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Summer school report: Quantum Monte Carlo and the CASINO program IX

The ninth international summer school in the “Quantum Monte Carlo and the CASINO program” series took place from Sunday 3rd August to Sunday 10th August 2014 and involved 32 people (including 22 students) from 14 countries.

The purpose of the school was to provide the students with a thorough working knowledge of the quantum Monte Carlo electronic structure method as currently used in quantum chemistry and condensed matter physics and to show them how to use the Cambridge CASINO QMC program for serious scientific research. The participants spent around 4-5 hours each morning listening to lectures from Mike Towler and Neil Drummond on the quantum Monte Carlo method. This was followed by practical examples classes with the CASINO software, and a programme of healthy recreational activities such as mountain walking and cave exploration.

Away from their scientific activities, the participants mounted successful expeditions to Monte Procinto, Pania della Croce, the rock arch of Monte Forato, the cave of Cascaltendine, Monte Palodina, the Orrido di Botri canyon, and the flat top of Monte Penna, the beautiful city of Lucca, and the open-air swimming pool at Barga. These trips were followed by nice dinners at Alto Matanna, Da Sandra, Eremo di Calomini, Al Laghetto and the old restaurant at Vallico Sotto, specially opened yet again for the “Vallico Sotto against the World” football match. Tragically, our team suffered yet another heavy defeat to the thrusting young lads of Vallico Sotto, but this time they did it with style, with some of the goals by Libya’s very own Sabri Elatresh being some of the greatest in the history of the Rest of the World side.

To check which students have been paying most attention during the lectures and practical classes, we traditionally hold a tough examination on the final day. The highest mark and the award of the prestigious title of “TTI QMC Summer School Champion 2014”, went to Peter Townsend of Cambridge University — with an honourable mention for Katharina Doblhoff-Dier, who nearly beat him — and for this he was awarded the prize of a bottle of Vietnamese snake wine, containing a cobra eating a smaller snake, of the type apparently used by Vietnamese gentlemen to increase their virility [NB: TTI does not condone the murder of animals for this purpose, but we happened to have a bottle of it, and all the TTI staff are quite virile enough, thank you very much]. Townsend’s triumph was celebrated with fireworks and, continuing a long tradition of oratorical brilliance from former champions stretching back many years, we heard a quality speech from the victor which could have been given by Winston Churchill. After thirty-four whiskies, fourteen glasses of porter, too many super strength cigars, and a Nazi bombing raid.

Documents
Poster
Original announcement
Summer school programme

Photos
Samuel Chang
Caterina de Franco
Jan Jenke
Mike Towler

Instructors
Mike Towler and Neil Drummond assisted by Sam Azadi

Students
Ali Bagci, Braulio Brito, Eike Caldeweyher, Kuang-Yu Samuel Chang, Shibing Chu, Caterina De Franco, Katharina Doblhoff-Dier, Sabri Elatresh, Fatih Ersan, Jan Florian, Wei Guo, Jiří Hostaš, Jan Jenke, Yelda Kadioglu, Saudi Woman, Thomas Mellan, Christoph Reimann, Giovanni Rillo, Peter Townsend, Fan Wang, Thomas Whitehead, Dmitry Zvezhinsky

Lectures presented : slides (password required)

Mike Towler (mdt26 at cantab.net)
1. “Quantum Monte Carlo : a practical solution to the correlation problem in electronic structure calculations” [PDF]
2. “The CASINO program : a basic introduction to functionality and input/output” [PDF]
3. “The CASINO program: distribution, setup, and compilation” [PDF]
4. “Probability and statistics in quantum Monte Carlo: the fascinating details” [PDF]
5. “Useful calculations for big, complicated systems: quantum Monte Carlo at the research frontier” [PDF]
6. “Three QMC scaling problems: many atoms, many protons, many processors” [PDF]
7. “Interfaces between CASINO and external programs” [PDF]
8. “Pseudopotentials for quantum Monte Carlo: a necessary evil” [PDF]
9. “Forces and dynamics. Expectation values other than the energy” [PDF]

Neil Drummond (n.drummond at lancaster.ac.uk)
10. “Optimization of many-electron wave functions” [PDF]
11. “Theory and practice of Diffusion quantum Monte Carlo” [PDF]
12. “Wave functions beyond Slater-Jastrow” [PDF]
13. “Quantum Monte Carlo studies of condensed matter: Ewald interactions and finite size effects” [PDF]
14. “Quantum Monte Carlo study of the two-dimensional homogeneous electron gas” [PDF]

Practical worksheets and input files
– “QMC practical classes” [gzipped tar file]

QMC Exam
– “Exam” [PDF]
– “Answers” [PDF]

Comments
  • “Thank you so much for the two amazing weeks in Vallico. I will never forget
    those moments.”
  • “The week of the summer school went so fast. I think I got both knowledge and fun from this school. Thank you very much for your work!”
  • No words can express how much I am grateful for what you did. Thanks a lot for this extraordinary school.. I hope this school go on for as many years as possible.
  • “Thank you once more for wonderful summer school!”
  • “Thank you for all you did in Vallico Sotto..”
  • “Thank you very much for organizing such an interesting summer school. I do benefit a lot from this summer school.”
  • “Thank you for organising this wonderful week in Vallico Sotto and preparing all the lectures. The last lecture, especially ‘DMC vs. stochastic pilot-wave theories’ and ‘De Broglie-Bohm theory’ was really interesting and I hope to have time to learn more about this topic.”
  • “Thanks, I had a brilliant time, and learnt a little bit of QMC too. Unfortunately not enough time for me to use QMC during this PhD for my VO2 work, but if I start a post doc within the next few months, it would be seriously useful for strongly correlated materials I’m interested in and attempt to study using DFT presently. Wagner’s paper was one of the reasons I was so keen to attend, so I’m glad you were impressed too.”
  • “Many thanks to you (with Neil and Sam) for your work. I noted how it was hard for you to finish the school by yourself. I personally need some time to digest all information and hope that we can still discuss remaining questions by means of forum or email. (I promise that I will not annoy too much with them.)”
  • I thank to you very much for everything Mike. It is my first international summer school so i hesitated to speak with you because of my bad english in speaking ( im going to develop it). This summer school is very important and special for me. I was able to learn how i can use casino and also convert dft inputs to casino in there. i will use casino in my electronic and geometric structure calculations. I had to leave very early (6.00 am) from Vallico Sotto because of the plane. So I did not have the opportunity to say goodbye (also thank) to you. Nice to meet you and others very much.
  • “I have been back to China yesterday. Very much Thanks for your time and effort for the TTI conference and summer school. You are a good guy.^_^ When I get a faculty position of China’s university in the near future, I would love to make an invitation for you to have a visit of China If you will and have some time. It’s really an amazing journey to the Vallico Sotto. I enjoy the climbing, the hiking, the Italian foods and discussing with lot of clever guys. I love the photo about you with black beard (but I don’t think the black beard is the reason ^_^) and your daughter in your homepage.”

Peter Townsend – Summer School Champion 2014

Sabri Elatresh – best footballer ever..

Sergeant Azadi

The Changs (best photographer..)

Monte Matanna – summit

Monte Procinto and Pania della Croce

Monte Nona

Monte Nona II

Monte Nona III

Monte Nona IV


Monte Nona V

Local wildlife

Sergeant Azadi makes a low hummming, whistling noise

The hunt for the secret tunnel

The hunt for the secret tunnel II

Conference report: Quantum Monte Carlo in the Apuan Alps IX


It was Daniela the barmaid who told me that the old people — though surely they weren’t so old that they would actually remember — were saying that it was the worst summer weather in Tuscany since 1915. Well, round here you never know — they might be — and despite the rain, almost a hundred years later, forty-six people have gathered in Vallico Sotto to attend the ninth “Quantum Monte Carlo in the Apuan Alps” international workshop. From the 26th of July to the 2nd of August 2014 our resident physicists and chemists spent each morning listening to talks on quantum Monte Carlo and related computational electronic structure methods, followed by afternoons that were often full of mountain walking, caving, canyoning and other activities but — for pretty much the first time ever in history of events at TTI — were equally often cancelled because of the appalling weather.

A great deal of interesting science was presented and discussed at the meeting, and much of this is summarized in the scientific report further down this page. I think it’s now clear to most people that the quantum Monte Carlo method is continuing to grow in utility and importance, and for those with a big enough computer it self-evidently ought to be the method of choice for highly accurate benchmark quantum-mechanical calculations of molecules and materials — certainly those with more than a few atoms.

As described on the CASINOQMC blog some weeks ago, the monastery had undergone an extensive revamp for its 10th anniversary with a freshly painted exterior, sealed internal walls that don’t rain plaster on delicate electronics, and a vastly improved university-grade broadband wireless network extended to the whole site and nearby buildings with a dedicated Synology central file server (at one stage the Wifi was running over 150 connected devices). We also now have an outdoor ping-pong table, and our musical equipment was upgraded to the extent that the place can now be considered a live music venue. This was ably demonstrated by singer Ed Norris — hired for the opening night 10th Anniversary party — who moved many of the local people to tears with his renditions of ‘old Frank Sinatra/Tony Bennett-style songs’ [I’ve realized that I don’t know how to properly refer to this style of ‘Jazzy Pop Standard Lounge Swing Crooning’ which is often insultingly misfiled as ‘Easy Listening’ in record shops, but I think you know what I mean. It’s actually very cool, even if young people don’t generally like it or more likely have never heard of it.].

Anyway, away from their scientific activities, the participants mounted successful expeditions to Monte Procinto, Pania della Croce, the rock arch of Monte Forato, the cave of Cascaltendine, Monte Palodina and the flat top of Monte Penna, the beautiful city of Lucca, and the open-air swimming pool at Barga. These trips were followed by nice dinners at Alto Matanna, Da Sandra, Eremo di Calomini, Al Laghetto and the old restaurant at Vallico Sotto, specially opened yet again for the “Vallico Sotto against the World” football match. Tragically, the Rest of the World team shuddered under the second heaviest beating in history to the thrusting young lads of Vallico Sotto, despite not playing all that badly. Possibly they were suffocated by having a surfeit of players, in much the same way as King Henry 1st of England (though that was with lampreys, obviously).

Regular attendees may have heard me going on for years about the mysterious secret tunnel, closed as recently as the 1930s, which ran from somehere below the Doctor’s House in Vallico Sotto all the way up to the site of the former Fortress several hundred metres away at the top of the hill, and whose precise location has been lost to collective memory. After all the talk it was clear that it was time to find it or just shut up. Did we succeed..? Not during the conference, though Dario Bressanini did obtain a clue by posing as a tourist and talking to old ladies. And later? All will be revealed (possibly) in the next instalment of the ‘News from the Towler Institute‘ blog over at the Barga News site.

Quantum Monte Carlo in the Apuan Alps may return one day, but financial issues and the increasingly stupid organizational effort required means that summer 2015 will mark our first proper year off. Anyone wishing to use the place for their own meetings in which MDT doesn’t have to work so hard should contact him, preferably offering gifts (see p. 12 paragraph 5 of the current CASINO manual).

Documents
Poster
Original announcement
Conference programme

List of participants
Dario Alfè, Sam Azadi, Giovanni Bachelet, Dario Bressanini, Shibing Chu, Ron Cohen, Gareth Conduit, Csaba Daday, Caterina De Franco, Andrea Droghetti, Neil Drummond, Edgar Engel, Matthew Foulkes, Leonardo Guidoni, Nic Harrison, Kenta Hongo, Blazej Jaworowski, Martin Korth, Jonathan Lloyd-Williams, Pierre-Francois Loos, Pablo López Ríos, Ryo Maezono, Fionn Malone, Mariapia Marchi, Bartomeu Monserrat-Sanchez, Elaheh Mostaani, Richard Needs, Carlo Pierleoni, Tom Poole, James Shepherd, Sandro Sorella, James Spencer, Alex Thom, Mike Towler, John Trail, Cyrus Umrigar, Tack Uyeda, Will Vigor, Ching-Ming Wei [CANCELLED: Stefano Baroni, Vincenzo Barone, Roberto Dovesi]


Photographs
Ron Cohen
Gareth Conduit
Csaba Daday
Caterina de Franco
Pierre-Francois Loos
Mariapia Marchi
Mike Towler
Will Vigor

Music videos
– Mike Towler: Ed the Singer
– Pierre-Francois Loos: Italians are proud: riot at Laghetto
– Mike Towler: Bressanini and Bachelet: Folk Band
– Mike Towler: The dwindling audience of Jerry Lee Lewis


Talks presented

  • Dario Alfè (d.alfe at ucl.ac.uk)
    “Water clusters, ice, and bulk liquid: improving ab initio structure and energetics” [PDF]
  • Ron Cohen (ronald.cohen at ucl.ac.uk)
    “Quantum Monte Carlo simulations on silicate perovskite and other high pressure phases” [PDF]
  • Gareth Conduit (gjc29 at cam.ac.uk)
    “Pseudizing the Hamiltonian” [PDF]
  • Csaba Daday (dadaycs at gmail.com)
    “Wave function embedding methods and excited states: a guide to the perplexed” [PDF]
  • Andrea Droghetti (drogheta at tcd.ie)
    “Spin-crossover molecules: puzzling systems for electronic structure methods” [PDF]
  • Neil Drummond (n.drummond at lancaster.ac.uk)
    “Electronic and vibrational properties of monolayer hexagonal indium chalcogenides” [PDF]
  • Edgar Engel (eae32 at cam.ac.uk)
    “Anharmonic nuclear motion and the relative stability of hexagonal and cubic ice” [PDF]
  • Leonardo Guidoni (l.guidoni at gmail.com)
    “Geometries and properties of (bio)molecules by quantum Monte Carlo” [PDF]

  • Nic Harrison (nicholas.harrison at imperial.ac.uk)
    “Describing strong interactions – some outstanding problems” [PDF]
  • Kenta Hongo (kenta_hongo at mac.com)
    “QMC applications to noncovalent interactions in cyclohexasilane dimers” [PDF]
  • Martin Korth (martin.korth at uni-ulm.de)
    “On the hunt for molecular organic battery materials” [PDF]
  • Jonathan Lloyd-Williams (jhl50 at cam.ac.uk)
    “DFT and QMC calculations of solid molecular hydrogen” [PDF]
  • Pierre-Francois Loos (loos at rsc.anu.edu.au)
    “Chemistry in a 1D world” [PDF]
  • Pablo López Ríos (pl275 at cam.ac.uk)
    “Multideterminant compression algorithm for quantum Monte Carlo” [PDF]
  • Ryo Maezono (rmaezono at mac.com)
    “Embedded atom into jellium sphere” [PDF]
  • Fionn Malone (f.malone13 at imperial.ac.uk)
    “Parallel strategies for FCIQMC” [PDF]
  • Mariapia Marchi (marchi at esteco.com)
    “Using modeFRONTIER to automate DFT and QMC calculations: application to liquid hydrogen” [PDF]
  • Bartomeu Monserrat Sanchez (bm418 at cam.ac.uk)
    “An overview of vibrations in solids” [PDF]
  • Elaheh Mostaani (emostaani at gmail.com)
    “Binding energy of bilayer graphene (updated) and electronic properties of oligoynes” [PDF]
  • Richard Needs (rn11 at cam.ac.uk)
    “Xenon oxides under pressure” [PDF]
  • Carlo Pierleoni (carlo.pierleoni at aquila.infn.it)
    “Liquid-liquid phase transition in high pressure hydrogen: new predictions from CEIMC and comparison with DFT” [PDF]
  • Tom Poole (thomas.poole10 at imperial.ac.uk)
    “Algorithmic differentiation of diffusion Monte Carlo” [PDF] [NOT YET AVAILABLE]
  • Sandro Sorella (sorella at sissa.it)
    “Ab initio simulation of liquid water by quantum Monte Carlo” [PDF]
  • James Spencer (j.spencer at imperial.ac.uk)
    “An overview of the HANDE QMC project” [PDF]
  • Alex Thom (ajwt3 at cam.ac.uk)
    “FCIQMC and finite electron gases” [PDF]
  • Mike Towler (mdt26 at cam.ac.uk)
    “High-throughput QMC” [PDF]
    (Missing 5 slides near the end due to accidental file deletion – to be reconstructed.)
  • John Trail (jrt32 at cam.ac.uk)
    “Pseudopotentials for correlated electron systems” [PDF]
  • Cyrus Umrigar (cyrusumrigar at gmail.com)
    “Semistochastic quantum Monte Carlo: a hybrid of exact diagonalization and quantum Monte Carlo methods” [PDF]
  • Tack Uyeda (tueeeda at jaist.ac.jp)
    “Estimation of exchange interaction of SrMnO3 by QMC” [PDF] [NOT AVAILABLE]
  • William Vigor (w.vigor11 at imperial.ac.uk)
    “Unloading the dice: minimising biases in full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo” [PDF]
  • Ching-Ming Wei (cmw at phys.sinica.edu.tw)
    “Binding energy of 2D materials using QMC” [PDF]


Scientific report
Participants at the conference gave presentations on a very wide range of topics which I shall attempt to summarize below. I have divided them very roughly into two sections: (1) theoretical, algorithmic, and computational developments (which of course may involve interesting applications), and (2) applications. Some of the talks could conceivably fit in either of those categories; in such cases I have arbitrarily chosen one.

Theory
John Trail gave a very interesting report on his continuing efforts with Richard Needs to develop ‘correlated electron pseudopotentials’ more appropriate for use in explicitly many-body methods such as QMC than the one-electron Dirac-Fock/Hartree-Fock/DFT pseudopotentials that have traditionally been used. He showed that many of the difficulties associated with doing this can be alleviated by generating the pseudopotentials in very ionized atomic states, which are then very transferable to neutral states. Explicitly-correlated QMC results using these pseudopotentials were shown to be significantly more accurate than with Hartree-Fock pseudopotentials for a wide range of molecules and also for more difficult cases such as strongly-correlated and complex transition metal systems.

Multi-determinant expansions are a tool often used in quantum chemistry to construct very accurate wave functions. These can be used directly as trial wave function input to a QMC program but lengthy expansions of this nature can be very slow to evaluate. Pablo López Ríos presented a compression method for significantly reducing the computational cost of such expansions, whilst maintaining the desirable properties of leaving the existing evaluation algorithm unchanged and the original expansion coefficients optimizable. His implementation in the CASINO program showed compression ratios of between 2 and 25 in tests, and these factors translated more or less directly into an overall speedup of the calculation.

Csaba Daday presented work done in collaboration with the group of Claudia Filippi on using an embedding method to combine different levels of theory to describe ground and excited states of biomolecules. In particular, he showed one way of describing the ‘important’ parts of molecules with high-level wave function theory (perturbation theory, coupled cluster, or even DMC) while treating the rest of the system at the DFT level. Unfortunately, while this scheme seems to work well for small solvated molecules, the excitation energies obtained for green fluorescent protein were severely blue-shifted compared to experimental values. His conclusion was that classical embedding (point charges and induced dipoles) is the way to go until better functionals become available for DFT embedding. Clearly significant development work remains to be done.

In his presentation Bartomeu Monserrat-Sanchez showed how to include the effects of atomic vibrations in the calculation of total energies, electronic band gaps, and NMR parameters in first principles calculations. He demonstrated, for example, that static DMC and GW band gaps of diamond are in error by about 0.5 eV due to the neglect of electron-phonon coupling.

