So this was quite a challenge to write and it may be an even greater challenge to read.  My friend Ben posted his painting (above) of a cathedral perched on a foothill in Italy. After some discussion back and forth, we discovered that it was from a town called Barga in central Italy at the base of the Apennine mountains. I did some further reading on Wikipedia and found that the town was known for its silk exports to Florence in the middle ages and that the ancient name of the river that runs through town was the “Auser”–it’s now called the Serchio.


I also learned that during WWII this region was known as the Gothic Line but, when Hitler realized he would inevitably lose the region to Allied armies progressing North he renamed it the “Green Line” because he felt that it would be too embarrassing to have his “Gothic Line” defeated. In essence, he changed the name to make the Allied victory seem less victorious. This should help make sense of the lines:

I did some further research and I found some pictures of the inside of the Cathedral that is in the foreground of the painting.  Lorenzo, at whereinlucca, was kind enough to let me add those pictures to the blog to help explain the last part of the poem. The Cathedral, called the ‘Duomo,’ has a very unique pulpit that stands on four marble columns. At the base of two of the columns are two lions. One of the lions is subduing a dragon whereas the other is subduing a man. Hopefully this helps make sense of the final lines: 

but the simple, unmoved, are spared the sword
and pray thanks by their Duomo’s lions who
sometimes eat the dragon, other times the man,
but crave not humble flesh with no proud plan.

I hope not to detract from the beauty of the region, but I wanted to use it as a way to symbolically express the value of humility. I hope that this comes out in the poem.