Warning to all those coming from other countries to spend their Easter in our part of the world: make sure you can get to your place!
Just going from Chiffenti to Bagni di Lucca Villa – apart from the standard traffic lights at Ponte di Seraglio (when will they get that proposed tunnel built, I wonder?) where the road becomes a single carriageway, except for the week-ends when a flashing amber light states that you can risk it in both directions – I had to negotiate two further sections of single carriageway with temporary traffic lights, this time because of the inordinate number of winter landslides caused by the excessive rainfall we’ve had..
At least I managed to get through (though it does take a little bit longer). Pity the poor folk of Tereglio who now have to do a substantial detour through Lucignana to get to valley-bottom civilization! It’s just as well that Lucignana, too, hasn’t suffered from landslides as it did a few years back. In the case of Tereglio, however, it isn’t so much a question of a simple landslide but of the road moving about like a slithy serpent because of the continuous instability and possibility of a whole hill slope descending into the Fegana torrent.
Even pedestrians have had to be diverted via a specially built path. It just isn’t safe there anymore.
It would be tedious to enumerate all the other single track roads, temporary traffic lights and downright road closure and diversions in our comune of Bagni di Lucca. I’ve never known anything like it except for that fateful year when Bagni di Lucca Villa was cut off from Ponte a Seraglio by a massive landslide. Evidently, this is an occurrence which come round every thirty years or so as these photographs of another landslide at Ponte shows dating from 1985:
In the past the worthy church-going inhabitants of Villa might sometimes have felt that they had been blessed by being cut off from their worldly casino-going neighbours in Ponte – such were the attitudes in more prudish times. Today it’s just another terrible inconvenience.
For how much longer the Tereglians will be cut off from direct access to the main valley is anyone’s guess. Let’s count our blessings: the following (English) inhabitant of Val Fegana had his garden wiped away when the river decided to change its course and ploughed through it last winter.
At this point anyone who doesn’t believe in climate change in our Valle di Lima must be living in cloud-cuckoo land.
From London to Longoio (and Lucca and beyond) Part One 
Thanks for passing this information on – could be very important to anyone effected by it.
Hope all goes well with the road repairs and that there are no further landslides.
Well according to statistics of the 5000 or so landslides this winter in Europe it seems that Italy has had at least over 3000 the worst hit in fact! This is so tragic so with landslides earthquakes flooding Italy is not doing so well it is seemingly on the move where and when will all this end it is truly scarey! In the UK so far it has been mainly flooding which has been devastating for a lot of people as they cannot reach their homes until the end of the year. earthquakes do not happen in UK earth tremors a few so we should disallow fracking landslides well as far as I can see none maybe screes off mountains getting wider, but the curious events that have happened have been the opening of the earth due to excessive rain similar to pot holes very deep and dangerous and spontaneous fires in pavements luckily no injuries to report in either except for complete right off of a vehicle that vanished into the earth.
Just out of interest, where does the proposed tunnel around the Ponte Serraglio area start and finish?
A little bit before the traffic lights at each end of that stretch of road