Prof. Sorella outlined his recently developed method for performing ab initio molecular dynamics simulations with quantum Monte Carlo. In this technique, ionic forces are computed using highly accurate variational wave functions containing several parameters that are fully optimized on the fly. He showed recent results obtained for hydrogen at high pressure and for liquid water at ambient conditions. Though preliminary the results were clearly very interesting and promising for future applications.

Pierre-Francois Loos of the National University of Australia gave an unusual but very interesting presentation showing that finite-size uniform electron gases can be used to create a generalised version of the local-density approximation. He observed that this new functional can be applied to one-dimensional inhomogeneous systems and that it yields accurate estimates of the correlation energy. He also discussed atoms and molecules in one dimension and demonstrated that, in distinct contrast to our world, one-dimensional atoms are bound by one-electron bonds.

Gareth Conduit’s talk was entitled “Pseudizing the Hamiltonian“. He began by describing the contact interaction often used in modelling ultracold atomic gases, and how it leads to pathological behavior driven by the divergence of the many-body wave function when two particles coalesce. He then proposed a family of smooth pseudopotentials which reproduce the scattering phase shifts of the contact interaction, resulting in significant improvements in efficiency when used in numerical calculations. Finally, he showed how to extend this formalism to generate a pseudopotential for the Coulomb electron-electron interaction in such a way that calculations can be accelerated by an order of magnitude.

Mike Towler’s presentation focussed on ‘high-throughput QMC’ – motivated by the remark made by Tim Mueller at last year’s meeting: “By 2016-ish, we should be able to calculate QMC energies for every known inorganic material on a single supercomputer in about a week (roughly).” Towler showed how it was possible for QMC calculations to ‘monitor themselves’ so that (a) they know when they have equilibrated and it is possible to begin accumulating statistics, (b) they know when they have achieved a desired target for the statistical error bar – which may be set in input – and then automatically stop, and (c) they know when a desired target error bar is ‘unreasonable’ and cannot be attained with a reasonable amount of computation. This can largely be done in a statistically valid way using a ‘distribution-free’ technique which does not rely on the validity of the central limit theorem. It is to be hoped that techniques such as these can help to greatly improve the rate at which calculations of large datasets can be done.

Full configuration interaction QMC (FCIQMC) and related methods such as semi-stochastic QMC have received a substantial amount of attention in recent years, and we were treated to six separate talks on this topic. These techniques arguably have a non-traditional focus compared to regular QMC calculations since they attempt to obtain the full configuration interaction result, i.e., the exact result for a finite basis set, with reduced but still non-polynomial scaling. The utility of such results can typically be seen in the benchmarking of other finite basis methods for small molecules and dimers, but there have also been successes in applying FCIQMC directly to solids such as nickel oxide chains. One can argue that FCIQMC has, in some sense, created a bridge between the usual QMC community and the quantum chemistry community and demonstrated the benefits of a stochastic approach to users of wave function-based methods. Amongst other developments, this has resulted in a stochastic version of coupled cluster theory developed by Alex Thom and collaborators.

Such developments are of course greatly assisted by the availability of high-quality standard software and a particularly promising new open-source code is the ‘highly-accurate N-determinant’ project : HANDE. We heard five talks given by the developmental team of HANDE, which is apparently nearing its public release. Will Vigor of Imperial College, London and James Shepherd of Rice University, focussed on attempts to understand the algorithmic detail of FCIQMC. They reported on errors related to the stochastic algorithm and systematic issues arising from the sign problem. Fionn Malone, also of Imperial College showed how FCIQMC can be parallelized more efficiently using non-blocking asynchronous communication (apparently motivated by Towler’s similar developments in CASINO from several years earlier). Alex Thom of Cambridge University discussed applications of FCIQMC and its coupled cluster equivalent to finite electron gas systems. James Spencer from Imperial gave the final talk as the lead developer in HANDE, and summed up how this work and many others besides had been made possible by access to this new piece of software.

A different but related technique known as semi-stochastic QMC was reported by Prof. Cyrus Umrigar of Cornell University. He presented developments that potentially offer routine efficiency gains of orders of magnitude over FCIQMC, while apparently not compromising on the quality of the resulting full CI energies.

It seems clear that this community has much to do to make FCIQMC etc. routinely useful such that a quantum chemist might consider using it instead of their traditional techniques (it’s bad enough trying to get them to use a non-Gaussian basis set, after all). The exponential scaling with system size remains a serious issue (the main advantage of DMC, for example, is the favourable N3 scaling combined with the high accuracy; of course many techniques exist which can do just high accuracy). Clearly much can be gained from observing similar problems that have been solved in more traditional QMC techniques, and this was reflected in the many and varied questions put to the speakers and the lively discussions that followed both in the session and outside of them.

Applications
Jonathan Lloyd-Williams presented the results of a combined DFT and DMC study of the phase diagram of solid hydrogen at pressures from 100 to 400 GPa. He and his collaborators have performed highly accurate DMC calculations of the static lattice energies of several candidate structures for the various experimentally observed phases of solid molecular hydrogen. By combining the DMC energies with anharmonic vibrational free energies — calculated using the method described in the talk by Monserrat-Sanchez — they found a phase transition between two of the candidate structures at pressures and temperatures in good agreement with those experimentally observed for the phase III/IV transition in solid hydrogen.

Prof. Alfè began by demonstrating the serious deficiencies in the DFT description of water. By decomposing the energy of water systems into a sum of one-body, two-body and many-body terms, and by providing energy benchmarks with CCSD(T) and QMC, he showed that different functionals have different errors in these terms. For example, BLYP has serious two-body errors but relatively small many-body errors. PBE has fairly small two-body errors but larger many-body errors. Alfè then showed that BLYP two-body errors can be effectively eliminated using GAP technology, and the resulting BLYP+GAP potential energy functional provides a good radial distribution function for water at ambient conditions.

Prof. Guidoni gave a very colourful and wide-ranging talk entitled ‘Geometries and properties of biomolecules by quantum Monte Carlo‘, showing calculations of various molecules up to and including models for large biological chromophores. He demonstrated – amongst other things – accurate QMC energies for ground and excited states, geometries, polarizabilities, and harmonic and ananharmonic frequencies. He also showed that geometry optimizations involving more than 100 atoms are now feasible, and that the so-called JAGP wave function (‘Jastrow antisymmetrized geminal power’) – a highly-accurate variational wave function based on Pauling’s ‘resonating valence bonds’ idea – is sufficiently flexible to do useful science at the VMC level rather than the more expensive DMC.

Prof. Cohen showed some applications of DFT, QMC and DFT-DMFT to silicate perovskite, cubic boron nitride, iron monoxide, and a number of other materials at high pressures.

Elaheh Mostaani from the University of Lancaster gave a talk about DMC results for the binding energy of bilayer graphene, demonstrating once more how you can get any answer you like with density functional theory when dealing with van der Waals or other weak interactions – with the sad exception of the correct one [Mike ducks to avoid missiles..]. She also showed preliminary results for a DMC study of the ground- and excited-state electronic properties of oligoynes (end-capped linear carbon chains with alternating single and triple bonds).

Edgar Engel presented DFT PBE calculations of the anharmonic quantum vibrational energies for hexagonal and cubic ice, showing that the thermodynamic stability of hexagonal ice with respect to cubic ice has its origin in the smaller anharmonicity of the nuclear vibrations. Using the displacement patterns of the corresponding high-energy hydrogen vibrational modes, this can be traced back to structural differences between the hexagonal and cubic forms, or more specifically, to the fact that hexagonal ice contains both boat- and chair-form hexamers of H2O molecules whilst cubic ice contains only chair-form hexamers.

As has become traditional, Prof. Needs gave a talk about ab initio random structure searching within DFT, this time with the aim of identifying stable stoichiometries and structures of xenon oxides under pressure.

Kenta Hongo from Japan spoke about noncovalent interactions in cyclohexasilane dimers (which are potentially important in ‘liquid silicon inks’ used as a source material for Si thin films). He compared and constrasted results for calculations done with various different DFT functionals along with MP2, CCSD(T), and DMC methods. The latter two, as they should, showed good agreement. He also showed preliminary results for a DMC study of metallic hydrogen at high pressure.

Martin Korth presented research on molecular organic battery materials with a focus on liquid electrolyte solvents. He used a variety of computational methods from wave function theory to strongly empirical quantitative structure-property relationships with the aim of screening for advantageous compounds. He was able to demonstrate that such an integrated approach is already helping experimentalists to design better electrochemical energy storage devices, and he also gave some insights into the complexity of an accurate computational treatment of electrochemical processes at the atomic scale.


Neil Drummond gave a talk in which he described density functional theory calculations of the electronic band structures, cohesive energies, phonon dispersions and optical absorption spectra of a new class of two-dimensional crystals: In2X2, where X is S, Se or Te. Two crystalline phases (α and β) of monolayers of hexagonal In2X2 were identified, and it was shown that they are characterized by different sets of Raman-active phonon modes. Drummond’s calculations showed that these materials are indirect-band-gap semiconductors with a sombrero-shaped dispersion of holes near the valence-band edge. The latter feature results in a Lifshitz transition (a change in the Fermi-surface topology of hole-doped In2X2) at experimentally accessible hole concentrations. Quantum Monte Carlo calculations are clearly required to describe the electronic structure of these materials with quantitative accuracy.

Prof. Nic Harrison gave an interesting talk on a number of different problems. First of all he investigated whether it was possible to perform accurate compuations of the potential energy surface for the scattering of He atoms off an MgO (100) surface. He showed that it was possible to get close to the exact curve but only with considerable effort (involving doing MP2 calculations of the periodic system with the CRYSCOR code, with coupled-cluster corrections computed using a finite molecule). He also presented a very nice discussion comparing and contrasting the effects of breaking the symmetry in a linear polyacetylene chain using both dimerization (Peierls distortion) and spin-polarization.

Mariapia Marchi showed how the workflow of computations involving both DFT and QMC can be optimized using the commercial software modeFRONTIER developed at the ESTECO S.p.A. company located in Trieste. The modeFRONTIER (mF) code is described as ‘an integration platform for multi-objective and multi-disciplinary optimisation, with an unlimited range of applications, though mainly used in engineering design optimisation‘. In her talk, Marchi focussed on a system of sixteen hydrogen atoms in the molecular liquid phase. DFT runs were used to fill in the Slater-determinant part of the wave function, while one-, two- and three-body terms in the Jastrow factor were optimised with VMC. This was followed by a molecular dynamics step using a second-order Langevin dynamics to sample the ionic configurations within the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. For each new atomic position, the determinant part was filled with new orbitals and the Jastrow factor re-optimised. DFT and VMC energies can be monitored on the fly through mF’s graphical user interface during the run. Although results were shown only for a simple test system, it is clear that this sort of thing can be very useful, for example, in investigating the properties and phase diagram of larger systems in order to avoid finite-size effects.

Andrea Droghetti reported extensive calculations assessing the performances of DMC for ‘spin crossover’ molecules containing Fe(II) ions. Looking at the spin crossover transition he showed that, independently of the choice of the trial wave function, DMC gave an energy difference between the high spin (spin=2) and low spin (spin=0) states which was almost an order of magnitude larger than that computed with state-of-art CASPT. As he pointed out, the quantum chemists normally tell us to trust CASPT2 as a reference so this is a little puzzling, to say the least. Of course we expect DMC to be even better, since with CASPT2 the short-range correlations are treated only perturbatively in contrast to the essentially exact QMC treatment. Andrea says ‘this calls for new studies aimed at unrevealing the shortcomings of both DMC and CASPT for transition metal complexes, which confirm themselves as very challenging systems even for the most advanced electronic structure methods available’.

Prof. Ching-Ming Wei from Taiwan presented various materials simulation applications of QMC including CO adsorption on late transition metal (111) surfaces and the binding energies of 2D layers such as graphene, BN films, and silicene. Though limited computer resources meant that there some issues with DMC error bar convergence he showed a large number of interesting results in systems where DFT is known to fail.

Carlo Pierleoni gave a presentation in which he outlined the established Coupled Electron Ion Monte Carlo (CEIMC) method, and showed an application to the liquid-liquid phase transition in high pressure hydrogen. The region of the phase diagram where molecular hydrogen — stable at low pressure and temperature — transforms into a mono-atomic or plasma state with increasing pressure and/or temperature is both interesting and challenging, in particular since molecular dissociation under pressure is also accompanied by a metal-insulator transition. Traditional QMC methods are largely used to study ground states and miss the important temperature dependence, and the usual Path Integral MC method for fermions is limited to the temperature range above 10-15K. CEIMC is a QMC method, based on the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, in which nuclear degrees of freedom, either classical or quantum, are sampled by standard MC methods, while the electronic energy is obtained by highly accurate ground state QMC method for the electrons. The use of Born-Oppenheimer means CEIMC is capable of investigating the temperature range below which electronic thermal excitation can be safely neglected in the system, and allows one to apply QMC methods to high pressure hydrogen in the most interesting region of the phase diagram where molecular dissociation and metalization under pressure occur. Prof. Pierleoni showed the results of calculations of the molecular dissociation under pressure both with CEIMC and Born-Oppenheimer MD employing several XC functionals, both for classical and quantum nuclei. All the theories (except PBE with quantum nuclei) led to the same qualitative picture of the existence of a weakly first-order liquid-liquid phase transition below some temperature. The precise location of the transition line and of the critical point strongly depended on the theory with the CEIMC line lying in between the GGA-PBE line (at lower pressure) and the vdW-DF2 line (at higher pressure). Note that the pressure difference with different DFT functionals was up to several hundred GPa. The quantitative prediction for the location of the transition line depended crucially on the relative accuracy with which a specific theory can treat both molecular and atomic (or plasma) states, and both insulating and metallic states. He showed that their trial wave function is very accurate even across this crossover and therefore the CEIMC line is expected to to be very accurate. An experimental validation of these theoretical predictions would clearly be immensely valuable.

Tack Uyeda and Tom Poole also gave talks which I will summarize when I manage to find a copy of their slides.

In summary, “Quantum Monte Carlo in the Apuan Alps IX” was a fascinating meeting which demonstrated many interesting theoretical advances and a very considerable range of applications that QMC is being used to study. However, I thought it was a pity that most of the people whose work I selected to highlight as particularly ground-breaking for a recent review talk entitled “QMC at the research frontier: useful calculations for big complicated systems” were unable to attend this year. I’m thinking of regular visitors like Lucas Wagner, Elif Ertekin, Richard Hennig, Tim Mueller, Luke Shulenburger, Jeff Grossman.. at least two of whom couldn’t come because they’re setting up home together and were installing solar panels on their new roof.

I’m sure you’ll all join me in wishing Lucas and Richard every future happiness.

Oh, wait..

MDT


Comments

  • “I just wanted to say thanks a lot for again organizing the coolest conference of the universe (only small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri could disagree)!” [Sure, but why would they disagree..?? MDT]
  • “Thanks again for working so hard to have a wonderful workshop in Vallico Sotto. There is simply nothing else like it!”
  • “Thank you so much for the two amazing weeks in Vallico. I will never forget those moments.”
  • “It was so great coming to the workshop and getting to know you and your family a little. You are doing great stuff! Maybe in the future I can come longer and help out some.”
  • “It was lovely to see you, Sam, Saska & Jamie, your home and to have a chance to catch up. Thank you for inviting me and for being such gracious hosts.”
  • “Thanks for a good TTI, even the rain was pleasantly tuscanic… Please thank Sam and the kids for having us all, and hope the summer school went well.”
  • “We left in a rush on Friday and I did not have time to thank you again for your hard work in putting together such an excellent event. I enjoyed myself as much as every other year (despite the weather!), and found it one of the most useful conferences I attend every year. Enjoy the summer school!”
  • “Thanks again for a great conference and I hope the summer school goes well, too!”
  • “Thank you again for organising everything. This was a great meeting!”
  • “Thank you very much for your efforts. I really enjoyed the
    conference!”
  • “Thank you very much for your great workshop.”
  • “Thanks for organizing the conference and accommodating my special
    arrangements. As ever, it was very good fun and I was sad to leave
    early.”
  • “Thank you again for the invitation, the hospitality and all the conference organisation. I had a great time there.”
  • “Thanks again for organizing the very nice conference.”

 

 

Preparations for QMC in the Apuan Alps IX

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Well, it’s Tuesday afternoon, there are four days to go before around fifty people will arrive in Vallico Sotto for the ninth Quantum Monte Carlo in the Apuan Alps IX international conference, and you know what? The place looks like a bomb has hit it, the weather forecast is promising days of terrible thunderstorms, and I haven’t even got the Bedouin tent up yet. In the odd moment, I need to find time to do some research so I’ll have something to talk about in my presentation next week. Sigh.

But then again, it’s always like that just before a TTI conference. Just this year it’s a bit worse as the old Institute is having a 10th anniversary revamp. Yes, it’s been ten years since Sam and I opened up for business. Here we are looking youthful and exuberant in 2004 (left) with our first physicist guests Nicole Benedek, Andrea Ma, and Arash Mostofi. Or Professor Mostofi as I should say nowadays. As you can see the previous owners liked any colour so long as it was white.. it’s a bit different now.

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So in order to celebrate our first decade (and the monastery’s 1246th year) there will be a party on the Doctor’ Lawn during the evening of Arrivals Day Sat 26th July  – 7.30 onwards, don’t be late. Saska and I are designing a poster to distribute round the village so the locals know to come too, and we’ve got a singer, no less  – the famous Ed Norris, former member of the Ramones and the New York Dolls. See him in action on Youtube here.  He does requests. Catering will be provided by Sam and whoever we can get to volunteer to help, as well as the wonderful Ramona from nearby Fabbriche di Vallico. In addition to Ed and the Village People (the real ones, not the 1970s disco band), we will be welcoming the following scientists from around the world:

Dario Alfè (University College, London, U.K.)
Sam Azadi (Imperial College, London, U.K.)
Giovanni Bachelet (Sapienza University, Roma, Italy)
Vincenzo Barone (Scuola Normale, Pisa, Italy) – possibly
Stefano Baroni (SISSA, Trieste, Italy) – possibly
Dario Bressanini (Università dell’Insubria, Italy)
Shibing Chu (Lanzhou University, China)
Ron Cohen (University College, London, U.K.)
Gareth Conduit (University of Cambridge, U.K.)
Bruno Cramer (University of Campinas, Brazil)
Csaba Daday (University of Twente, Holland)
Caterina De Franco (University of L’Aquila, Italy)
Roberto Dovesi (University of Torino, Italy)
Andrea Droghetti (Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland)
Neil Drummond (University of Lancaster, U.K.)
Edgar Engel (University of Cambridge, U.K.)
Elif Ertekin (University of Illinois, U.S.A.)
Matthew Foulkes (Imperial College, London, U.K.)
Leonardo Guidoni (University of L’Aquila, U.K.)
Alex Haider (Lisa’s Room, Cambridge, U.K.)
Nic Harrison (Imperial College, London, U.K.)
Kenta Hongo (JAIST, Japan)
Blazej Jaworowski (Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland)
Lisa Johnson-Davies (University of Life, Cambridge)
Martin Korth (University of Ulm, Germany)
Jonathan Lloyd-Williams (University of Cambridge, U.K.)
Pierre-Francois Loos (Australian National University, Australia)
Pablo López Ríos (University of Cambridge, U.K.)
Ryo Maezono (JAIST, Japan)
Fionn Malone (Imperial College, London, U.K.)
Mariapia Marchi (ESTECO S.p.A., Trieste, Italy)
Bartomeu Monserrat-Sanchez (University of Cambridge, U.K.)
Elaheh Mostaani (University of Lancaster, U.K.)
Richard Needs (University of Cambridge, U.K.)
Carlo Pierleoni (University of L’Aquila, Italy)
Tom Poole (Imperial College, London, U.K.)
James Shepherd (Rice University, U.S.A.)
James Spencer (Imperial College, London, U.K.)
Sandro Sorella (SISSA, Trieste, Italy)
Alex Thom (University of Cambridge, Italy)
Mike Towler (University of Cambridge and University College, London, U.K.)
John Trail (University of Cambridge, U.K.)
Cyrus Umrigar (Cornell University, U.S.A.)
Kyra Umrigar (Cyrus’s House, U.S.A.)
Jasmine Umrigar (Cyrus’s House, U.S.A.)
Tack Uyeda (JAIST, Japan)
William Vigor (Imperial College, London, U.K.)
Lucas Wagner (University of Illinois, U.S.A.)
Ching-Ming Wei (Academia Sinica, Taiwa)

Sadly, most of my Cambridge colleagues — in a desperate attempt to save a few quid and to avoid having to do any chores — are coming on the late flight and will miss both their dinner and the singing. Bunch of cheapskates.

