I lived in Florence and worked in Reggio Emilia for many years and friends of a close friend in that town often took me into the regions of Parma where, in 1990, interest was already awakened to the Via Francigena on an official level. I chanced to make a series of portraits of puppets from a collection shown in the Royal Palace in Colorno (Parma) which was to be shown again in Fidenza. I followed the exhibition to that town.Interest in me as a watercolour artist was shown and I was asked to paint views of the historic centre of Fidenza which were duely exhibitied there. Then paintings of the outlying country side were called for. Eventually I was requested to make a painted record of the bas relief on the façade of the cathedral. Don Amos Aimi, a parish priest connected to the Duomo was my host in town. This enabled me to get all the paintings done with ease, and he enjoyed watching the work develop.His enthusiasm for art knew no bounds. He was a tireless promoter of my work.He attended a big meeting in Parma where European funding for the Via Francigena was being discussed and returned to Fidenza full of ideas for my rise to fame along the Via Francigena backed by European funding!
His idea was that I paint watercolours of views along the Francigena and eventually exhibit them in places named by Sigeric, Archbishop of Canterbury, in his list of place names recording where he stopped on his return to Canterbury after travelling to Rome to receive his pallium direct from the hands of Pope Paul xv in the year 990.
As I had been living in Florence since 1970 and returning to Britain by car at least once a year via a route I now discovered to be the Via Francigena, I imagined I knew the way intimately. Having, at sixty, conserved a surprisingly youthful lack of reality I immediately began to dream of the series of exhibitions I would run along Sigeric’s itinerary. These I reasoned, would make gallery contacts for my work in many towns between Rome and Canterbury. I even envisaged exhibitions and commissions along the way making sufficient money to finance my journey to England each summer!!! It just so happened that In the following years I saw four art galleries open, stagger along and close in one town alone even before the Via Francigena collection of paintings was completed. The one thousand five hundred kilometres of Sigeric’s probable route were to be the toughest learning curve I have ever faced.
I put the plan of painting the watercolours into action before ever I set about anything logical on the construction of the project. My sister persuaded a friend of hers to help as a secretary and this persons’ logical mind immediately set about searching for funding. It was soon apparent that almost no one finances “odd bods” such as myself, without fame or name, to set forth on a costly “Grand Tour” with paintings to exhibit. (Sponsors like to see their name bobbing along on the cap and tee shirt of people who are in the limelight all the time. To gain their approval one must be part of a reliable organization with a name and good contacts or an obviously winning idea which, preferably, is already well known to the media.
I spent my time skipping to and from Britain and staying with friends along the route in France and Italy doing paintings for “The Via Francigena Project” whenever I could between those for two other projects then in progress in northern France. Greatly overworked, I called for help to everyone I came across.
The number of people I convinced to assist on all levels increased rapidly. “The Project” became a reality long before we ever discovered that there was very little hope of funding. All of us started working on the assumption that the Idea was so good that the authorities would be only too anxious to come forward in the long run and pay for what was already “en route”. We seriously lacked the essential experience of local government!
We were all so busy with our own creative part of the project, and all so far from one another in England, France, Switzerland and Italy that it was about two years before it was generally accepted that funding was extremely unlikely to come about. By this time each one had invested of his own and created personal momentum to a point that going on to (perhaps) recuperate investment from a sponsorship or funding was the mirage we all struggled towards.
By this time the number of people involved was considerable. For my part there was a secretary and assistant, each with husbands who were frequently expected to resolve problems not usual to a housewife. A retired policeman/turned frame maker was busy framing work as fast as I produced it. Friends in the translating business agreed to supply translations in French and German. Italian copy was checked in the library in Altopascio. Captions to the paintings were to be quadrilingual as was also the catalogue I dreamed of. In North Wales the sculptress involved a foundry to cast her statue of Sigeric, (three quarters life size shown riding a mule and talking to a child). A club of eight or nine top notch embroiderers had been persuaded to make the clothing for the fantocci (stick puppets seven feet tall). Each woman took one fantocci as her personal project for a years work and sustained the costs of the beautiful materials used. A couple made the shell of the theatre, the scenes and props and the puppet bodies. All the photocopy work of the puppet theatre sets was made possible by the owner of a village art shop. And so it was that around thirty people in four countries were directly involved in producing the exhibition, many of whom never ever got to meet those in other countries who were as deeply involved as themselves.
The “office and organization staff” would meet in Shepperton (London) when they could no longer solve issues alone. I would join them from France or Italy as frequently as I could afford to, my mind bursting with questions. On some visits a lot was achieved. On others my presence would be ignored (family issues being more urgent etc). The great number of people involved kept the momentum of The Project going all the time.
I began seeing mayors of the different towns along the way to find out who would accept to show the exhibition and in what style. Obviously there was a great difference in attitude between the various places as to what they could or would give, and, when it came to it, how they treated us. I suffered greatly from fatigue at all times but I refused to give up. Looking back I know this to have been one of the strongest points in The Project. I never once entertained the idea that there was a possibility that it might not succeed. For me, it went without saying that I would get there in the end, even though I suspect that I could not, at the time, have clearly defined where it was I was trying to get. Of course, had the secretary refused to pay the bills as they arrived we could not have gone on. Had she withdrawn her sound common sense and practice in organizing events, we would have floundered; but she paid me the honor of considering it a most interesting project and felt happy to be included. So everything went ahead.
All year round, be it cold and wet or too hot and sunny I was at my easel whenever possible (which was not near so often as it aught to have been for the horrendous amount of time lost trying to get local authorities to agree to host the exhibition.)