PASSEGGIATA TABUCCHI 3
A WALK WITH TABUCCHI 3
Casa di Piazza Garibaldi
On the corner of piazza Garibaldi and via Barsuglia
This is the house of the maternal grand-parents, Erina Puccetti and Cesare Pardella where Antonio Tabucchi spent part of his adolescence and youth, together with his parents, Tina Pardella and Adamo Tabucchi.
Tabucchi recalls, «I was a lively and sociable boy. I used to go out in the hills with my friends looking for bird nests to take back home. This was our hobby. I remember my parents getting desperate when we hadn't returned home by eight in the evening. They would go out looking for me everywhere in the village […] In other words, I had a very free childhood, something that I remember now with great nostalgia.» (Antonio Tabucchi, Zig Zag. Conversazioni con Carlos Gumpert e Anteos Chrysostomidis).
Ernesto Chicca, Piero, was a close friend of Antonio from when they were children. He remembers, among the games they played together, the gangs at war with each other, just like The boys in Paal Street (I ragazzi della via Paal) Antonio was the oldest and the leader. He made up all sorts of games. Battles using catapaults were frequent. The first time that they tried to skate, with heavy iron roller skates inherited from his uncles, was unforgettable. “Anyway we learned, especially at the end of the fifties when the first street was paved in Vecchiano. And we launched a new trend because, after a short time, a lot of boys and girls had their new light roller skates and we couldn't compete with them”, Piero remembers. “Our best childhood memory is when we became explorers and went to explore a cave here in Vecchiano, a frightening place where nobody dared enter, but we went in twice looking for the grave of a friar, Scrocci, a sort of priest who used to live in ‘Castello’. We went up there with shovels and pickaxes to see the grave of Scrocci. This is the best adventure I remember.”
And it was exactly in this house, where Antonio had to stay in bed for a whole year, that his passion for literature and his vocation as a writer began. At the age of 12 he was forced to stay in bed due to a sharp pain in his knee. He took advantage of the time, thanks to the bookshelves of his uncle Cisello, to read Jack London and Stevenson, especially Treasure Island (Antonio Tabucchi, Opere, Tomo primo, Cronologia a cura di Paolo Mauri, Mondadori, Milano, 2018, p. LXII). Thanks to these adventure stories and a little atlas of the world, the young Antonio Tabucchi discovered his passion and fascination for literature and realised that in order to learn to see it is necessary to travel far from one's home town.
In 2016, the Council of Vecchiano bought this house where Antonio grew up. It consists of three parts which extend from the ground floor up to the second floor covering 183 square metres, including the former bar which opens onto the square and the previous herbal shop. The renovation of the facade was finished in May 2022. The idea is to transform a good part of this building into a library space that can accommodate the Fondo Tabucchi, now in the town library, and also a cultural centre dedicated to him.
(Traduzione di Rina Boschetti)