Anyway, the final version of the programme document for the conference can be found here. There are six days worth of excellent talks to listen to in the mornings, and in the afternoons most people will be going on refreshing mountain walks and other excursions here in the Apuan Alps National Park, before they reunite in one of the fantastic local restaurants. And before you accuse them of having too good a time at taxpayers expense, they do use the afternoons and evenings to discuss quantum Monte Carlo as well. At least I hope they do. I can’t help it if it’s nice around here.

But back to the bomb site. Let me just post a few photographs to give you a flavour of what’s going on in the monastery at the moment..

Like I said, TTI is having a serious revamp. Here are my bravi ragazzi Marco and Raresh attached to the front of the church a couple of hours ago. I just asked them to paint it, but they’ve insisted on removing all the old paint and mould and doing the job properly so it will look nice for years to come. What a pair of fantastic guys. If you see them at the party, buy them a beer (also Marco the Younger – not shown, though he may be too young to drink – don’t tell his mum).

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They’ve also done a deep scrape of the crumbliest internal wall inside the church, and applied a coating of some sort of glue so that the several kilograms of dust and bits of plaster that annually coat everything beneath will cease to be a problem.

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And as you can see we also have a nice new-painted blackboard:

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The lads are also helping me to get rid of junk which has always been too heavy to cart down the hill, like this hideous second cooker which has been sitting in the kitchen since the day we arrived without ever having cooked anything (I have a vague recollection of it being able to keep plates warm in the first few years..). Still, goodbye!

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Here are the rest of my cleaning team, who sadly seem to spend most of their time hitting each other with mops, rather than actually cleaning anything.

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Ed the Singer will be testing out TTI’s new PA system, as demonstrated here by Jamie Lee Lewis, who is already displaying the correct rock and roll attitude by prominently displaying his arse wherever he goes (that’s in addition to his newly-developed cocaine habit). I wonder if Ed will do that?

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Note we also have some nice new instruments, microphones, and loudspeakers. People missing TTI’s old beige acoustic guitar will be glad to hear it has gone to a good home, as I have donated it to Professor Needs’s son Ralph. Richard was desperately trying to give it back to me earlier this term, but in order to annoy him I have told Ralph to keep it and I’ve bought a colourful new Epiphone electro-acoustic instead..

Marco the Younger has been helping me clear the attic of 100 years worth of dust, rusting agricultural implements, and general detritus, as you can see in the photo below. It’s actually much longer than it looks, and will be a really useful new space (for example, as an emergency shelter for Bedouin Tent inhabitants during the dreadful thunderstorms. This is actually where I sleep on a mattress on a floor during the conference (though in former years only the nearer bit was habitable with the rest screened off by a curtain). Young Lopez Rios gets to sleep in my old comfortable bed on the floor below, for some reason – see the sacrifices I make for our guests’ comfort. Anyway, I’m thinking of converting the end of the attic into a little contemplation space with our little surplus sofa and a bottle of Armagnac, where I can sit and plot my imminent takeover of the world. And do last minute revisions of all those summer school lectures that I never seem to be able to write in time.

scatola_bianca

Right at the end of the attic, you can see the new scatola bianca, a complicated box of electronics running TTI’s new university-grade wireless network, which I installed earlier this summer. Every part of the Institute plus Flora’s house next door plus the Doctor’s House will now be covered from here. It will also shortly be possible to connect via ssh into TTI ‘s systems from the outside world, if you can think of a reason to do that.

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It’s also time to attach TTI’s new NAS file server (a  Synology DS1513+ 5 Bay DiskStation
Desktop NAS), which amongst other things will make running summer schools a good deal easier. Ideas for what to store in its 10 terabytes of storage space on a postcard please. Here it is, still in its box. I hope it doesn’t have a Windows-only setup CD. I thought I still had at least one copy of Windows after Pablo’s ‘Everyone must use Ubuntu’ spring cleaning a few years back, but I can’t find one..

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I’m afraid the garden took a bit of a pasting in a giant thunderstorm the other night (which — despite the advantage of allowing me to map the current location of the leaks in the church roof —  also took out the local internet service for an entire day , which is very frustrating when you’re trying to organize a conference). At least some of the pretty flowers are coming out though..

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Earlier this year I read an article in the paper about Crug Farm Plants in Wales, who sell exotic plants from the Mysterious East (the Jungles of Laos, and places like that) which they collect personally on Indiana Jones style expeditions. So the garden now contains seven of these oriental immigrants. A prize for the first person to spot them. I appreciate this isn’t very rock and roll – perhaps I’m getting old.

As you can see below, Sam has been busy sculpting these last few weeks. I continue to marvel in disbelief – why on earth did she marry someone as talentless as me?

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Here’s another sculpture in front of the new sucker machine I’ve installed to extract all the nasty fumes Sam creates when she melts wax with a hot knife. At last the Alien Death Sphere in the church (which is holding up the trunking) has found a use.

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For tenth anniversaries you’ve got to have some fireworks. The two boxes are labelled ‘Nuclear Demolition’ and ‘Power Station 3’,  for some reason,  and there are (cough) a few small rockets in the blue box. Anyone wishing to launch satellites into orbit should contact me for a good price.

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Here’s my currently scruffy desk in the back of the church, where I was sitting a few seconds ago until I got up to take this photograph.

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And I’ll conclude with what Young People Nowadays apparently refer to as a ‘selfie’.

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If you’re travelling to Vallico Sotto this week, I wish you a very pleasant journey. We’re all looking forward to meeting you, and to enjoying some great science and some great company. And if you get some exercise as well, all the better (let’s face it, you do spend too long sitting around behind your desk, don’t you..). I note finally that the only volunteer for the Vallico Sotto against the World football match against the local tough guys later this week is Jasmine Umrigar (aged 13). I hope you’ll all be really embarassed if she beats them.

See you soon!
Mike

[who’s just remembered he has a summer school to organize as well for the week after. Oh God. Why do I do this again?]

 

QMC visit to the Scuola Normale in Pisa

Sammy and I were in Pisa yesterday at the invitation of Prof. Vincenzo Barone from the Theoretical Chemistry group at the Scuola Normale. Prof. Barone is amongst other things, Professor of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry in Pisa,  President of the Italian Chemical Society, and author of more than 650 publications, which for a young man like me still stuck on around 60 papers is something to aspire to, to say the least.

Despite the literal meaning of ‘Normal School’ – which in English sounds like somewhere you go if you can’t get into a good school –  the Scuola Normale is probably Italy’s most prestigious university – founded in 1810 by Napoleonic decree as the sister  of the École Normale in Paris. It is very much an elite institution, and to become a student there, candidates have to pass an extremely selective admissions exam with only a 6% pass rate – every year only sixty candidates are admitted out of nearly 1000 applicants. The main building is the overwhelmingly beautiful Palazzo della Carovana (pictured above) which was designed and built by Giorgio Vasari in the 1500s as the headquarters of the Knights of Saint Stephen. It is situated in Piazza dei Cavalieri  – the second main square in Pisa and right in the heart of the action. What a fantastic place to work, I have to say!  It certainly beats the modern incarnation of the pebble-dashed prefab Cavendish Laboratory – which was moved out of the centre of Cambridge to a field three miles away in the 1970s. This was done at probably the worst moment in history for British architecture at a cost of only two million pounds and it really shows;  despite inflation that wasn’t very much money back then either.

So anyway I gave a talk aimed at introducing the theoretical chemists to quantum Monte Carlo – like most chemists they focus on small molecules when doing accurate work, and I think they enjoyed being shown applications to crystalline solids and to large systems with an accuracy comparable to their ‘gold standard’  CCSD(T) method. You can tell how smart they all are – I don’t think I’ve ever had so many people asking good questions and so obviously understanding the difficult bits.. As example applications I used a subset of the cases from my last ‘Useful calculations for big complicated systems‘ post on this Blog – once again highlighting the excellent recent work of our American colleagues such as Lucas Wagner, Elif Ertekin, and Jeff Grossman – as well as my recent clathrate calculations with Stephen Cox et al.  So for anyone interested in a single talk introduction to QMC with applications, you can look at my 51 slides here:

pisa_talk

After the talk and a bit of lunch, Sammy and I were taken into the attic of the Palazzo della Carovana to see the ‘3D CAVE‘ of Prof. Barone’s DREAMSLAB (‘Dedicated Research Environment for Advanced Modeling and Simulations’).  With the help of some 3D glasses we were able to move around and interact with scattering data from CERN, a 3D model of a protein, and a reconstruction of an ancient Greek temple in Sicily (I know Sicily isn’t in Greece, but the Greeks were in Sicily once). Really quite stunning – Vasari would have though it black magic. They have a 3D hologram thing  in a glass pyramid as well – I asked the programmer guy Niccolò Albertini if they had done Princess Leia doing ‘Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi – you are our only remaining hope‘ in his spare time, and he had to admit that he had. We also had a go with a developer version of the ‘Oculus Rift’ –  a virtual reality headset apparently about to take the world by storm (Facebook paid 12 billion dollars for it last year). Wandering through a forest I accidentally fell off a 1000 foot cliff, and I swear it hurt when I hit the bottom.. Albertini said: ‘You’re not supposed to be able to do that!’ so it looks like I found a bug. Glad I was able to help.

So anyway, it seems that Prof. Barone and his team liked what they saw, and that they may be getting involved in QMC research in the future. Many thanks to him  (and to Monica Sanna who helped us with practical arrangements) for a great day out. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in Pisa in the future.. especially as it’s only an hour away from my Apuan Alps Centre for Physics. Prof. B. will hopefully be attending this year’s ‘QMC in the Apuan Alps‘ meeting, and I’m sure we will benefit from his extensive knowledge and experience in theoretical chemistry. Looking forward to it.

.

QMC at the research frontier: useful calculations for big complicated systems

Here’s a link to the slides from a talk I gave the other day in the Cavendish Laboratory Electronic Structure Discussion Group here in Cambridge (click the following picture):

qmctalkslides

Many people seem to have the impression that QMC is still stuck in the era where DFT was about 20 years ago, and that we’re restricted to calculating the lattice constant of silicon and similar tedious stuff. The idea with this talk was therefore to attempt to answer the question “Is diffusion Monte Carlo ready to solve genuine scientific problems – in ‘green environmental-type research’, say – possibly involving big and complicated systems, on reasonable timescales on today’s computers“? I will show – partly through a review of the recent literature on problems of relevance to energy research – that it most certainly is (and, almost incidentally, that attempting to use DFT for most of the problems highlighted is likely to lead to wrong answers).

The talk – which focusses on recent work of our American colleagues such as Lucas Wagner, Elif Ertekin, Richard Hennig, and Jeff Grossman and their collaborators (who frequently visit us in our summer meetings in Vallico Sotto) – includes summaries of applications involving  hydrogen storage, defect energetics, photovoltaics, water chemistry and solvation, database generation, and even strongly-correlated systems such as metal-insulator transitions in oxides and coupling of lattice, charge, and spin degrees of freedom in superconducting cuprates.’

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Much of the content of the slides was nicked or summarized from the papers discussed (and from a recent review article by Lucas) – full references are given and you are encouraged to read the original papers instead.

Enjoy! All comments welcome..

Mike

Mike Towler’s Jerry Lee Lewis set list

As he wishes to document his efforts at transforming himself into a Jerry Lewis impersonator, Mike T. here presents to you what would be his ideal 19-song set list, if only he was better at learning to play music by listening to it, and assuming he can learn to sing in the proper rock and roll style (which currently makes him cough, but you never know..). If you can help him perform this – by playing, singing, by transcribing songs, etc.. – then let him know. This is some of the exciting popular music ever recorded – enjoy!.

Just to get you in the mood, first have a look at pretty much the only high-quality colour footage of the man from the 1960s, along with none other than the legendary Tom Jones, who had his own TV show back in those days. They’re only screwing around – you’ve got to love the ‘comedy’ sequence (not) – but clearly these are two geniuses at the height of their powers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRJdPM0TRJQ

To those young people who think Tom Jones is just a television presenter, check out ‘Tom Jones dances like an animal‘, especially from 1:18 onwards (a feat also attempted, somewhat less convincingly, by a Guatemalan peasant here.)

And here’s Jerry Lee with three familiar faces – it’s Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Elvis!

Live at the Vallico Sotto Star Club – sometime in the future..

Lots of web links, some audio only, some videos and film clips. Some of the links are blocked on mobile devices but they all work on my proper computer. Some of the audio quality is a bit rough and you should really listen to the CD instead. Headphones at maximum volume required!

1. Mean Woman Blues (from ‘Live at the Hamburg Star Club’)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE-EI3JXnFE

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2. Money (from ‘Live at the Hamburg Star Club’)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVtyHz4Gu7g

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3. Lewis Boogie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c31qo7xio3Y (original record)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhulYR9UhT8 (very good Waylon Payne impersonation from the Johnny Cash biopic ‘Walk the Line’)

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4. High School Confidential
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzxDc2TyOEk (original record – too much guitar for us)
http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/262424/High-School-Confidential-Movie-Clip-Open-High-School-Hop.html (from the movie; best piano-only recording)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y51bM5vAmY (live on UK tour 1964 – video – teens go wild again)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDxR9MV5RmY&list=PL2B522F4AA0431A00&index=2
(Live at the Star Club – best live version – better sound quality than above)

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5. I’m on Fire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zarQE_Btlio (overproduced Mercury original – hard to hear piano)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs5rBPy9RoI (live on Granada TV – 1964)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gYNRwDgya8 (modern version done for the ‘Great Balls of Fire’ biopic; old man voice; good solo)

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6. I Believe In You (great solo!)
Difficult to find online: the following may work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJFLL86LtJE

7. Hit The Road Jack
Required: Three comedy singing ladies with incredibly high voices – unless we can find gentlemen with a falsetto – and we need to lose the saxophone and massive Mercury overproduction and make it a bit more sparse.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNIuFmiiy9E (original record)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fycMC6jsH10 (bizarre slow live version with under-rehearsed singing dolly birds, at least one of whom appears to be on drugs. And is that Dr. McCoy from Star Trek on Guitar?)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Tiz6INF7I&list=RD6XdVefBj8UI (Ray Charles original)

8. Drinkin Wine Spo-dee-o-dee
First song ever played live by JLL in a garage in Ferriday, Louisiana;
‘spo-dee-o-dee’ is apparently a euphemism – because you couldn’t say
‘motherfucker’ on the radio. For some bizarre reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e5R-xFtqyQ (original record)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtrVRMdrPe0 (surprisingly excellent modern version)

9. It’ll Be Me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfgu2XBmqOo
This one grows on you after a while.. love the solo! And how do you do
that funny ‘washboard’-y effect in the background..? (edit: buy a washboard!)

10. Pink Pedal Pushers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC93ehMorUw
(this just reminded me of one of my favourite songs by the Stray Cats:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYiwxM_RVEI )

13. Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFxRTLmtsbE (original record – “There is nothing conceptually better than rock & roll,” John Lennon told Jann Wenner in a 1970 interview for Rolling Stone magazine. “No group, be it Beatles, Dylan or Stones, have ever improved on ‘Whole Lotta Shakin” for my money.”)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifEc-RazQlY (live On Granada TV 1964 – watch the insane teenagers!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw7SBF-35Es (first ever live TV appearance on the Steve Allen Show 1957 – this is what made him famous)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQhQq0Pg_V8 (Dennis Quaid and some fabulous old lady dancing – ends up being the movie version of the above)

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11. Lovin’ Up A Storm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dwlo0ZmW3s

12. Rockin My Life Away
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yZBuAu2ysU

14. Crazy Arms
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xx6e00_jerry-lee-lewis-crazy-arms-1958_music (original record)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rxDXy2yH3c (From the 1989 Movie)

crazyarms
Sun Records boss Sam Phillips brings ‘Crazy Arms’ hot off the press to the radio station..

15. I’ll Sail My Ship Alone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPWgnU3hnxY

16. Lucille
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jmNe77vces (Little Richard original – superior to the JLL version. But I can’t sing like that, and neither – probably – can anyone else..)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3-OaNevkfg (As above but ‘live’)
You can find many JLL versions on the internet but they’re all a bit slow and lazy.. A live version would need to be based on the Little Richard).

17. You Win Again
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Def3BsdYnJ4 (original record)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMTPqFNuDYI(‘live’)
The B-side to ‘Great Balls of Fire’ no less – I can play this!

18. She Was My Baby
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFLa4Flh5AI
Comedy gold.

19. What’d I Say
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owCiPI4xBn4 (original record)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5dOlLvHNG4 (‘Live at the Hamburg Star Club’ – awesome..)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPLZL4s_jtI (Ray Charles original – so sloooow – but still awesome)

and as an encore..

20. Wild One (as impersonated by Dennis Quaid) – just for the standing on the keyboard trick..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHkLtPThjQ
Here’s the original:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzTbLDdrACI

jllquaid

21: Lust of the Blood (“You know, if anybody ever asks me why I do this radio show, I could just play them that – Jerry Lee Lewis singing Shakespeare. That’s what this show is all about.” Bob Dylan on Jerry Lee Lewis’ Lust of the Blood from the rock musical, Catch My Soul.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rjNDOepPis

jerry_iago

and just for fun, as we’ll never get anyone who can drum like that (Barry Jenkins of the Nashville Teens, later of The Animals):

22. Good Golly Miss Molly… (‘Live at the Star Club’)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woAh_ne_PMM

starclub4

and finally a slow one , because I agree what the reviewers say “a one man tour-de-force, a stunning fusion of everything that was Jerry Lee Lewis. The bluesy piano licks thrown into the middle of the stone hillbilly classic and a vocal of scorching intensity.

