Fosco Maraini: ethnologist, anthropologist, orientalist, writer, traveler, photographer, mountaineer and documentary filmmaker. At twenty-two he embarked on the ship Amerigo Vespucci as a teacher of English.
In 1937 he left in the wake of the famous Orientalist Giuseppe Tucci for an expedition to Tibet which others followed. He lived in Japan for years as a researcher and professor and taught Japanese literature at the University of Florence. With his books he has made the world known to entire generations.
He happily lived his youth on the hill Baronti a Baroncelli where he learned to understand and love nature, especially trees of which he wrote that “when the exceed a certain size, they acquire something sacred.”
He lived with his family in a house in Via del Carota “an authentic villa on the one hand, and a set of farmhouses, stables, barns, greenhouses and lemon groves on the other.” His neighbors were the Wisslers whose son Roland became his friend. They took the same road to school together every day, one to Bagno a Ripoli and the other to la Colonna.
He himself said that “Rolando’s house stood on a hill somewhere near Via del Carota, and it was called Il Frantoio (The Mill).” There was a clear distinction between the two houses: one was the “noble house” and the other the “worker house” and Fosco liked the latter the most because ” everything was much simpler at the Frantoio; we found ourselves in front of a row of buildings which were very similar to each other, open to the southwest, which housed sharecroppers, cows, hay, chickens, wine vats and various foodstuffs.” The Frantoio home was “all the more real and authentic than his villa.”
Fosco had found in Rolando “a true friend, a true companion for any game. In summer there was the Arno river, swims, dives and in other seasons there were the Montisoni woods where with bows and arrows they created the imaginary world of the Native Americans and, always “in the Montesoni or Montepilleri woods they would play while descending an entire wooded side without putting their feet on the ground”, the forerunners to tree-climbing.
The memory of those years was still very much alive in Fosco even at age of eighty-seven years old when, in 1989, with the undersigned, he recalled with emotion the events and places of his youth.
Massimo Casprini
