World Italy Liguria Monterosso al Mare

Tripping with Judy and Herman Mediterranean Melodies

The '2 Giants' of Monterosso-al-Mare 9 Oct 2011

Sunday 9th October 2011 Weather:-As Mr Poggi told me 3 years ago: - “madam we do not wonder about the weather here—we only worry about the quality of our next glass of wine!” Herman and I visited the local tourist information point here in Monterosso yesterday to make enquiries about the ferries and trains. The reply to my first question concerning the ferries was met with “go down the road to the ferry office” she did not even take her eyes of the computer she was working on. The second question was met with “the train station is upstairs; they will be able to tell you”. We were obviously just pesky tourists that had come to interrupt her day. Yesterday I had taken some photos of the giant statue that adorns one of the villas on the northern end of the beach; we had taken photos of it the last time that we were here and I have one of them hanging in our hallway at home and over time I had wondered how and when it came to be made and in search of information we headed back to the tourist centre. My question today was answered with a shake of the shoulders and her head and a “sorry but I know nothing about it”. Now Monterosso is not a very big town---surely the tourist information.....But no—no information to be had here. There was only one other option and that was to go to visit the other big giant here in Monterosso-al-Mare and that is the owner of the ‘Hotel La Spiaggia’ Mr Andreas Poggi—he who can trace his family back to the 1500s here in the local church and during these last few years he has been to lands title office in Genoa where he has been able to go back to the 14th century and view land holdings from his ancestors and see how much land tax they paid. Mr Poggi is a generous man, generous with his knowledge and his time and wine; in a short 20 minutes we were given so much information that it astounds us. When we told him of our experiences in the tourist office he blurted out “those girls, do you expect them to retain anything in their brains? All they are interested in is chasing boys up the street!” First of all ‘The Giant’ formally known as ‘Neptune’ was made in 1906 to 1910 out of 8,000 tons of cement. The Architect was Mr Hinerbi from the town of Ferrara, he was the son of the mayor of that town and was from a prominent Jewish family there. It was built by Levacher who was a colleague of Bartoldy, the man who built the statue of Liberty. Originally it had a giant clam shell on its back and also a staff (as seen in the back of the brochure for the Hotel la Spiaggia) but unfortunately the reo inside the concrete went rusty and that caused concrete cancer so those parts were lost. During the last world war German soldiers were stationed there and a local lady told me that there was lots of dancing and partying on the upper decks of the villa, now it looks like it is a private club. In his research Andreas found the documentation about all the big buildings that are on the beach front today; they were all built by his maternal grandfather Pietro Accini, this is also the man who arrested Winston Churchill who at the time of the arrest was a war correspondent during the Boer War in South Africa. I mentioned to him that we also saw that the name of one of the little piazzas in town was named ‘Piazza Augustino Poggi’ and he told us that Augustino (one of his distant cousins) had gone to Chile and while there he sent back money to pave the square as it was only covered in dirt before then so they named it after him. Another fact that was mentioned is that when Marconi was moored in the harbour of Monterosso his ship was equipped with a mobile laboratory experimenting with radio waves and according to Mr Poggi he switched on the street lights in Sydney from here using same. So now you know why I have titled this ‘The two Giants of Monterosso’ for surely there are two here and I have seen one and met the other, again lucky me!!

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