23. Your Cheating Heart (‘Live at the Star Club’)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZXHqFLaWPM

starclub3

Some of you may be wondering ‘why hasn’t he mentioned Great Balls of Fire yet’? Well, to tell the truth I find it a bit over-familiar now and stupidly I decided not to include it in my set list. That said, you really must watch (a) Jerry Lee – played by Dennis Quaid – utterly humiliating Chuck Berry with this song whilst totally ignoring Health and Safety Regulations in the 1989 Movie. This was apparently based on a real incident –  ‘Follow that, Killer!‘. Rumour has it that three of the letters in that phrase were substituted with other ones, but don’t worry – JLL and Berry were later to become great friends..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgT6qvywfpY

and (b) the real Jerry Lee Lewis – at around 97 years of age – completely owning Dennis Quaid at the post-movie wrap-up party.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kKMOAr4iA8

There you go. Hope you enjoyed it!

Report on ‘QMC in the Apuan Alps VIII’ workshop 2013


The eighth “Quantum Monte Carlo in the Apuan Alps” international workshop took place from the 27th of July to the 3rd of August 2013. The participants spent four hours each morning listening to talks on quantum Monte Carlo and related matters, followed by afternoons of mountain walking, caving, canyoning and other activities.

The vitality of research in this field was confirmed by the extremely wide variety of applications discussed, which included high-pressure solid hydrogen, rare gas crystals, biomolecules, ultracold atomic gases, water clusters, water-acene complexes, the design of metal alloys, hexagonal boron nitride, point defects in semiconductors and wide-band gap oxides, molecular crystals such as para-diiodobenzene, proton disorder in ice, nanocrystalline alumina, electron-hole systems, the metallization of solid helium, the binding energy of bilayer graphene, correlation-bound anions and organic diradicals, methane binding in ice clathrates, and (for the first time) the high-Tc  superconducting cuprates. Wagner’s talk on this latter subject – in which he showed highly-accurate DMC calculations of the spin-lattice coupling in the real material (as opposed to a model system) for the first time – was particularly interesting. He found that some lattice degrees of freedom depended strongly on the magnetic state, and that the spin-lattice coupling was removed with 25% doping. Considerable attention was also paid to computing weak interactions such as van der Waals in QMC; talks by Tkatchenko, Benali, Ambrosetti, Deible, Gillan, Jordan, Mostaani were all devoted to this topic in one or another, and showed the very considerable superiority of QMC results over DFT in this area.  As the power of available computers and the sophistication of the algorithms and software increases, it is clear that the size and complexity of the systems that can be treated within QMC continues to rise rapidly. A number of researchers, including Gillan, Wagner, Maezono, Towler, and Alfè are particularly active in pushing the boundaries of what calculations can be done for real systems on large computers.

A number of more technical questions were addressed. These included forces and correlated sampling, finite-size effects, direct incorporation of light nuclei at the quantum level in DMC calculations, maximum probability domains in crystals, and the use of CASINO on systems containing GPUs. A number of speakers such as Tim Mueller stressed the need for using QMC to generate publically-available databases of highly accurate results – for examples of formation energies – and the subsequent requirement for developing methods for doing ‘high-throughput QMC’. QMC is ideal for such databases – which need only be created once and would be useful for a very long time – not only because it produces highly accurate energetics, but because it scales well with processor
number and system size and because it works for ‘everything’ (molecules, metals, insulators, semiconductors..). Mueller’s talk had the interesting and surprising conclusion that – given suitable recipes and workflow improvements -‘by 2016-ish we should be able to calculate QMC energies for every known inorganic material on a single supercomputer in (roughly) about a week‘.

A significant number of people in groups in London and Cambridge are involved with stochastic Monte-Carlo approaches to classic quantum chemistry techniques such as CI and coupled cluster, and these efforts were the subject of a number of interesting talks by Spencer, Thom, and Vigor. The FCI-QMC technique can reproduce the results of full CI calculations (for a given finite basis) essentially exactly but in considerably less time, and it is now possible to calculate energies for systems very much larger than was possible before. The stochastic coupled cluster technique discussed by Thom can reproduce large coupled cluster calculations much more quickly; it is considerably simpler to implement than deterministic coupled-cluster, and is feasible on workstations and very parallelizable.

On a lighter note, notable athletic achievements by the group included the ascents of Monte Matanna, Monte Palodina, Pania della Croce, and Monte Forato, the exploring of the Neanderthal cave (Grotto dell’Onda) and the Cave That Screams, and the penetration of the Turrite di San Rocco and Orrido di Botri canyons. They were the first group to reach the fortress of Trassilico from San Luigi, and ascended a small hill with a nice view near San Pelligrinetto.

Edgar Engel became the first person since pioneers Evans and Towler to reach the Fat Boy Filter in the cave of Cascaltendine by heroically free-climbing the 60 foot wall of the final waterfall chamber. As the opposition fielded their best team (for once) our heroes suffered an embarassing 15-4 hammering by the thrusting young village lads in the fourteenth “Vallico Sotto Against The World” football match (utter humiliation being avoided only by four goals from deadly striker Bartomeu Monserrat-Sanchez). The football was followed by fireworks, dinner, and the Great Rock and Roll Face-off, in which trainee Jerry Lee Lewis impersonator Mike Towler and girly choirboy Alex Thom competed to see who could sing ‘She Was My Baby (He Was My Friend)‘ in the least convincing rock’n’roll style. Needless to say, an almost unanimous vote by everyone except his own loyal daughter Saska voted Towler as by far the worst singer. The other days were concluded with evening discussions and dinner, and on Tuesday, by a trip to the Vallico Sopra Festival where the participants ate local delicacies such as necci, migliecci and pitonca, learned how to dance the Moresca, and observed demonstrations of interesting agricultural techniques.

     

    List of participants

    Dario Alfè, Alberto Ambrosetti, Sam Azadi, Anouar Benali, Pascal
    Bugnion, Mauro Causà, Gareth Conduit, Mike Deible, Andrea Droghetti,
    Neil Drummond, Edgar Engel, Elif Ertekin, Matthew Foulkes, Mike Gillan, Richard
    Hennig, Kenta Hongo, Ken Jordan, Jonathan Lloyd-Williams, Pierre-Francois Loos,
    Matthew Lyle, Martin Krupicka, Ryo Maezono, Natalia Matveeva, Bartomeu
    Monserrat-Sanchez, Elaheh Mostaani, Tim Mueller, Richard Needs, Joshua
    Schiller, Luke Shulenburger, James Spencer, Jian Sun, Alex Thom, Alexandre
    Tkatchenko, Mike Towler, Peter Townsend, Tack Uyeda, William Vigor, Anatole von
    Lilienfeld, Lucas Wagner (CANCELLED: Dario Bressanini)


    Talks presented

    Dario Alfè (d.alfe at ucl.ac.uk)

    • “Graphene on Ir(111): growth and thermodynamics from combined experimental and theoretical methods” – NOT AVAILABLE

    Alberto Ambrosetti (ambrosetti at fhi-berlin.mpg.de)

    • “Long range correlation energy from isotropically damped Quantum harmonic oscillators” [PDF]

    Sam Azadi (s.azadi at imperial.ac.uk)

    • “Quantum Monte Carlo study of high-pressure solid hydrogen” [PDF]

    Anouar Benali (abenali at alcf.anl.gov)

    • “Quantum Monte Carlo calculations of many-body van der Waals forces in rare gas crystals and biomolecules” [PDF]

    Pascal Bugnion (pob24 at cam.ac.uk)

    • “Spins, superfluidity, and ultracold atomic gases” [PDF]

    Mauro Causà (mauro.causa at unina.it)

    • “Correlated maximum probability domains in crystals” [PPT]

    Gareth Conduit (gjc29 at cam.ac.uk)

    • “Concurrent materials design” [PDF] (password protected)

    Mike Deible (mjd87 at pitt.edu)

    • “Quantum Monte Carlo studies of water clusters and water-acene complexes” [PDF]

    Andrea Droghetti (drogheta at tcd.ie)

    • “A DFT+model Hamiltonian approach to zero-bias transport in nanostructures: work in progress” [PDF]

    Neil Drummond (n.drummond at lancaster.ac.uk)

    • “Electronic structure of two-dimensional crystals of hexagonal boron nitride” [PDF]

    Elif Ertekin (ertekin at illinois.edu)

    • “QMC for point defects in semiconductors and wide-band gap oxides” [PDF]

    Matthew Foulkes (wmc.foulkes at imperial.ac.uk)

    • “Forces and correlated sampling in DMC” [PDF]

    Mike Gillan (m.gillan at ucl.ac.uk)

    • “Quantum Monte Carlo benchmarks for weak non-covalent interactions” [PPTX]

    Richard Hennig (rhennig at cornell.edu)

    • “Computational discovery and design of materials for energy technologies and electronic devices” – NOT AVAILABLE

    Kenta Hongo (kenta_hongo at mac.com)

    • “Finite-size effects in diffusion Monte Carlo simulations of para-diiodobenzene” [PDF] (password required)

    Ken Jordan (jordan at imap.pitt.edu)

    • “Quantum Monte Carlo studies of correlation-bound anions and of organic diradicals” [PPT]
      “Proton disorder in ice” – NOT AVAILABLE

    Pierre-Francois Loos (loos at rsc.anu.edu.au)

    • “Uniform electron gases: electrons on a ring” [PDF]

    Matthew Lyle (mjl78 at cam.ac.uk)

    • “Low density nanocrystalline alumina” [PDF] (password protected)

    Ryo Maezono (rmaezono at mac.com)

    • “Studies of electron-hole systems using DMC” [PDF]

    Natalia Matveeva (matveeva.na at gmail.com)

    • “Localization of an impurity in a bilayer system of dipoles” [PDF]

    Bartomeu Monserrat Sanchez (bm418 at cam.ac.uk)

    • “White dwarf cooling: electron-phonon coupling and the metallization of solid helium” [PDF]

    Elaheh Mostaani (emostaani at gmail.com)

    • “Binding energy of bilayer graphene” [PDF]

    Tim Mueller (tmueller at jhu.edu)

    • “Quantum Monte Carlo for materials design” [PDF]

    Richard Needs (rn11 at cam.ac.uk)

    • “Decomposition and terapascal phases of water ice” [PDF]

    Luke Shulenburger (lshulen at sandia.gov)

    • “Status of DMC for condensed phases” [PDF]

    James Spencer (j.spencer at imperial.ac.uk)

    • “Full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo and coupled cluster Monte Carlo: a framework for stochastic quantum chemistry.” [PDF]

    Alex Thom (ajwt3 at cam.ac.uk)

    • “Linked stochastic coupled cluster theory” [PDF]

    Alexandre Tkatchenko (tkatchen at fhi-berlin.mpg.de)

    • “Explicit many-body van der Waals corrections to DFT, and how QMC can help to develop them” [PDF]

    Tack Uyeda (tueeeda at jaist.ac.jp)

    • “Ohmic contact on diamond semiconductors” [PPTX]

    William Vigor (w.vigor11 at imperial.ac.uk)

    • “Accelerating Full Configuration Interaction Quantum Monte Carlo” [PDF]

    Anatole von Lilienfeld (anatole at alcf.anl.gov)

    • “Preaching on first principles views on chemical compound space, atom-centered potentials, and statistical learning” [PDF]

    Lucas Wagner (lkwagner at illinois.edu)

    • “Can we understand the high-Tc superconducting cuprates from first principles?” [PDF]

    Comments

    • “The conference was absolutely incredible. I hope to be back next year.”
    • “Thank you so so much to all of you guys for giving us the opportunity to get
      to know such a wonderful (and almost unreachable, at least at the first
      attempt) place as it is Vallico di Sotto and the whole Apuan Alps area! What
      an experience, it really make us change from the inside. I don’t know if it
      has to be with the lots of fresh air you get there, or the amazing food , or
      the awesome company , or all the wise that concentrated there at the
      Monastery, or the figs …maybe it was all these things together, but at
      least [my husband] and me , we both feel full of energy and optimistic (maybe a
      couple of pounds heavier , doesn’t matter, :o) just ready for what next,
      simply great!”
    • “I didn’t see you yesterday morning before we all left so I just wanted to
      say a huge thank you for putting on ‘QMC in the Apuan Alps VIII’. I had a
      brilliant time attending the lectures and going on the excursions and it was
      a great privilege to be given the opportunity to interact with so many
      distinguished physicists in such a friendly and welcoming environment.”
    • “Thanks again for a great conference, and good luck with the summer school.”
    • “Thanks again for another wonderful conference.”
    • “TTI was very great conference and it was a good experience for me.
      I got many interesting suggestions and friends. I want to attend next TTI !”
    • “We left yesterday early in the morning and didn’t have the chance to say
      goodbye or to thank you and your family once again for your hospitality. I
      really enjoy going to your place every time, and although I must say that I
      have never been to any other conference (and twice to yours), I cannot
      imagine how both science and fun could get any better.”
    • “Thanks for organising another excellent conference. I had a great time.”
    • “Thanks a lot for hosting us in Vallico Sotto!
      You and your family are doing a marvellous thing!
      [My wife] and me really enjoyed the meeting and everything
      else.”
    • “Thanks again for all the efforts, and to Sam and you for including me so
      warmly and openly. This was an amazing event, and I very much look forward
      to any future get-together. Once the school is over, please do enjoy that
      Amarone bottle and tell Sam about the effect of the potential shape on
      electronic level spacing. On my ride back I was wondering if one could
      visualize such excitations, and even make a sound according to the
      frequencies of the levels or their excitations. That might be called the
      music of the electrons. Same thing holds for nuclear wavefunctions of
      course.”
    • “Thanks again for an excellent workshop”
    • “Thank you again for all your wonderful organization and opening your home to
      us.”
    • “We made it home late last night after some long traveling and already miss the valley. Thank you once again for coordinating such an awesome event.”
    • “Thanks for organizing the conference last week — it was an excellent
      scientific event with great activities.”
    • “Thanks very much for organizing the conference, there was a perfect blend of
      strong science and opportunities to discuss ideas with colleagues.”

     

     

     

     

    Report on ‘QMC and the CASINO program VIII’ summer school 2013


    The eighth international summer school in the “Quantum Monte Carlo and the CASINO program” series took place from Sunday 4th August to Sunday 11th August 2013 and involved 25 students from 16 countries.

    The purpose of the school was to provide the students with a thorough working knowledge of the quantum Monte Carlo electronic structure method as currently used in quantum chemistry and condensed matter physics and to show them how to use the Cambridge CASINO QMC program for serious scientific research. The participants spent around four hours each morning listening to lectures on the quantum Monte Carlo method. This was followed by practical examples classes with the CASINO software, and a programme of healthy recreational activities such as mountain walking and cave exploration.

    procinto
    In the late afternoons various groups of students attacked and conquered Monte Matanna, the cylindrical rock tower of Monte Procinto, the wild Turrite di San Rocco canyon, the legendary Cave of Cascaltendine, the Cave of Fairies of Vallico Sotto, the natural rock arch of Monte Forato, the terrifying ‘Cave That Screams’, the mighty Orrido di Botri canyon, and a small hill near San Pelligrinetto. Special mention should be made of Englishman Matthew Malcomson and Russian Yury Gladush, who spent the week showing off their tremendous athletic abilities and natural courage, by unnecessarily running up very steep mountains just because they could, and by free-climbing various suicidally dangerous slippy rock faces. Following his exploits in the annual “Vallico Sotto against the World” football match, in which he wore only a pair of shorts and no shoes, Malcomson was nicknamed “La Bestia” – the Beast – by locals, and quite right too.

    OK so we lost 12-11 on a Golden Goal after a hard fought match against their Junior team, but it’s better than being absolutely caned as is more usual on these occasions. Both men also demonstrated their considerable musical abilities in a Rock’n’roll evening at the Vallico Sotto Star Club, along with Minh Tam Nguyen, Ludmila Szulakowska, Sofia Silva, Mr. Pablo López Ríos (who also managed a 40-minute drum solo during a traditional Vallico Sotto dance night down in the village) and others.

    mountains
    To check which students have been paying most attention during the lectures and practical classes, we traditionally hold a tough examination on the final day. The highest mark and the award of the prestigious title of “TTI QMC Summer School Champion 2013”, went to Blazej Jaworowski from Wroclaw, for which he was awarded the prize of a 19th century Gentleman’s Telescope. Following our first-ever seaside day trip to Lerici and Portovenere, his triumph was celebrated in the TTI church with fine Barolo-soaked cheese from Lucca and a quality speech from the victor which could have been given by Abraham Lincoln. After Booth shot him.


    This year marked the promotion of 17-month-old Jamie Towler to our staff. We are somewhat unhappy to report that he spent the week perambulating about the Institute, clad only in a nappy/diaper, stealing people’s possessions from their rooms, chewing them, and attempting to throw them into the lavatory – before parading into the back of the church and making screeching noises during his father’s lectures. It is to be hoped that – following a rigorous and intensive training program – he might be of considerably more use in future years.

    yasmine

    Instructors

    Mike Towler, Neil Drummond, Pablo López Ríos assisted by Martin Krupicka

    Students

    Yasmine Al-Hamdani, Tadeusz Andruniów, Can Ataca, Samaneh Ataei, Salvatore Cardamone, Ambesh Dixit, Guillaume Ferlat, Laura Giacopetti, Yury Gladush, Cecilia Goyenola, Blazej Jaworowski, Manuel Perez Jigato, Peter Korir, Matthew Malcomson, Jana Mathauserová, Marcos Menéndez, Elaheh Mostaani, Minh Tam Nguyen, Antonio Noto, Eduardo Menendez Proupin, Samuel Ridgway, Kayahan Saritas, Pedro Silva, Kyrylo Snizhko, Ludmila Szulakowska

    people


    Lectures presented : slides
    (password required)

    Mike Towler (mdt26 at cam.ac.uk)

    • “Quantum Monte Carlo : a practical solution to the correlation problem in electronic structure calculations” [PDF]- “The CASINO program : a basic introduction to functionality and input/output” [PDF]- “Three QMC scaling problems: many atoms, many protons, many processors” [PDF]- “Forces and dynamics. Expectation values other than the energy” [PDF]

    Pablo López Ríos (pl275 at cam.ac.uk)

    • “Statistics in quantum Monte Carlo” [PDF]- “Wave functions beyond Slater-Jastrow for QMC” [PDF].  (Animation of nodes [GIF])- “Pseudopotentials for QMC” [PDF]

    Neil Drummond (n.drummond at lancaster.ac.uk)

    • “Theory and practice of Diffusion quantum Monte Carlo” [PDF]- “Optimization of many-electron wave functions” [PDF]- “Ewald interactions and finite size effects” [PDF]- “Quantum Monte Carlo study of the two-dimensional homogeneous electron gas” [PDF]


    Practical worksheets and input files


    QMC Exam

    • – “Exam” [PDF]
      – “Answers” [PDF]


    Student talks

    None.

    river

     

    Comments

    • “I just wanted to express my greatest thanks for this
      wonderful QMC school which in my opinion is the best combination of
      high-level science and great atmosphere ever. Thanks for all the efforts put
      in this!”
    • “I just wanted to say thanks very much again for this absolutely fantastic
      week; the places as well as the people were delightful! I’m sorry I didn’t
      get to say bye to you or Sammy properly (traveling days are always a bit
      hectic) but please tell Sammy and Saska that I really enjoyed their company
      and it was so nice of your family to be so very welcoming.”
    • “After safely arriving home I want to thank you (and all the people who
      helped you) once more for organizing such a great school. I thoroughly
      enjoyed it. First of all, the organizational part was excellent with me not having to
      think about any technical details at all during the school. Adding to this
      the amazingly complete pre-school instructions, I must say that the
      organizational part was really great. The balance between learning activities, sightseeing and Italian dinners (which were as substantial as long 🙂 ) could hardly be better. However, I would hardly survive more than a week of such regime, – and I can
      only imagine how it was to you. Which makes me even more grateful. 🙂
      So in conclusion, I say REALLY HUGE THANK YOU!!!”
    • “I’d like to thank you very much for the great week in Vallico Sotto. It was both instructive and really enjoyable. I had a lot of fun and I couldn’t dream of learning more. I am also glad to have met so many wonderful people!”
    • “Thanks again for organising the conference and summer school! As ever they
      are by far the best workshop & summer school that one could ever hope to
      attend.”
      elaheh

    Five stories : ‘News from the Towler Institute’

    Here for the readers of the CASINOQMC site, in reverse order of publication, are five stories originally published in the ‘News from the Towler Institute’ blog on that wonderful website barganews.com [‘busily putting Barga on the map’ with single-minded determination since 1996 – before most people had even heard of the internet – by Keane, a great man and a great artist]. The stories concern various happenings during the development of the Apuan Alps Centre for Physics which may be of interest to people who have attended events at the venue.

