. They had been picked off, one by one, and he had been the last one left out of twenty of them.
This was his pilgrimage.
He was seeing this same landscape through different eyes to mine… his in elderly despair and mine full of young wonder for my surroundings, and only concerned for my aching feet and the mosquito bites I had picked up.
‘Context’ and ‘perspective’ are different windows out onto the same world.
Thank you, David, for illustrating this so eloquently…