Google translate from the Polish from pages 59-64:
In Lucca it was not sightseeing. It was a visit. It is a story, I do not know whether it is interesting. But I will tell it.
What a strange city Lucca is! Especially when I visited it. Squeezed within its walls, it has preserved its palaces and houses in such narrow streets that the light of the sun never reached them. These quiet and dark streets are brightened from time to time by small squares, on which stand innumerable churches. There may not even be so many of them, but they are so noticeable among the dark streets, they are so bright in the gaps of shadow.
There is San Frediano here, and San Giustino, and Santa Maria della Rosa, and So Micyaani, and S Michele, with its beautiful deaas on the throne, on which stands the mighty figure of the Archangel Michata. The cathedral is also beautiful. All the facades of these churches, built in a uniform Lombard-Romanesque style, are covered with a shield of flying columns, which endow these buildings with a gesture of tearing upwards. The towers of windows, as the floors go up, also climb like doves at these churches, observing the principle of enlarging the openings, are ready to fly. Because the city: is completely enclosed by defensive walls preserved to this day. They surround the city and churches in a tight and compact ring. They now form a wide avenue planted with beautiful trees. Plane trees, chestnuts and acacias grow here, flowers bloom abundantly. The formidable walls have been transformed into beloved places for walks and rides of the inhabitants of Lucca. These are charming walks, magnificent trees grow on "bastions", it is never hot here: And the city itself, squeezed into these walls, rolled up like a tuft of wool, can boast of urban layouts originating from Roman urban planning. On one of these narrow streets, via Antonio Mordini, lived my friend, Mrs. Felicia Campetti.
When I arrived in Copenhagen in 1932[1], I very quickly came into contact with the Polish writer and journalist Felicia Baumgarten, a Warsaw native who lived permanently in Denmark. She was a translator from Norwegian and Danish, including several books by Knut Hamsun, and our friendship was forged on the basis of literary interests. As a translator, she used the pseudonym Felicia Aum.
She lived in Copenhagen with her friend, a German, Miss Goethe, whose surname I gave (leaving aside the other meaning of the name) to a resident of a boarding house in Florence, about whom I will speak later. She was very intelligent, old and bitter. However, she fit into the Danish environment, where there are plenty of such old maids, independent workers, scattered around the beautiful Copenhagen apartments. Despite this, she clearly felt lonely, gravitated towards Polish society and after a while became a regular guest at our more intimate gatherings. She was a lovely and friendly person. My wife received her first bunch of gerberas[2] from her; for a long time we did not know what flowers they were and called them Baumgarten flowers!
I had barely left Copenhagen when I heard the news that Mrs. Baumgarten had gotten married.[3] And not just any way. An Italian group came to Copenhagen, Mrs. Felicja had somehow met them (probably on the subject of Esperanto, for she was an ardent Esperantist) and had married a member of the group, a mathematics teacher in Lucca, Mr. Campetti.
From then on our correspondence continued for many years[4]; it was neither frequent nor intense, but it continued uninterrupted until her death, of which no one informed me. Most importantly, Mrs. Campetti, as a citizen of the village, could write to me during the war and those postcards (she always wrote on ordinary postcards) arriving at Stawisko from Lucca in those terrible times rang out like a voice of hope for a better future.
But now there was no war yet. There was a car, sightseeing with the Campettis in Lucca, Torre del Lago, Pisa, seeing all these wonders. Unfortunately, spring that year was very ugly, rainy, and above all cold.
Mrs. Campetti, when I was to visit Lucca from Montecatini, promised to "heat" the apartment. I was curious to see what this "heating" would look like.
The Campettis occupied an entire floor of a tall tenement house on Via Antonio Mordini, a narrow, typical street. There were about twelve rooms there. The floors were marble, of course, Carrara on the side, the greatest luxury that the boys in San Gimignano spoke of was the scala di legno (wooden staircase). A terrible coldness blew from these floors, but there were fireplaces in the rooms. In Mrs. Felicia's room, where we were sitting, two large pine cones were burning on the fireplace. This was the "opal".
It does not seem that Mrs. Felicia was happy in these apartments. She was married in the synagogue in Copenhagen, which in Lucca (as well as in Denmark) was considered very chic. Unfortunately, this was etched in the memory of the residents of Lucca and when the Germans occupied the city, she had to "hide". Hiding consisted of going to the Campetti estate (her mother-in-law was still alive at the time), to the vineyards located in the mountains above Lucca. This is also where the excellent, unadulterated wine came from, pressed in the vineyards by the feet of workers as in the times of Boccaccio and Machiavelli. Felicia Aum cannot really get used to the customs of a small town, a deep province, which Lucca is in fact. She complained that her family did not eat breakfast first thing in the morning, and that having coffee made for her in the morning was considered a great concession.
Felicia Aum could not really get used to the customs of a small town, a deep province, which Lucca was in fact. She complained that her family did not eat breakfast first thing in the morning, and that having coffee made for her in the morning was considered a great concession.
Old Mrs. Campetti would get up very early and from the early morning hours would start cooking “brodo,” a broth that was an everyday dish, and prepare that seasoning for spaghetti that was really only eaten in old Italian homes.
I used to visit Lucca after the war.[5] When old Mrs. Campetti died, Mrs. Felicja wrote to me: "We had to sell part of the apartment and now we live only in eight rooms." When I received this letter in ruined Warsaw, I felt a bit foolish. The Campettis knew what we had been through, but they didn't really understand. They once came to Warsaw for an Esperanto congress.[6] Mr. Campetti couldn't calm down that Warsaw had such poor fruit. "Explain to me," he said, "why don't you have good pears?"
Dinners at their home or in the restaurants they took me to were very good. Only the cold and fog always haunted me in Lucca, and that is how this city has stuck in my memory, cold but beautiful.
I have often thought that Mrs. Felicia's fate, her path: Warsaw--Copenhagen--Lucca, would be suitable as the content of a novel or a short story. Such a wonderful Italian city from up close does not seem so wonderful at all, hiding from the Germans, among the villages of the towns, for which Felicia was a complete stranger, and those vineyards in the mountains, as in a movie, and all this together with Polish sentiments. It would probably be too difficult for me to write.
That is why Lucca has a meaning other than touristic for me and all the beauties of this city (the church of St. Michael, the cathedral, whose facade covered with columns made Henrik Heine laugh) have a kind of double meaning for me - one purely touristic, the other emotional, connected with an old friend. Lucca does not have a good press in guidebooks and tourist books. Besides, Heine's sketches should be enough to establish the fame of this city. It is the most beautiful romantic prose, a mixture of emotion and irony, worthy of standing next to the Book of Lieder. And whenever I think of Pisa, Muratov's words about its inhabitants locked within ancient walls always come to mind: "How nice it must be when, from the eternal narrowness and dampness of these narrow streets as crevices of a small town that resembles a prison, one can finally go out onto these walls and think about a long journey, about freedom, about a life full and rich! How vague the hopes are then born and how unreliable they later turn out to be!"
My friend Campetti did not limit himself to hope, he wanted to go beyond the "prison" walls. He was the organizer and creator of the cooperative with walls. He became the president of this cooperative and towards the end of his life the Campettis moved out of the narrow street of via Mordini and lived "in freedom" ', behind the walls. But I did not have time to visit them. Very quickly they moved from there to their eternal apartment.
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from Page 70:
Dear Mrs Campetti came from Lucca, and of the Polish delegates the nicest were Miedzyrzecki, the charming Zofia Ernstowa and the most pleasant man I have ever met in my life, Jan Brzechwa.[7]