    Tales from the Disaster Zone

    Posted on

    by Mike Towler

    So we’re cut off. Vallico Sotto is isolated from the rest of humanity by the biggest damned landslide you ever saw. See this hundred-foot-deep three-hundred-foot-wide mile-long hole? That was a road I walked over just the day before.

    landslide21

    It all began with the snow, see. They cancelled the school bus because of the nasty weather, and so I took Froggie the Fiat Multipla down to pick up our four-year old daughter Saska and the three daughters of some English friends who live in the forest below Vallico. It’s the week of the recita – which I imagine is some kind of Nativity play – and Saska has been given the vitally important role of a snowflake. It’s not what I’d hoped for actually. Especially since at the big pantomime in her English school a week earlier she played a star, not in the showbiz sense, but in the sense of standing at the back of the stage with a gold pointy shape attached to her head and being told to twinkle. You’ve got to say it’s disappointing.

    I’ve got the Virgin Mary in the back of the car though. And to be fair you can see why she got the job, as she looks exactly like your internal picture of the real one back in about 10 BC, albeit maybe a bit cleaner. And right now, you can tell from her face she’d rather be on the back of a donkey than in my car. The school is down in the valley far below, and when I got there it was only pretending to snow. As we begin the climb back up the steep, winding road to Vallico Sotto, it really starts to snow. Proper snow that sticks to the road. And Froggie, with his old worn-out wrong-sort-of-tyres and total lack of preparation for winter, starts to slip and slide. After ten minutes of incredibly slow driving in second gear we get back to the Vallico car park and I reckon we have something like five minutes to spare before the road becomes impassable. Lucky.

    The Virgin Mary’s father – sadly called John rather than Joachim – is waiting, and he hurriedly clears off to his forest with the short-arsed holy trio. Saska, my wife Sammy and I are left alone in the car park. Through the swirling snow I gaze at the ugly monstrosity building site which has been the public face of Vallico for the last three and a half years. When we first came here five or six years ago, it was a beautiful old ruined fourteenth century palazzo. Looked quite nice actually. Only reason you couldn’t live in it was that there was no glass in many of the windows and there was a huge crack in the stonework of the facade. Then whoever owns it decided to restore it by – get this – completely demolishing it then putting the resultant jigsaw back together from the multiple piles of tens of thousands of ancient stones. Unsurprisingly this took a long time, with a giant crane taking up half the places in the car park, but eventually something that looked remarkably like a modern palazzo reappeared. No plaster, still no windows, and then everything stopped. People said that the builders had been banged up in jail for nicking the most architecturally important bits of masonry and selling them on. Some other people said the money had run out. Eventually after a year or so someone came and took the crane away (What’s the weekly rent for one of those things? No wonder they had financial problems.). And so now for a hell of a long time an unfinished something like you’d expect the Mafia to build in Sicily has squatted like a monstrous toad in front of our supposedly-protected beautiful village, amid piles of mud and concrete, swathed in scaffolding and the ugly bright-orange netting with which the law obliges you to cover every building site. The hundred or so people I bring here every summer for our public events arrive expecting to see some kind of Tuscan mountain idyll. When they get here and see this thing it’s clear some of them want to go home again. On the official building site sign where it says “Estimated Date of Completion: Dec 2007″ someone has written, in Italian, “So f***ing complete it then”. That’ll be the day.

    So, slipping and sliding just like Froggie, we walk up the steep path to our lovely old monastery and settle in for the night.

    car_park1

    Fast forward to the following morning. After I wake up, I lie in bed for something like four hours, refusing to tunnel from underneath nine layers of bedclothes into the frigid air of my unheated room. When I eventually crack and fling open the frozen shutters, all I can see is a vast uneven field of snow extending as far as the eye can see; the unevenness is caused by a series of giant lumps which I take to be houses. The entire village and all of the surrounding mountain have been completely buried under two to three feet of snow. We are, and not for the last time this Christmas, cut-off from the rest of the world. When I pop next door later, our lovely neighbour Flora Calissi – a resident of Vallico Sotto since around 1896 – told me there hadn’t been any serious snow up here since the 1960s. Before that, she said, it was a regular thing; that’s climate change for you. To be fair though, a couple of the younger local lads (the ones in their 70s) remembered that actually there was a pretty fair snowfall here around 1985. Mind you, that’s still a quarter of a century ago and you have to wonder whether the council snowplough still works.

    OK, snow. Brilliant. Snowmen! Snowball fights! Let’s build an igloo! Hooray. However for some reason I don’t have any gloves and when the air-temperature is still around minus 10 degrees and the snow is exactly the wrong sort of powdery little crystals that don’t stick together you rapidly lose your enthusiasm after picking up your first handful. Unless you’re Saska of course. She quickly goes completely mental and buries herself in the stuff for hours on end and amazingly emerges without a terminal case of frostbite..

    snow3a1

    Back in the world of grown-ups, there are problems. Just around the time of the first snowfall Sammy and I realized there wasn’t any food in the house, and we were just about to plan an expedition to the big Leclerc supermarket in Gallicano when the snow came. So now we’re likely to be stuck here for days with nothing to eat. Now, why don’t we just go to the local shop, you might ask? Well, first of all of course, Sammy’s got to have her bloody soya milk and other rare delicacies that they don’t stock in village shops – Christ, there’d be tantrums if she was stranded on a desert island – but the most important point is that we don’t have a village shop any more. We used to, mind, but sadly it closed a few years back when local baker Mario – husband of the lovely Adelina from behind the counter – built a giant new emporium for her down in the main valley miles away. If you visit Da Mario in Piano di Coreglia, tell them to come back. We miss them. There was a village restaurant too, but that closed a few years before the shop did. There is still a bar, but it’s a sort of members-only workin’ mens’ club (apparently so they don’t have to pay tax on the beer) and it’s not the sort of place you go to have fun in winter. So basically we’ve got no services left at all. When the villagers were offered a mains gas supply a year or so before we arrived they voted against it, on the grounds that Mario would always bring round the enormously heavy bombole di gas for your gas fires or your cookers on his little tractor, and these are apparently very slightly cheaper. Bet they’re regretting that now.

    I should say though that everything in the restaurant is still there (tables, cookers and all that) – it’s just that the door is always locked. Some enterprising and very kind local friends of ours actually reopened it this year during one of our summer schools when we had our annual “Vallico Sotto against the World” football match and they made us some quality pizza. One little village – with only around eight guys fit enough to run around for half an hour – against a potential pool of something like seven billion people. I’ve tried importing Brazilians, English, Spanish, Germans. Even Mongolians and Nepalese. But it’s no use. Every year we still get hammered by Marco and his boys. The shame of it.

    Anyway, I digress. We’re trapped, and we’d better get used to it.

    snow41

    OK, so you don’t get confused with what follows, let me bring you up to speed with the local geography. The fortress and village of Vallico Sotto – which certainly dates back to Roman times (I’m currently translating Gabriella Carli’s history of the village – should be finished as soon as I can figure out what the lengthy passages of mediaeval Italian mean) – is built on the ridge of a rocky outcrop high in the southern reaches of the Apuan Alps between the two little rivers Rio Maggiore and Rio Selvano. A few hundred metres higher is our non-identical twin, Vallico Sopra – presumably built not long after Vallico Sotto when some sun-worshipping ancient from the Dark Ages realized that its location got sunshine for a couple of hours longer in the afternoon. This is where our artist friend Mandy lives, of whom you will hear more. She bought a ruin there last year, and the builders have just (like, two days ago) finished putting in the heating. She has – and she’s really going to regret this – invited about 200 members of her family to visit during this Christmas holiday to celebrate the completion of her new home. Mandy, husband Dave, and son Tom drove here from England and arrived about twenty minutes before me and the Virgin Mary and the others got back from school. That was lucky too.

    How can we get cut off then? Basically, there’s one only way up.. Look at this photograph of what Vallico normally looks like in winter..

    vallico_in_winter_landslide1

    The red road is the escape route from Vallico Sotto (population: 120). Just on the other side of the ridgeline the road winds down for about three km past the Da Sandra restaurant as far as the village of Fabbriche di Vallico at the bottom of the Turritecava valley. Descending from there along the Turritecava river for about nine km brings you to the main valley of the river Serchio. From there, left to Barga and Gallicano, right to Lucca.

    The green road goes past some local agriturismi and a few houses. Then the tarmac runs out and the resulting bumpy dirt road climbs steeply up to the ridge at Foce di Pompanella. In principle it’s possible to traverse this to get to the village of Trassilico in the next big valley parallel to ours, but in reality you need a four-wheel-drive off-roader with a three-foot ground clearance. Froggie doesn’t cut it. The yellow road goes to Vallico Sopra (population: 80) then continues up to the ridge where we find a dead end at the even tinier village of San Luigi (population: 10 and some dogs). There is in fact an old mule trail from there which continues to Verni and Trassilico but it’s completely impassable to cars, even expensive ones. That said, I reckon a hundred guys, working for a week, could widen it and clear it to make it suitable for motor vehicles.. Why would you need to do that, though? I mean, really! Don’t look at the blue line yet.

    The orange dotted line is the mule trail. The lily-livered pansies like me who inhabit the place nowadays talk about being cut off, but you’ve got to remember that the red, green and yellow roads were only built from 1960 to 1970. Before then, if you wanted to come up here, you had to hitch a lift with a bloody donkey – for Christ’s sake – all the way up one of the mule trails now overgrown and forgotten by everyone but the very old. Didn’t stop ‘em though. There were getting on for a thousand people living up here in the early 1900s.

    Just for the record, this is what Vallico looked like a few days after the snow. Reminds me of the hymn we used to sing at school back in the 1970s (though obviously these days you’re not allowed to sing hymns, since Jesus was after all only a minor prophet and you might offend someone):

    In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
    Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
    Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
    In the bleak midwinter, long ago.
    snow_vallico21
     

    So anyway, we stick it out for three or four days. We venture out occasionally to play around in the snow, but mainly we sit inside, reading, talking, playing. The girls watch about 8 million DVDs. Yeah, and we cook as well. Real back-of-the-cupboard stuff. It’s when I find myself looking one evening at a bowl of two-year-old rice to which – in the absence of other options – I have just added some red-wine vinegar and a pinch of cinnamon past its sell-by date, that I realize this is starting to piss me off. Not only the food, but the water pipes have frozen, and we can’t wash, clean our teeth, flush the loo, and the only reason I was able to cook the rice was because I melted some snow. It would be good to know when we can get out of the house for a bit. I want to take the girls to Lucca, to let Saska play on the vintage roundabout with horses that go up and down. I want to mooch around the Christmas market, to visit the antiquarian bookstore, to sit in our favourite little bar sipping some deep rich red wine. Vallico Sotto is great, but a guy’s got to have a little relaxation. And anyway, I don’t have enough presents to fill Saska’s Christmas sock.

    The council have fired up the rusty old snowplough, sure enough, and they’ve cleared the roads. But they’re all still covered by a thick crust of ice and Froggie has no chance of even getting out of the car park. But it’s then that something bad happens. The temperature goes up by more than twenty degrees in the space of a few hours. What do you call it? A warm front moves in. And then. And then about five billion tons of snow melts all at once. And then it starts to absolutely piss down with rain, and it doesn’t stop. It doesn’t stop for a long time.

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    Not long afterwards it’s the 22nd of December 2009 and it’s still absolutely lashing it down. It’s also my fortieth birthday. No shit, really. Old man now. I’m wearing the funkiest shirt in the world (courtesy of my lovely wife) and we’ve all gone down to Da Sandra to celebrate with Mandy’s family. They get to the restaurant before us, and when we arrive they give me some great presents. First, a machete. There are any number of beautiful footpaths around here, but sadly – and understandably – the denuded population have lost the will to keep them clear of encroaching vegatation. Go on, I’ll do it then. Also, knowing my love of filling the house with weird stuff to show our visitors, they give me a beautiful reproduction antique sword. I wave this around a bit, and find myself threatening Sandra with it and demanding she doesn’t charge us for our meal. She’s a formidable woman though, and she stares me out..

    Let me talk briefly about the Mandy family. They live just a couple of miles from us in Cambridge, and by some strange cosmic coincidence they bought a Tuscan ruin to do up only a couple of miles from ours in Italy, and they’re now our new best friends (don’t worry Dan and Jane, we still love you too!). Mandy is a painter, and a good one – add her to your list, Keane – and she’s the co-founder of the Tuscany Stuckists with Sammy. Her son Tom causes confusion. He is a strapping 6 foot tall 23-year old babe magnet with big hair, but Mandy looks so youthful and lovely that it makes you think she must have given birth to him aged about 3. And husband Dave, though – he’s a wild one. Dave is the boss of a Cambridge company that can make absolutely anything out of plastic. He sometime does stuff for artists, and one of his recent commissions involved making a giant six-foot lobster engaged in an act of sexual intercourse with a man. No, really. All those legs and antennae have got to imply some serious plastic-moulding talent. I tell Sandra about this and she falls about laughing. She says she’ll think about ordering one for the restaurant car park.

    So time passes. We have a brilliant evening with great food and then we head back home up the hill. It’s only when we get out of Froggie in the car park that we realize that it is seriously, very seriously, raining very hard indeed and we only have one umbrella between the three of us. Walking up the path is like wading up a river, and it is a relief when I slam the front door of the monastery behind us, and I can take off my soaking wet things. Now let me confess something to you at this point. I’m a bit drunk. I don’t normally get drunk (sorry mother), but it’s my 40th birthday and the end of my youth and all that, so I reckon I’ve got an excuse. I’ve had the equivalent of maybe a bit more than a bottle of wine, and I’ve had a good big meal. The one thing I want to do is go to sleep, so I pack the girls off to bed, and head out of their bedroom to check and close down the house and maybe have a cup of two-year-old Ovaltine (I am old now, after all). The best laid plans..

    ovaltine1

    The most miserable night of my whole life then begins, and it starts when I go to the kitchen on the top floor to get the Ovaltine. I reach my hand up to the little wooden tea-shelf but then I stop. Water is flowing down the wall in great streams behind it. I grab a towel and the washing-up bowl and run up the stairs to the attic. Finding water pouring out of a hole below the ridge line I shove the towel roughly into the hole to plug it, and arrange the bowl on the floor to catch the drips. Bloody medieval roofs! Then, covered in cobwebs and filthy, I go back down to the top floor. Shit. Downstairs. Even though it’s been raining for the last few days it hasn’t occured to me to look downstairs; I know perfectly well the church roof is a bit porous. In winter, see, with no central heating, we tend to nest on the topmost of our three floors which we heat with gas fires and block off with a trapdoor that I built over the stairwell. I’d got too cosy, and I had forgotten to look at the rest of the house..

    I pull up the trapdoor and go down to the second floor and run to the end of the corridor where the door to the church is. OK, so we’ve got a church in our house. Don’t get jealous. I swapped a little terraced house in Bolton that I inherited and sold for less than a hundred grand for this; hardly the Duke of Westminster. Anyway, sure enough. Drip. Drip. Drip. Three streams of drips are pouring through the church roof – I’ve seen at least two of these before. There’s a puddle of water behind the altar at the back of the church too, and I see that water is somehow streaming through the back wall. Definitely haven’t seen that before. I run down the stairs to the bottom floor to get some pans to catch the water, and as I enter the pantry I immediately sense something is not right. I look down and I see the crappy inherited piece of linoleum covering the floor that I always meant to replace is floating in two inches of water.. Shit, and double shit. Where’s this coming from? I look up? Nothing coming through the ceiling. I look sideways. Ah. Water is flowing into the room through holes in the plaster at the bottom of the wall. I remember that the house is built on a slope and that the bottom floor is something like eight feet underground. The level of the water table has apparently risen so far that it is now higher than the floor and the pressure is pushing huge streams of liquid through the wall.

    Panicking slightly, I reverse back into the kitchen – haven’t been in here for a week – and immediately I become aware of a high-pitched gushing noise slightly different from the sound of the incessant rainfall. It’s coming from the front of the house. Flinging open the windows into the lashing storm, I see that a high pressure jet of water is hissing horizontally into the front garden. Burst pipe. The one going to the garden bedroom. So that’s why the water pressure’s been a bit low since the pipes unfroze. Christ, this must have been going on for the last two days. Then it hits me that the only reason that water is coming through the back wall of the church (which is above ground level) is that one of the pipes running through there must have burst as well.

    It’s midnight. And it’s only then that I realize that despite my desperate need to sleep, I’m not going to get to bed for quite some time..

    ————————————————————————

    Two days later, it’s Christmas Eve, and I feel like death. I reflect back on the night of the 22nd. After putting big buckets under the roof leaks, and turning off the mains stopcock to stop the burst pipes spewing everywhere, I had turned to the water spouting through the wall. There was still some time to prevent a general flood, since thanks to either a cock-up by some mediaeval mason or by ground subsidence the back of the house seems to be lower than the front, and the water was collecting in a big pool against the back wall. If I could mop the stuff up at the same rate as it was flowing in, then maybe we could prevent a major disaster. I quickly found the mop, but the mop bucket wasn’t where I expected. When things aren’t used for a few years you forget where you put them, and after five comedy minutes of tearing round the house looking in all the different places where things get put, I gave up. How can a mop bucket just disappear? So, already bored, I improvised one. Using the removable plastic vegetable compartment from the bottom of the fridge, and a metal mesh salvaged from the grill-pan of the cooker. I lit a gas fire in the pantry, turned on the dehumidifier, opened a bottle of beer (there’s got to be some pleasure in this), and started to mop. Splash the mop into the water. Lift the dripping mophead onto the grill. Rotate five times. Push hard. Squeeze. Repeat. And that’s how it was for the next six-and-a-half hours. Until dawn. On my birthday. My arm muscles are still killing me.

