TUSCAN DES RES

Locals were agog when red and white vendesi (for sale) signs were plastered everywhere, including on a tree leading to a dead end road. The signs say: Loft, two bedrooms, two baths, garden. One assumes there is a kitchen/living area on the ground floor. There is a telephone number which, if called, is answered by a girl who knows nothing of the house and who refuses to give out the owner's number. I wanted to photograph the interior, for which read look around, but not if it meant a special trip for someone to open the door. I did obtain full permission to photograph the exterior.

The word "loft" puzzled me because the house is not large enough for such a thing but a neighbour told me that it was the attic with a spiral staircase leading up to it.

The cluster of buildings sits high up on a hillside (there are 27 steep steps to get to the front door) and were once farm workers' dwellings. They were gaunt and skeletal ruins when we moved here. The owner was an old fellow called Bigongiare who got his driver's license at age 70 and proceeded to terrorise the neighbourhood for the next 20 years as he careered around the one-lane roads. I've told his story earlier. Link

Bigongiare was not interested in selling and if asked would toss out a figure so preposterous that people fell about laughing. His heirs felt otherwise, however, and sold them one by one. One is now inhabited by the pork butcher's son, another by a physiotherapist and the middle one now for sale.

The views up there are to die for but to describe what you see here as a garden is a bit far-fetched. It also seems pointless to me to drive all the way out from Lucca only to be hemmed in by houses on either side. There was a man reading a newspaper in the morning sun outside the house to the right, not visible in this picture, and there were noises coming from the one to the left.

I hesitated to try to reach the owner to find out the asking price but in the end, I didn't have to. The neighbourhood fire warden who knows everything there is to now about the locality said the price was 385,000 euros or $490.300 or £317.000. Bigongiare would have fainted.

View from below: View from below.