    Oh yes, and every half an hour or so – just for a bit of variety – I had dashed madly through the house looking desperately for squidgy moldable substances to squeeze into the little holes through which the water was entering the house. An early thought was Blu-Tack, but for the life of me I couldn’t find the big packet that for some reason I’d brought over from England ten days before. It was only on the third trip around the house that I remembered that the previous week Saska had spent an entertaining evening making Christmas presents for Mummy using Daddy’s entire supply of Blu-Tack (including a pussy cat, and an entire park – complete with grass and twigs stuck into it). All were now lovingly wrapped in Christmas paper and ribbons and sitting under the Christmas tree. So 2.30am sees Daddy furtively scrabbling under the tree tearing off wrapping paper, wondering how many presents he can nick before Saska will notice (come Christmas day of course, she remembers every damned one..) ‘Stealing your own daughter’s Christmas presents? Shame on you!!’ cry the entire Barganews readership. I know. I know.

    And did it work? Was it worth the trauma and the infant Christmas blubbing? Well, when I shoved the Blu-Tack pussy cat into one of the holes (along with half Sammy’s supply of silicone ear plugs that for some reason she likes to wear when she’s asleep) there was a definite reduction in the water flow. I should write a letter to some nerdy DIY magazine.

    The following day was no fun either. With the snow mostly disappeared we got Froggie down the hill for the first time in a week and we managed to bring a wheelbarrow or two’s worth of supermarket supplies – plus some emergency plumbing stuff from Brico. I waited the whole evening for the incessant rain to stop until about 1am I bothered to read the instructions on my two-component epoxy putty. “ALSO DRIES UNDERWATER”. Sigh. And that’s how I found myself at two o’clock in the morning, sitting in the front garden on a white plastic garden chair in the freezing rain, mixing the two components of the putty together in my hands. It grows hot as it begins to polymerize, and I put it down on the window sill while I briefly scratch at the ruptured copper piping with some emery paper. When I pick up the putty thirty seconds later it is as solid as a small stone and completely unworkable. OK, now I know why there was something about ‘careful timing’ in the instructions. The whole twenty-minute process has to begin again, and I head back inside dripping wet. Legendary reserves of patience are beginning to be called for. To stop me from remembering how miserable I am, the whole time I’m declaiming under my breath the Richard Burton narration from Jeff Wayne’s 1978 War of the Worlds concept album which I’d learnt off-by-heart – with the correct melodramatic accent – for something to do during the 19-hour drive from Cambridge ten days before when I realized I’d forgotten to bring my usual CD audiobooks.

    No-one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No-one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets and yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us..

    .. and the rest of it. Over and over again. During the whole journey down I had a giant six-foot elk in the back of the car. It must have thought I was completely insane.

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    So back to Christmas Eve. Having found Flora in tears on account of the huge amount of water dripping into her attic and back bedroom (the same leak that’s coming into our top floor), I’ve spent half an hour on the dangerously slippy moss-covered roof. You should see it up there. About an acre of higgledy-piggledy centuries-old tiles weighed down with occasional heavy rocks. Many of the tiles – if you stand on them whilst weighing more than about four stone which, erm, I guess I do – will crack and introduce another leak. Offered this job, I think Sisyphus might have preferred to keep pushing his boulder up the hill. I slap on a couple of tarpaulins in something like the best place and hope for the best. And yes it is still raining.

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    We’d also managed a run down to Fabbriche di Vallico to pick up a decent turkey from Signor Vanni the butcher. All the preparations for Christmas are made, with the exception of wrapping the girls’ Christmas presents in the attic, and having had a total of about five hours sleep in the previous three days I’m hoping they’ll go to bed soon. Af course they’re both so excited they stay up until about 1.30am. First I have to wait for the sound of infant snoring. 2.30am. Then I have to sneak into the attic, wrap the presents whilst trying not to make rustling noises, and find Saska’s Christmas sock. In the end I have to make do with one of my not very Christmassy ordinary socks – the only clean one I have left. Then I run round the house trying to find some little things like tangerines and sweets to put in the sock, then I have to drink the whiskey and eat the panettone that Saska has left out for Father Christmas. She’s helpfully covered both of them with a thin film of ash from the fireplace. Then I write her a note of thanks telling her to be a good girl next year and that the whiskey was delicious (even though it was actually some disgusting liqueur someone gave us years ago). As I sneak into the girls’ bedroom, I feel compelled to don a small beard of cotton wool, a red hat, and a thick dressing gown in case they see me. Of course neither of them do so I just end up feeling a bit stupid. I lay the sock on the end of Saska’s bed, and finally I leave a trail of cotton wool snow from the bed back to the chimney. I check my watch. 5.30am. Jesus, they’re going to be up in a few hours.

    Anyway, before you say I’m destroying the illusion about how these things work (sorry kids!) I’ll delete the previous paragraph as soon as Saska learns to read, OK? And you mustn’t tell her. I want her to keep believing in Father Christmas until she’s at least fourteen. As well as mispronouncing words like ‘aminal’, ‘mazagine’ and ‘hopsical’ which I’ve been carefully mispronouncing myself ever since she learned to talk.

    Since one of the purposes of this story is to show you what a miserable time we’ve had then I’ll skip Christmas day itself, since it was lovely (apart from the continuing torrential rain of course). Mandy, Dave and Tom came round with Dave’s sister and Tomoko’s family from Vallico Sopra for turkey and fun. Foolishly we showed them North Face in the evening – a German film about Toni Kurz and Andi Hinterstoisser’s extremely fatal 1936 attempt to climb the North Face of the Eiger; foolish since Mandy immediately banned me from taking Tom and Dave anywhere near Monte Procinto or on a few other dangerous hikes we were planning.

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    Unperceived by us, however, just down the mountain something terrible was happening. The first I knew of it was the day after – late Boxing Day evening. Mandy up in Vallico Sopra phones up Sammy. She’s been told the carabinieri are closing the road to Fabbriche (our link to the outside world) tomorrow at 7am. Permanently. There’s been a landslide. If you want to get your car out, drive it down now.. We do need to get it out since it’s being driven back to England for the new term next week but by now, of course, you can guess what condition I’m in. Yes, I’ve just had three glasses of wine and a nice dinner and I want to go to sleep. I wonder if anyone has ever done so much crisis management late at night whilst drunk. In the rain.

    So I wearily put on something warm and go to the car park. Soon Froggie and I are rolling slowly down the red road into the inky-black soaking-wet canyon that is the Turritecava valley. Mandy had said the landslide was just below Sandra’s restaurant and that the road had already been cleared, but that there was a huge threat of another which is why they were closing the road. Halfway down, it occurs to me that driving the car directly through the fallout zone of an unstable landslide is er.. well, slightly dangerous. As I hurriedly motor past the Valsozza bridge, Froggie’s headlights pick out a confused mass of mud and smashed tree trunks shovelled off the road line, and a minute later, I’m down. I park on the main road somewhere since Fabbriche is full, and then I realize that, as always, the worst part of the evening is yet to come, since I’ve forgotten to bring a torch and I need to walk three km back up an incredibly steep hill, in the pitch dark, under a landslide, drunk, while being rained on. Isn’t this just the best Christmas ever? Five minutes later I hurriedly pass the landslide gazing upwards through the drizzle into the threatening black void. A couple of eery red warning lamps and a bit of moonlight is all the illumination I have, and it ain’t enough to see what happened, but there is – at least in my imagination – a palpable sense of menace.. All the way up there’s nothing on my left but gigantic nearly vertical slopes with water streaming off them, and it’s at times like this, that I really begin to regret reading all those climbing books which end with the climber getting his head smashed in by falling rocks.

    Here’s a picture of what the pleasant little country bridge over the Valsozza looks like not long after about 100,000 cubic metres of mud and half a forest has just blown straight through it.

    sandras1

    Now a question – where did all that mud come from? I know the Foce di Pompanella road (the green one on my picture) is a few thousand feet straight up from the Valsozza bridge. Perhaps I’ll get a better view from there. The next day I climb about a mile up the road, as far as a tree-trunk barrier that someone has rapidly fashioned to block the way. Past the barrier, round a corner, and you get the shock of your life. The Foce di Pompanella road isn’t there anymore.

    landslide11

    This quite clearly is a bit of a disaster, to say the least.. Marco’s agriturismo “La Fornace” is on the other side of this new canyon, along with quite a few houses and capanne. The locals get their wood from there. There’s any number of fantastic walks and views that way, and this is not going to be fixed any time soon. Click on the following picture to play my gloomy rainy video which should give you a better idea of the scale.

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    Repairs are going to cost millions of pounds and take many years, if they think it’s worth repairing at all. Eventually, from talking to people and reading press reports, I figure out what actually happened. Believe it or not, it was at lunchtime on Christmas day. 12.30 on the dot. There were 200 people having their Christmas lunch in Sandra’s restaurant just a hundred yards up from Valsozza. It’s amazing someone arriving or leaving wasn’t killed. Apparently the diners were all stuck up there until the road was cleared with big diggers later that afternoon. It wasn’t until they sent some geologists along the upper road the following day that they realized only half the mountain had collapsed, and that the other half was in serious danger of following it. Mayor Oreste Giurlani signed an indefinite road closure notice and that’s it.. We and the 200 others up here are trapped, and all over the local news programmes.

    It’s all planned of course. The Mafia (or whoever) are apparently planning to build an incinerator plant next to Saska’s school(!), and we’ve all been summoned to a meeting tonight in Fabbriche di Vallico to protest against it. I wonder how much dynamite it took to stop the 200 Vallichese from attending. Those guys have powerful connections.

    So, what have the authories been doing since the landslide? Very quickly, a load of concrete and stones were thrown over an incredibly-steep old path that goes down from a meadow below Sandra’s to the main road. So at least young fit people can now walk down the mountain and escape without having to play Russian roulette in the landslide drop zone. I’ve also read in various news articles that they’re going to build a helicopter landing pad, and that the army are going to build a Bailey bridge over the Valsozza gorge away from the fall line, which should be interesting. This could even be done quickly, since these bridges are meant for getting tanks over rivers whilst under fire. At least no-one will be shooting at them this time.

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    What should be done in an ideal world

    • Since the second landslide hasn’t happened despite a week of opportunity, the authorities should organize a traffic light system for people to drive past Valsozza (maybe with a bloke up on the hill with a mobile phone to provide early warnings of falling stuff). Even a couple of hours a day would be good. Perhaps also a little two-stage taxi service to take old people shopping and schoolchildren to school in the valley.
    • Send a daily Ape (a local motorized three-wheeled little truck – not a chimpanzee – in case you were wondering) up at high speed past the landslide with food supplies to regularly restock the temporarily re-opened (not!) shop.
    • Convert the mule trail from San Luigi to Verni and Trassilico via Pian di Lago into a proper road to stop this happening again. This is a week’s work for thirty men and some diggers. Until the 1940s we were part of the Trassilico Commune anyway, and this would reunite several villages with centuries-old historic connections.
    • The EU gives us millions of pounds and a team of a thousand labourers to stabilize the landslide zone and to quickly rebuild the Foce di Pompanella Road.

    What you can do to help

    • Prevent the very wonderful Da Sandra restaurant (0583 761712) at Valsozza and Il Canapale restaurant in Vallico Sopra (0583 761766) from going out of business by booking a table now. They’ve already lost most of their holiday season income (Sandra normally seats around 200 on New Year’s Eve – that’s a lot of missing money). Bring your hiking boots and work up an appetite before your meal.
    • Are you the owner of a light aircraft? Parachute in lots of tasty treats and donated teddy bears and all that to stop everyone here from becoming miserable.
    • Commercial Opportunity! Buy some donkeys, along with the old ruined mill next to the river at the bottom of the Vallico Sotto mule trail. Restore the mill to its former working glory and make chestnut flour. Persuade the authorities to demolish the ugly old ruined paper factory near by to make it into a proper beauty spot, then run a Tourist Donkey Nostalgia business offering people rides up the mule trail. Use the donkeys as emergency supplies transport during natural disasters (and if we get snowed in for more than two months, we can even eat the poor creatures). Flora says that in the old days she used to walk up and down the mule-trail every day to catch a charabanc to her factory at Borgo a Mozzano, so if she can do it, donkeys can too. Me and the Virgin Mary’s father and some other English boys made a start the other day by clearing the mule trail with my new machete and some shears. Now it’s up to you!
    • Go to Da Mario in Piano da Coreglia and offer Adelina lots of money to move her business back to Vallico Sotto, or better still – Career Opportunity 2! – buy her old shop off her and open it yourself. Very useful when the village is cutoff.
    • Chefs! Buy the old closed (fully furnished and equipped) restaurant in Vallico Sotto and make it into a three-star Michelin venue. Offer free meals to Vallico Sotto residents. During landslide events organize a trolley to take free delicious meals to all the local old people.
    • Are you a Neapolitan mafioso? Stop building incinerators and power stations in beautiful places. What’s wrong with ugly places?
    • Buy one of the many vacant houses in Vallico Sotto and Vallico Sopra and contribute to the revitalization of these wonderful villages. If we can triple the current population then this would be one of the best places to live in the world. People who only come for two weeks in August not allowed. Families with large numbers of children especially welcome (since Saska needs someone to play with). Also, if there are more people living here, then the government might give more money for landslide relief.
    • Buy the Ugly Building Site at the back of the Vallico Sotto car park off whoever owns it and finish it off (this has nothing to do with the landslide crisis, it’s just a damned good idea).

    So, how was your Christmas, Mike?

    Well, Terry, I’ve been cutoff from civilization for the best part of two weeks, I haven’t been anywhere fun, I’ve been forced to eat two-year old rice with red-wine vinegar for supper, we still can’t afford central heating, I’ve been continually rained on, snowed on, my roof leaks, my walls leak, my floor leaks, I’ve sat up the whole night of my 40th birthday incessantly mopping, my daughter missed her pantomime and never got to be a snowflake, the local shop is still closed, I have to park my car miles away down a very steep hill and I have to walk down to it and back up (always through the rain, with a whining child) to go anywhere or do any shopping, my job contract runs out next October, and half the mountain has collapsed. Still, mustn’t grumble.

    Funny though, I’ve had a brilliant time. Wouldn’t be anywhere else.

    Sammy and the Eagle

    Posted on

    by Mike Towler

    My girl’s not famous. But that’s got to be the world’s fault and not hers. I reckon that if she’d been around in Renaissance times, when art was art and skill spoke for itself, posh rich guys with commissions would have buzzed around her like bees around a flower and she might have enjoyed the success and reputation of an Artemisia Gentileschi or a Luisa Roldán. If you believe in reincarnation though, she actually looks just like Camille Claudel – Rodin’s temperamental lover, muse and more highly-talented artistic rival – who, after spending the last thirty years of her life in an asylum, might just have come back to try again after buggering things up somewhat the first time around.

    keil_claudel1

    Today Sammy – or Samantha Keil, bronze sculptor to you – is busy. See, in a telephone call from under their mountain on the other side of the world the Tibetans (don’t ask) have suggested something new for her to do. These chaps are hard to ignore (and they charge a hundred quid for advice) so she’s decided to go with it.

    Sammy is going to sculpt a giant bronze eagle.

    So I help her to get out the black wax and the wire and the heavy metal stand from the sculpting cupboard, but then I naturally get banished from the studio (I’m never allowed to see things before they’re finished) and I decamp to my favourite contemplation spot at La Rocchetta, a little hill a hundred metres or so above our monastery and the village of Vallico Sotto. Centuries ago, this hilltop was the site of an imposing medieval fortress; later and less glamorously, when people round here still grew their own food, it was the village potato field. These days Corrina the Old Lady who owns it lets us set up our ‘Luxury Bedouin Tent‘ there during summer events at the Institute.

    Digressing wildly, I have to tell you that not long ago I heard from an old guy in the village about a secret tunnel which leads from the Doctor’s House far below all the way up to the site of the fortress. This was meant to be used for evacuation purposes if the village was attacked (which it was.. did you know we fought a war against Lucca and won? Forza Vallico Sotto!). Anyway, he says it was bricked up when he was about ten years old by the 1930s equivalent of health’n’safety fascists, on account of its crumbling roof and the tendency of local kids to go exploring. Which, to be honest, was probably fair enough. My first thought about this though is that I feel a Towler Institute Barganews Adventure [see blogs passim] coming on – it’s long overdue – and I resolve to call my friend Evans. He’s good at building walls so I’m sure he can knock them down. Maybe he even knows where we can get a Ground-Penetrating Radar set like on those archaeological TV shows. But that’s for another time. Today, we’re going to talk about art.

    I lie down in the soft grass and watch the few wispy clouds drifting ever so slowly in the blue far overhead, a sight which always makes me think I can sense the rotation of the Earth. I begin to think about eagles. And, in one of those coincidences that happen all the time, especially to Samantha, my eye immediately latches onto a couple of specks scudding through the air currents high above. And then another one. That’s three. Then another, and another. Christ, you wait all day for an eagle, and then five come along at once (never seen that before). Well look, I say eagles, but one sees these big birds quite often around here and Delma says they are in fact poiane, which according to my dictionary means we’re looking at buzzards of some kind. Now I’m hardly Mr. Nerd Birdwatcher, but it’s fun to observe them; sometimes – particularly up round San Luigi or on the Fornovolasco Road – you can even see them up close, gliding between the trees. It reminds me how lucky we are to be able to spend part of our lives here in Italy. Back in Cambridge we have to make do with sparrows and stuff and it seems that most of those are dead anyway. Make a donation to the Save the Sparrow Fund. Or not.

    Eagles as sculpture, though. This is a bit of a departure for Sammy and she wasn’t sure what feathers and all that look like. We have a few Victorian stuffed ones in the Institute taxidermy collection, but she needed more, so we ended up going to Lucca to hunt for a suitable book. Little two-year-old Saska got to play horses on the Piazza Napoleone merry-go-round and she had a trawby ice cream; mamma went to the lovely outdoor bookshop in Corte Biancone and found a giant coffee-table book called La Caccia, full of eagles swooping onto unsuspecting furry creatures. Ah, the different tastes of the Vallico girls. They both seem satisfied.

    You might want to know what Sammy normally does. She started off, years ago, by making bronze horses. Not Little Dobbin the Carthorse, but serious foaming-at-the-mouth bad-assed vicious wild stallions racing and leaping and really really enjoying themselves. And you know what? They move. No, really – ever seen bronze statues that move? It’s a neat trick. She has this thing where she can capture violent motion in a completely static figure – never seen it anywhere else. She got into the horses after running away from home aged eighteen to Israel where she used to enjoy galloping bareback across the Negev desert with some Arabs, as she also did years afterwards in Arizona (though with Red Indians this time [Proper Red Indians like in old John Wayne movies as opposed to nice environmentally-friendly Native Americans.]). She managed to repeat the trick later with her amazing ballet dancing sculptures. Some of you might remember Matthew Bourne and the Adventures in Motion Pictures chaps from the mid-1990s doing their Swan Lake that everybody liked – where they had what I think were described as ‘menacing, aggressively-male swans’ in place of the usual crowd of ever-so-nice frilly girlies in tutus. Sammy basically did them in bronze and showed off the results in an exhibition for the cast in New York. If you haven’t seen the stage show, you might have seen the very end of the Billy Elliot film where Billy turns into swan Adam Cooper leaping across the stage. Then you know what I mean.

    I didn’t really want to embarrass her, but apparently it all started when little Sammy was two years old, on the occasion when she marched up to her mother Judy and stated clearly and firmly, and with the characteristic patience that has always served her well: “Mummy. I gonna be a thculptor. I want thome clay. Now.” She never looked back. I’ve seen stuff she did as a six year old, and it puts the plasticine cows I do for our daughter to shame. Even the ones with little white plasticine eyes with carefully-placed tiny black pupils.

    So OK, here’s some ballet dancers that Sammy did.

    dancers11dancers21dancers31

    And some horses.

    horses11horses21

    As you can see, she even colours them in. The pretty colours you can see are not paint, but carefully-considered patinations etched into the bronze by a complicated chemical process that I don’t pretend to understand, but which make the things shimmer and glow in the right light.

    Now, come on though, these are quality pieces, aren’t they? (I know I’m her husband, but I can still puff them up if I want to, so there). How do we define quality in art then? I’m only a physicist, and what do I know, but I guess there are quite a few ways. We could say, for example, it’s good if “it looks as much as possible like a real horse”. That’s clearly not what Sammy’s up to but it’s one definition of quality – possibly the most obvious one – and one practised by most of the great masters of the art of sculpture. And if the horse is doing something interesting while looking as much as possible like a real horse then so much the better.

    So Sammy’s doing figurative art then, but not purely representational art. She’s trying to invoke the quality and power and muscle and emotion and energy and spirit and life force of a real horse by exaggerating its characteristics, in a style so original that you won’t see any other sculptures like them anywhere else. But the thing is still quite clearly a horse. So part of the quality is the originality of the style, and surely to produce something that no-one has ever seen before in such an ancient medium has to be profoundly difficult.

    The trouble though with the most prevalent modern definition of quality is that it goes something like “maximising the degree of spluttering outrage experienced by a set of non-existent defenders of the status quo”. So to produce a horse sculpture a modern get-ahead fellow might put a tin of horse shit on a plinth and call it Horse. And this viewpoint is so predominant that fine artists – people doing fine art using highly-skilled techniques refined over centuries – get elbowed off stage by the political artists and the cartoon artists and people who aren’t artists at all but get up one morning and feel like being one. Well OK, that’s all great fun of course – and I think I’m supposed to mention that French chap with his urinal during the First World War at this point – but as an outsider, I wonder, is this really the most important thing to be doing in art nearly a century later?

    Anyway, you know the consequences of this. That’s where we started. Sammy is not famous. Not famous at all. Nor is she even infamous. In fact, to a first approximation, nobody has ever heard of her. You’ve never heard of her. I’ve never heard of her. It’s amazing she recognizes herself in the mirror whilst brushing her teeth in the morning. I’ve seen her, on very rare occasions when she can be bothered, walk into galleries to see if there might be a possibility of sticking one of her sculptures in the back of the shop, and some overdressed glorified shop assistant looks at her like she’s something they just scraped off their boot. Try looking Sammy up on an internet search engine and you’ll find nothing but the website which I made for her a few years ago (computers are a mystery to her, bless) along with a couple of links from stupid craft sites that I did link exchanges with so the site would register in Google. And that’s it.

    So as I lie in the grass on La Rocchetta I make a decision. It’s time for Sammy to become famous.

    How on earth does she do that? Let’s start by recalling who are the most famous present-day artists, and then thinking how we can emulate them. Well now, in England we have this thing called the Turner Prize, and because of its giant media exposure this is just about the most prestigious prize in British Art. For the last twenty years or so, when the winner is announced, we have the same unvarying annual pantomime on the TV bulletins. Ding dong. “It’s ten o’clock and here is the News. And tonight, on the News..” [amused smile, one eyebrow slightly raised] “..we ask – is this art?”. Cut to balls of elephant dung stuck to a wall. Or a room with the lights going on and off. Last time around (I’m not making this up) a guy won the forty-thousand pound Turner Prize for dressing up as a bear. Hmmm.. alright. If that’s the game, let’s see if we can play it. I smile as the beginnings of an idea begin to permeate into my little brain, and thirty seconds later I have a plan..

    So that night over dinner, following Sammy’s first afternoon of work on the Eagle, I tell her what to do. “Look sweetheart – while you’re making your sculptures you gotta dress up as some sort of furry woodland creature. The guys who appreciate fine art will just see the quality of the sculpture. The conceptual bullshit artists will look at the forest-dwelling mammal stuff and think you’re making some kind of ironic statement about figurative art. You can’t lose! Look, there’s these funny creatures that live on top of mountains round here called marmites or something.. I saw this documentary once. If we can dress you up like that..”

    marmite1

    Four hours later, I emerge from the casualty department of Barga Hospital. My head is swathed in bandages where the fork has been surgically removed from the centre of my forehead.

    She doesn’t like it.

    Back up at Rocchetta some time later, gazing at the Colognora ridge, I try again. Right then, Nicholas Serota. Charles Saatchi. Tracey Emin. Mr. Bear Suit Man. If we can’t join you we have to fight you. I have a vague memory of some people dressed as clowns demonstrating outside the Turner Prize Award ceremony. Maybe there’s some movement or a bandwagon that Sammy can join. People like to pigeonhole artists, to say that they belong to this or that group, or in this or that category. Maybe we can do something like that. I head back to the monastery, fire up the laptop, and start to dig on the net.

    I find some interesting quotes:

    Turner Prize art is based on a formula where something looks startling at first and then turns out to be expressing some kind of banal idea, which somebody will be sure to tell you about. The ideas are never important or even really ideas, more notions, like the notions in advertising. Nobody pursues them anyway, because there’s nothing there to pursue.” (Jonathan Jones)

    And in shock news tonight, a member of the government expresses a radical thought:

    If this is the best British artists can produce then British art is lost. It is cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit. Kim Howells. P.S. The attempts at conceptualisation are particularly pathetic and symptomatic of a lack of conviction.” (Note pinned by British Culture Secretary to comments board on visiting the Turner Prize exhibition in 2002).

    I learn that before one of the Turner prize ceremonies, famous graffiti artist Banksy stencilled “Mind the crap” on the steps of the Tate Gallery, who had to call in emergency cleaners to remove it. Ho ho.

    And then.

    stuckists1

    Finally, I have it. The Stuckists! These are the clown demonstrators. The Stuckists haven’t heard of Sammy either, but I think they might like what she does. This is a group founded in 1999 that “places great importance on the value of painting as a medium, as well as the use of it for communication and the expression of emotion and experience – as opposed to what they see as the superficial novelty, nihilism and irony of conceptual art and postmodernism“. And they also like to publically annoy and irritate the Turner Prize crowd whenever they get the chance. “Artists who don’t paint aren’t artists“, they say (and luckily for us, if you delve deep enough into their various manifestos, you find on their Handy Hints page that “Sculptors who don’t sculpt aren’t sculptors“) .

    That’s all very well. But what’s really interesting is their derived movement of Remodernism which is “an attempt to introduce a period of new spirituality into art, culture and society to replace Postmodernism, which they accused of being bankrupt and cynical..” You can read their detailed manifesto on this page, but here’s some fun selected extracts:

    5. “We don’t need more dull, boring, brainless destruction of convention, what we need is not new, but perennial. We need an art that integrates body and soul and recognises enduring and underlying principles which have sustained wisdom and insight throughout humanity’s history. This is the proper function of tradition.

    7. “Spirituality is the journey of the soul on earth. Its first principle is a declaration of intent to face the truth. Truth is what it is, regardless of what we want it to be. Being a spiritual artist means addressing unflinchingly our projections, good and bad, the attractive and the grotesque, our strengths as well as our delusions, in order to know ourselves and thereby our true relationship with others and our connection to the divine.

    9. “Spiritual art is not religion. Spirituality is humanity’s quest to understand itself and finds its symbology through the clarity and integrity of its artists.

    10. “The making of true art is man’s desire to communicate with himself, his fellows and his God. Art that fails to address these issues is not art.

    14. “Why do we need a new spirituality in art? Because connecting in a meaningful way is what makes people happy. Being understood and understanding each other makes life enjoyable and worth living.

    That sounds exactly like the sort of stuff that Sammy’s been spouting at me for years. And all without ever engaging with the Art World at all. So there you have it. Sammy must be a Remodernist. I’ll get round to telling her about it later. But here’s something I haven’t told you either – and I apologize for this – but I thought it might be more fun if I left it to the end. And that is that Sammy has actually, finally got a couple of public commissions – in London (essentially because she knows one guy with connections). She still isn’t famous. But hopefully someone might notice her stuff, because the sculptures are going to be sitting outside in the street and someone might accidentally trip over them or something.

    The first of these is a pair of bronze panels to go either side of the main door on the facade of the new Embassy Court apartment building in Wellington Road, St. John’s Wood – a posh part of central London. These huge things are each more than fifteen feet across – and will incorporate dozens of balletic bronze figures in a sculptural ensemble on a background of inscribed sacred geometry. The second commission is in another district in South London called Elephant and Castle. This zone was carefully redesigned by the Luftwaffe in the 1940s, and not so carefully redesigned by local developers in the post-war years. Which is why it is now having to have its whole town centre replaced, and the guys in charge of that want Sammy to sculpt a big piece for a fountain in a new public square. A big elephant with water soaring from his trunk. Posh people buying new fancy apartments in the area will also find they have little bronze elephant key rings to open their new front doors. (Sammy’s first attempt at this was actually squashed and partially eaten by one of Evans’s many children after I left it on a sideboard in the monastery. This caused much consternation all round and resulted in the removal of several of my testicles).

    Oh and by the way, I was right about the French guy. In their Open Letter To Nicholas Serota , the Stuckists/Remodernists write: “You can’t help feeling that Saatchi’s insipid sensationalism would make Duchamp wish that he’d never ever exhibited his piss-pot in the first place and had become a water-colourist instead.“. Hmmm…

    Anyway, enough. Just then, from my perch on the hilltop I see that far below, Sammy the Newly Remodernist Sculptor has finally emerged from the monastery. Great. She’s due to finish around now – maybe it’s time to go and see the bird..

    But then I see her put her head in her hands and I hear the anguished wail “MIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIKE!!!”. Shit. From previous experience I know we have about thirty seconds before Mr. Eagle is toast. Leaping to my feet as quickly as I dare without straining something I start to run down the hill but I know I’m more than a minute away, and as I duck under the olive tree half-way down I watch helplessly as Sammy disappears back inside and the inevitable shrieking and smashing sounds begin.. I burst through the door of the studio to see the Eagle hanging upside-down from its pedestal, held to its base only by the horribly bent wire skeleton. Sammy is beating what remains of the sculpture into a pulp with one of the auditorium chairs. I dive into the restraint cupboard for the straightjacket and soon Sammy is trussed up in the corner, blubbing quietly. The Eagle, however, is ruined.

    A certain amount of time and several cups of tea later, Sammy confesses that the left wing had begun to sag under the weight of all the wax that had been loaded onto it, and once that happens there’s nothing that can be done to rescue it. It wasn’t her fault. But sculptors invest so much mental and physical effort in their creations that the realization that they’re irretrievably broken can be overwhelming. It turns out that we had run out of aluminium wire of adequate thickness, and never having built a wing before she had decided to risk using the next smallest gauge to build the skeleton. Then I realize that the fault is probably mine; as her official assistant and dogsbody one of my jobs is to keep the sculpture cupboard well stocked and I hadn’t noticed that some vital things were missing. I mentally shoot myself, then take Sammy into the back garden to look at the mountains.

    Sammy is vaguely aware that I am writing a story about the Eagle, and after a while she agrees with my suggestion that we attempt to put the thing back on its pedestal and straighten it up a bit so we can take some photos. Just about all that remains is the right wing and the head. The beautiful fanned tail section is completely gone. The left wing is in pieces all over the floor. What a waste. Sighing to myself, I get out the Canon Powershot G9 and begin to take some snaps.

    eagle11

    eagle211

    eagle31
    I shake my head and marvel. And not for the first time. This would have been a brilliant sculpture, created in less than a week (though of course the mental conceptualization of these things can take much longer). And, thankfully, I know she can do it again, and better. That’s the benefit of using wax. Think of the poor marble chaps in the Renaissance who usually took months, if not years, to chisel out their creations and they had to live with the constant mental stress that one single misplaced blow of the chisel could shear a wing or an arm off. At least you can bend wax back into place and reshape it should it get damaged. At least unless you physically assault it with a chair. So yes, she’ll try again I have no doubt, and then we’ll take it to London so that Sammy’s ace foundry man and long-term collaborator Chris at Arch Bronze can cast it in metal.. Replacing a wax maquette with an exact replica in bronze through the lost wax procedure is an ancient and incredibly complicated technical skill in itself of course, but that’s another story (See here.)

    So that evening, Sammy and Saska and I tuck up in front of some DVDs and I give my wife a hug, promising her that by the end of 2008, at least five people around the world will have heard of her. You’ve got to start somewhere, after all.

    Ladies and gentlemen. I offer you Sammy – the Poster Girl for the Barga-News-sponsored Remodernist movement in sculpture. And not only can she sculpt, but she’s got a nice bottom. Today, Aristo’s bar. Tomorrow – THE WORLD!

    Bronze Hermaphrodites and the Fat Boy Filter

    Posted on

    by Mike Towler

    I don’t remember all that much from English lessons in school. I recall that you shouldn’t use very or a lot or exclamation marks in creative writing and that repetition of words in too close proximity is a serious crime against style. I recall snatches of Shakespeare and William Golding. I recall Mr. Shewan dangling me and another twelve-year old – one in each hand – by our hair for talking in the library (My God, he’d be in the Labour Party salt mines these days, wouldn’t he?). One piece of advice I remember very clearly though about writing stories is “Give it a snappy title, and if you can follow that with a decent first line then you’ve got ‘em hooked!”. So how about this one then? Does that title have you wanting more? What do you think the topic is today? Five euros and a lot of cold Morettis if you can figure it out.

    [Smartarse at the back] “Go on, it’s about caves isn’t it? You always write about bloody caves. And you know what? No-one cares. Don’t you know that Barganews readers want to learn about jazz, and opera, and what’s happening in Aristo’s bar. There was something in the discussion forum about it a while back..”

    I open and close my mouth and narrow my eyes like a fish in a headlight, and an image flashes into my head of the time last August when I brought a big group of students from our Institute on a tour of Barga. Stopping in a little square in the old town after descending from the cathedral, Tour Guide Towler had pointed to his left. “That’s Aristo’s – the bar for cool people.” He then flicked a casual finger to his right. “And that [crosses himself] is the bar for tourists.” I had always assumed this to be so, even though the little bar on the left is so cool it doesn’t have a sign outside saying Aristo’s or anything like that. Inside – probably – are people without first names like Keane the Editor and O’Connor the Award-winning Photographer and Doggybag (can they really all be the same person?). Anyway, out of my crowd Maja the suave Serbian part-time supermodel and Colin the hairy Swiss hippy (blogs passim) end up going left. Me and the other fifteen students go right. It just goes to show. It’s a big problem with being a physicist.

    Anyway, defensive now, I glare at the smartarse. I want to say something cool and clever. Instead I say “Er, yeah. It is about caves actually. But look – this isn’t Mr. Nerd’s Speleology News, you know? Are you not aware that my last contribution to this publication described the occasion when my colleague Evans and I had a heroic caving adventure, and we discovered historical relics described in an old book, untouched since the time they were put there in the nineteenth century. Indiana Jones or what?”.

    But inside I know – and I know that the smartarse knows – that this story is not like that. Oh no. This one doesn’t have a heroic ending.

    This is a lament. A lament for my arse.

    —————————————————————————-
    It’s September 2007. Evans and I are back at the Cave of Cascaltendine (or whichever of its dozen or so names you want to use) and today there are two stories to tell. [I still hear the voice of Mr. Shewan. “Don’t ramble or digress, boy. Why can’t you keep to the point and tell them about one simple thing? And clearly ‘arse’ and ‘smartarse’ are much too close together at the end of the previous section. Furthermore your ignorant metaphor presupposes that fish close their eyes when you shine lights on them, which, let me tell you..”].

    The first story, just to delay relating the details of my humiliation, is historical and archaeological. They say this cave was inhabited on and off for five thousand years. So what did these people find to do without Aristo’s? Without Barga, even. Without jazz, for heaven’s sake.

    Second story. An adventure. Local guide books tend to have a sentence or two saying that one of the two branches of this cave goes into the mountain for more than a kilometre (although whether it is the left- or right-hand one seems to depend on what book you read, and sadly proper descriptions of cave explorations are very difficult to come by as they only get published in grotty caving club pamphlets circulated to the caver’s mum and a few of his mates. Put ‘em on the internet guys! 21st century and all that..). Well now, in plenty previous trips to Cascaltendine we hadn’t managed more than thirty or forty metres in either direction but not long ago Our Boy Drummond went feet first into a hole near the ceiling down the end of the left-hand branch and discovered a huge secret chamber. Inside a massive vertical wall, and an old abandoned rotten rope leading upwards into darkness. Who dares to follow? In the past, er.. nobody. This time Evans and Towler stand unsmiling at a slight angle to the camera, eyes narrowed, hoping no-one will notice they are flexing their biceps slightly. “We do, by God”.

    cc411


    The Bronze Hermaphrodites
    Although I love history, don’t you know, one of the things that drove me to become a physicist instead is that I want to see things for myself, goddamit. I couldn’t bear the constant disappointment of not being able to personally witness Custer’s Last Stand or the Charge of the Light Brigade or whatever. Well that’s what I thought. Now it just so happens that not long ago I won a particularly interesting Ebay auction for nothing less than the original H.G. Wells `Time Machine’ prop from the movie of 1960. It appears that following its disappearance late in 1971 the disassembled apparatus was rediscovered in a bin-liner in someone’s garage and then got rebuilt by some time-machine nerds (not the sort of people you come across every day, I know, but I’m not making this up – see the Time Machine Project). Cutting the long story short and all that, I had it shipped to Vallico and I was able to find some tough guys from Cardoso who were prepared to drag it up the mountain. And now Evans and I are sitting in the repaired machine on the plateau at the top of Monte Penna (hunched up a trifle close I have to say – only a one seater, you see). But, I hear you exclaim, it’s just a movie prop, right? Well I thought so too – I just wanted it to decorate the chapel in the Institute alongside our giant Faraday Cage from ‘The Prisoner‘. But, get this..

    I drew a breath, set my teeth, glanced sideways at the ever-nonchalant Evans who was tapping one of his fingernails on the side of the machine and whistling. Gripping the bronze and crimson leather starting lever with both hands, I slowly pulled it back to its reverse position. Incredibly, the hilltop became hazy and the atmosphere perceptibly darkened. Then the night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment yesterday arrived. The landscape grew faint, then fainter and ever fainter. Yesterday night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange numbness descended on my mind. I turned the crystal speed dial to put on pace and night began to follow day like the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion of the plateau seemed presently to fall away from us, and we saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as we went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and we could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.

    Watching the instruments, I resolve to stop, and jerk the lever forward again. The whole hideous motion comes to a juddering halt. The solid brass dial reads August 4th 2037 BC. It is 3 o’clock in the afternoon.

    Got a job lot of Harry Potter invisibility cloaks and infra-red night vision glasses too. Ebay, eh? Turns out to be have been a good move, because as we peer over the edge of the cliff looking down on the entrance to Cascaltendine we see there are a lot of people here. Cascaltendine is considerably more popular back then. We can hear rhythmic beats and chanting. A bunch of long-hairs are banging on hides stretched over wooden frames, and you know what? It sounds a bit like Gene Krupa on “Sing, Sing, Sing”. There’s even something that looks like a bar, and as we watch, there are a bunch of kids, ten years old or so, apparently being forced to drink something by some older guys and a Chief-Witch-Doctor type with white make-up. They start ‘em early round here, it seems.

    Evans and I follow the paths we know to get down off the cliff, circle round, and crawl up the steep approach to the cave entrance from below, then we use our cloaks to get past the band and the dancers and head into the gaping hole at the base of the huge parabolic cliff. Inside it’s quite a bit lighter and more impressive than the last time we saw it in the twenty-first century; in fact there are flaming torches planted in the ground in two long lines all the way to the back of the enormous fifty-metre entrance hall. Someone has even swept the floor. Then, near the back where two narrow passages branch off the main chamber, we see the ten-year olds, flailing now and looking the worse for wear from whatever they’d been given to drink. The shaman guy is shoving them down the left-hand passage out of which runs the magic stream that this cave is famous for. We follow them, trying hard not to give ourselves away by disturbing the water, and we see the boys carried up under the arm of some big guy as he climbs the crack into the upper cavity. We follow discreetly and see them being pushed through the hole that leads into the room which had the dangling rope inside back in our day; clearly we weren’t the first people to discover this place. I hear a splash and howl as one of the kids falls into the pool. The shaman barks some commands in an unfamiliar language – for the sake of argument let’s call it proto-Ligurian – then he walks away leaving the kids in the cold darkness. Unsure what to do, Evans and I settle down to wait.

    Zammo squatted on the bare rock, his unclothed back resting against the biting damp rear wall of the cavern. He was staring sideways at the unmoving clusters of elongated caverniculous insects dotted around him and, like all other visitors to the cave before or since, he was idly wondering what they ate and what the point was of flying around small holes in the ground in complete darkness. Being more strongly built than the other two lads he had been able to secure the only ledge where he could sit without effort with his whole body out of the frigid pool that covered the floor of the chamber. Tucka, the smallest of the three, had found an unstable perch on a six-inch rocky projection and was shivering uncontrollably not just on account of the cold but also because of the awful agitation that now gripped him. Even back in the village Tucka had rarely strayed far from his mother’s skirts and the priests’ forced march up to the sacred cave, the overwhelming black drink, and the boys’ subsequent abandonment in this freezing grotto was proving too much for him. The third boy, whose name was Grippa, lay insensible half-in and half-out of the water. Zammo was momentarily unable to tell whether he was alive or dead.

    His eyes instead strayed to the flickering flames of the torch held by a piece of twine looped over a stalagmitic spike on the giant fin-shaped rock on the right of the chamber. Gobbets of burnt cloth and tar were falling through the air, hissing as they struck the surface of the water. Zammo knew that the light would soon be gone. Then he gazed at the delicate vertical flutings of the huge flowstone in front of him, looking for all the world like a frozen waterfall, and as his eyes failed to penetrate the heavy shadows high above he closed them and saw again the priest grinding up bark and roots and a black powder he took from a gourd. Strong arms had held them from behind. Each boy forced to open his mouth as the black semi-liquid paste was shoved in and washed down with beer. Almost immediately the boys felt themselves in a waking dream. Now, as Zammo opened his eyes again, the grotto began to spin out of control. Multicoloured sputterings and flashes began to fill his vision.

    Suddenly there was a tremendous splash as something heavy fell into the pool. For a fleeting second Zammo seemed to see the lower half of a pair of legs, and heard some spirit voice muttering in some unknown tongue. Something about ‘Haripotta’ then some shushing noises then silence. The proto-Ligurian for “Whoah.. heavy shit” ran through Zammo’s mind. Unlike the others he wasn’t particularly afraid. Back in the village he had known who to approach and who to ask the right questions. He had been told to expect visions and extreme damp and cold and darkness and isolation. It was all part of the Humpa ritual of becoming a man. A day and a night or more in the cave then he would emerge to claim the token of his coming of age.

    Then the light went out. The cave was plunged into a desperate blackness like someone had gouged out the boys’ eyes. Despite his bravado, Zammo trembled slightly.

    How long they waited they could not tell; any sense of time had left with the light. Zammo began to doze, only to be rudely interrupted by loud howls as Tucka rolled off his narrow perch into the freezing water. The sobbing seemed to take many hours to subside. An aeon later Zammo heard scraping noises coming from somewhere beyond the little hole. A muffled curse as an elbow hit bare rock. A glimmer of light. They were coming.

    At the bellowed summons, Zammo put his head into the little hole and wriggled his way upwards, his back dragging unpleasantly through shallow puddles of muddy water. Into the large cavity then into the hole on the right. He knew he was to climb down but he wasn’t tall enough to reach between the footholds, so rough hands grabbed him and passed him down. A bend to the right, over the lip of a small waterfall and into another circular chamber like the inside of a barrel. Left into the long narrow passage with high ledges on either side – Zammo was able to squeeze between them, all the time splashing through the sacred stream that emerges by magic from the middle of the flat-topped mountain.

    Finally arriving in the entrance hall he blinked. The rows of flaming torches made flickering shadows jump up and down the wall. Between the torches were long two lines of men, all facing inwards and grasping the hands of the man opposite to form a long arch. The chanting began. A clamorous thunderous rhythmical noise that terrified the boys. Zammo was pushed to the start of the man-passage and he ran through, continually kicked by strong feet in hide sandals, then fell at the feet of the familiar figure of the priest waiting at the end. The looming figure smiled kindly through his white mask and held out a small bronze figurine. With unfeasibly large testicles.

    “Boy – you are now a man. Here is your gronk.”

     buca71

    Boggling slightly, Evans and I decide we have seen enough and head off down the hill. We pass the outer wall of the fortification – not the same as the giant wall that exists in our day but you can see where they got the idea. I glance up the cliff to the right. Sure enough there is the entrance to the Palace of Ismeno, and amazingly there are people inside! The wild fig tree in front of it is much larger than in our day and ladders are lashed from the upper branches up to the high ledge. Two guys are apparently acting as lookouts and a strange blond woman is eating some legumes. I grin and shake my head – hard luck Aleksandra. Evans and I return to the Time Machine, once again I push forward the bronze levers, and not long afterwards we are in the warm sunshine of the summer of 1972. As we peer over Cascaltendine’s now ruined retaining wall I hear a familiar sound. No, it can’t be – it’s Misty Mountain Hop off Led Zeppelin IV – playing through a hissy battery-powered tape recorder. We then hear digging noises. The clink of metal on metal. A long-haired thin man from the University of Pisa is sifting some soil taken from a silted-up natural basin; he reaches into the sieve and plucks out an object. The crumbs of earth fall away. A figurine! The man’s figures brush away some of the earth. A green patina. Bronze. “Paolo! Vieni qui – ho trovato qualcosa..”

    Michelangelo Zecchini – for it is he – is carrying out the first serious archaeological dig in Cascaltendine in the mid 1970s with his mate Paolo Mencacci. He has just found a 4000 year-old bronze hermaphrodite idol (which Zammo had known as a gronk). This was only the first of a great cache of similar figurines. They also found fragments of Greek kylixes, Roman coins, vast number of animal bones, and quantities of other things which showed the place to have been used or inhabited over millennia. This is my translation of the abstract of the paper they subsequently wrote about it:

    “Excavations carried out at the Cave of Castelvenere in the province of Lucca have brought to light archaeological remains from various epochs datable from the second millenium B.C. up to the first centuries of the Christian era. The objects discovered suggest that the cave was the scene of cult activity – a conclusion supported in part by the recovery of a number of unusual bronze figurines of great antiquity, all either female or hermaphrodite.”

    For what it’s worth I’ve translated the whole article into English, and you can find the result here but just so you don’t have to read it let me talk, superficially, about some of the basic issues.

    The Humpa were the ancestors of a people known as the Ligurians or the Apuan Ligures who clashed with the Romans in the time of the Republic and afterwards, and were forced to hole up in places such as Cascaltendine (a bit like Helm’s Deep in Lord of the Rings, hence the big wall). Now of course these people left no written records and normally all we can do is overinterpret things from objects they leave behind. However unlike their contemporaries the Etruscans who left behind art and jewellery you’d be proud to wear to parties today, the Ligurians were quite frankly a bit crap – and quality objects like the Cascaltendine bronzes are pretty unusual.

    Up to now no-one has been able to say what the gronks were used for or why they were made. Well, they didn’t have a Time Machine did they, and as part of our contribution to original research on this issue, Evans and I can reveal that they were given to members of the tribe in a ‘coming of age’ ceremony and that thereafter they were the receptacles of the soul of the owner. The little spikes on the bottom were used to stand them up in some appropriate corner of the house. The hermaphrodite ones with huge testicles were for the boys (not sure why they had breasts but there you go – probably some kind of perverted fetish) and the female bronzes with carefully-engraved private parts were for the girlies. As it happens a cache of unused gronks (they had to make them in batches, you see) were left behind in the cave when the Humpa were forced to flee following an invasion of the valley by the fearsome Oompa-Loompas and these were the ones found by the Pisa boys four thousand years later. Oh yes.

    The relationship of prehistoric Italians with caves is well described in a fascinating book called Underground Religion: Cult and Culture in Prehistoric Italy by UCL Professor of Archaelogy Ruth D. Whitehouse (Get it at Amazon.com..). One thing she makes clear is that prehistoric fellows loved caves associated with what one might call ‘special water’ – be it waterfalls, steam caves, caves with natural fizzy water, underground lakes, or in the case of Cascaltendine mysterious streams appearing out of nowhere. Usually these places seem to have been used for religious or ‘cult’ purposes and although Cascaltendine isn’t mentioned in Prof. Whitehouse’s book it has all the hallmarks of a special water cult cave. Our time trip now seems to have confirmed that.

    Anyway, there’s a long discussion to have about this but the Towler blog isn’t the place for it (for all I know Cascaltendine scholarship has moved on since the 1970s article but the relevant journals aren’t easy for me to get hold of). Read my translation of Zecchini and Mencacci’s article or Ruth’s book for more professional insight; go to the Villa Guinigi museum in Lucca to see some of the gronks. But just before we get on to the adventure story, it’s interesting to note that Pietro Magri – whose little nineteenth century book initially sparked my interest in Cascaltendine and whose chiselled initials and rope Evans and I found in the Palace of Ismeno – had this to say just before leaving the cave back in 1880:

    “There was nothing left to see, but I knew it was bad to go back home without taking with me a memento of the Tana di Cascaltendine. I therefore took up a mattock and set myself to digging to see if Fortune would be kind to me, and in fact after excavating perhaps two handfuls of earth I found myself looking at some kind of black object.. I picked it up and examined it; it was.. a bone!”

    “Our Diori burst out laughing, perhaps with good reason. For my part it seemed that Fortune had in fact been very kind to me, and I treasure it. I still do not know what it is, I cannot decide, but it certainly has the shape of a human bone and perhaps we will be able to say something about it subsequently.”

    If only he had kept digging..

    The Fat Boy Filter
    PENTAX Image

    Following our return to September 2007, Evans and I go back to the chamber where we watched Zammo and his friends 4000 years ago. We are no longer hindered by the Time Travel Prime Directive (“Don’t let ‘em see you, and above all don’t kill anyone.”) so we can now attempt to progress further into the cave. You know, you hear about the Grandfather Paradox but you’ve only got two grandfathers and they’re pretty easy to avoid if you don’t want to shoot them. In 2000 BC – 160 generations ago or whatever – you have in principle 2 to the power of 160 (=730750818665451459101842416358141509827966271488) ancestors. This is just a tad less than a good estimate of the number of atoms in the earth, so you’re pretty much related to everyone (just goes to show the extent of inbreeding though!). And of course you don’t need to go around slaughtering everybody to affect the future. If you accidentally cause someone not to meet his girlfriend that night because they’re too busy gawping at the weirdo time travellers then the long chain of your ancestors will get broken and you will vanish in a puff of logic. Risky business. Doctor Who must have nightmares.

    Anyway Evans and I are standing on the small ledges at the edge of the pool that covers the base of the chamber. At the other side of the pool we see the huge fluted flowstone structure erupting out of the water and curving upwards. Dangling down the middle of it is the old rotten rope. Who left it there is impossible to say but clearly it could have been here for decades. Between us we only have two harnesses and a nice modern pink rope, so someone is going to have lead up a wet wall without protection; you can’t trust old rotten ropes not to break when you put your weight on them. I’m certainly not going to trust my weight to it. I have a wife and baby. Luckily however, Evans – who has a wife and four babies under the age of five – is an absolutely insane suicidal lunatic and he plunges into the pool, wades over to the wall and starts to explore the possibilities. Even more luckily, as we look around we see that over on the right there are some footholds and handholds which might enable him to stick to the wall and avoid testing the shock loading of the ancient cord. It seems, possibly, that it will go.

     cc511

    Just because he can and probably ought to, Evans ties the old rotten rope into his harness. Stepping up out of the water, with the nice but currently useless pink rope trailing behind him, he places his sodden boot onto a small rocky protuberance at the base of the wall and begins to climb. One hand up. Second hand up. Second foot out of the water. Onwards and upwards. Past the point of no return where he’s going to really hurt himself if he slips. I wonder if it will be possible for me to get him out of here if he breaks both his legs? Remembering the narrow holes one has to wriggle through and the walls you have to climb just to get to this point, I think not. I make the problem easier by avoiding thinking about it any further, and instead I wonder whether Samantha and I could cope with four foster children on top of the one we already have. Anyway, Evans continues upwards, sticking to the rock like one of those absurd cave insects that you still see even down here (what do they find to eat, I wonder?). Quickly, assuredly, he makes his way towards the curving summit of the flowstone about 50 or 60 feet up where hopefully he can find a safe stance. At his confirming shout I feel weirdly relieved..

    The pink rope snakes down and I clip on. My turn.

    It takes me a few moments to attach myself to the wall with my whole body out of the water. It feels strange to be doing a serious climb again, fifteen years after doing the Avon Gorge under the Clifton Suspension Bridge, and a bit of dabbling in Liguria a few years after that. I get up another metre or so and see immediately that the next bit is tricky. Evans had seemed to breeze through here, but then again he’s a better climber than I am. Inexplicably it takes me several minutes to put together the appropriate combination of moves (when in doubt just try to move a few inches higher and solutions will reveal themselves). I’ve never had problems in trusting equipment and Evans is reassuringly keeping the rope tight above me (it seems there is a kind of ‘natural bridge’ rock formation around which he has been able to loop the rope). After a few more minutes of scrabbling I am level with Evans, and all too aware of the hideous drop into inky blackness behind me. I focus on looking straight ahead and working out how to get off the exposed wall and deeper into the mountain. Evans, who has already found time to do some reconnaissance, disappears into a smallish opening up and to the left.

     cc61

    Splashing and grunts can be heard. The next chamber is evidently wet. When it comes to my turn I poke my head through the opening and groan. The small space beyond is like the inside of a dog kennel and a foot deep in water with another very restricted opening exiting to the left. Evans has squeezed through and has reached the next chamber and he exclaims in pain as he stands up and cracks his head on a protruding fin of rock (of course we didn’t bring helmets). I twist around inside the kennel and struggle to angle my body correctly to make the exit while trying to avoid dipping too much of my body into the freezing water. As my head emerges through the second opening, my torch illuminates the walls of another second relatively dry chamber with a proper horizontal floor and finally I begin to feel safe.

    We look around. A large, unusual chamber. Near the back, part of the wall has collapsed and it is clear that it is not solid rock but something like gravel covered by a centimetre-thick layer of limestone concretion. There are some unusual rock formations around the area above the opening we have just come through but at first glance there appears to be no way out. It takes thirty seconds or so to see an exit hole high up amongst these formations. Evans is up like a rabbit (one that knows how to climb, obviously); he squeezes through and immediately calls back. “There’s writing on the wall, like.” I haul myself up to the opening – it turns out to be like a small ship’s porthole – and I poke my head and upper body through. Sure enough, in front of me there is an inscription on the wall – a date in the 1930s and a name (I forget what it was – when you’re as senile as I am I should have remembered that I need to write things down.). I wonder idly if this was the owner of the rotten rope – my God – Evans could have been trusting his life to something eighty years old! Looking straight ahead I see there is a great crack in the rock heading more or less east as far as our torches will go. To the right another passage bends out of sight. This is more like it!

    I’m excited now we finally have something new to explore (I had been to the frozen waterfall cave many times before we dared the ascent) and I push forward eagerly. I wriggle another foot or so through the tiny hole but suddenly I come to a dead stop. I wriggle some more. And some more. I twist and contort my body to get the correct angle. An awful realization hits me, and I begin to turn ever so slightly pink.

    My arse is too big to fit through the hole.

    For a man whose personal self-image is still that of the muscular young runner of fifteen years previously, this is a hard blow for me to take. I move my gaze up from the floor towards the far wall, where Evans is leaning nonchalantly against the rock, staring at the strange Johnny Eck-like figure in front of him. As I look into his eyes, I realize that we are both thinking the same thing. If I get stuck, he will be trapped by a human-shaped plug in the Fat Boy Filter and I will have to watch him die of starvation whilst continually having to apologize for weeks on end. If he has brought a knife, he will have to dismember me in order to stay alive. If he hasn’t, he’ll have to chew his way through.

    Immediately I stop struggling forward as my arse is now jammed in tight. I try to go back but the fabric of my trousers is all rucked up, and I have to wriggle for several minutes to free it. I reverse for a foot or so. Relieved and assured of his exit, Evans says he will quickly explore the new passages but it is clear that the enthusiasm has gone from both of us and we agree that given the impossibility of rescue he shouldn’t go too far. He disappears round the corner. There are scraping sounds then silence. For no particular reason I reach upwards and turn off my head-torch. Instantly I am in utter blackness and I have an overwhelming feeling of smallness like that guy in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. I am a tiny ant compressed into a tiny hole under billions of tons of rock of a giant table mountain. A tiny ant. With a big arse. Flushed and humiliated, I settle down to wait.

    When Evans returns, we say little. He is unenthusiastic about what he has seen down the unexplored passages but it seems there are still new ways to go which will have to wait for the future. We both struggle through the flooded dog kennel and emerge at the top of the frozen waterfall. Both my nice pink rope and the 1930s special are looped around the natural rock beam above us from where they will be difficult to remove. We agree to leave my hundred-quid rope here to help future expeditions (though there is a reward of two Moretti beers for anyone who can arrange its safe return to me – now there’s a challenge).

    We decide that I should descend first, and as I contemplate what needs to be done I feel my first real moment of serious apprehension. See, the top of the waterfall is not a proper ledge with a flat top and ninety degree angles. The smooth slippery rock simply curves over into a giant black void which our headlamps don’t seem to penetrate. In a wonderful optical illusion there are no hand- or footholds whatsoever. The words “Not sure I can do this” escape my lips before the idiocy of the expression becomes apparent to me. The moment passes and I remember to have confidence in the equipment. I’m on a rope now. But it’s not the best moment of my life as I slide forwards on my big arse with my feet disappearing over the curving edge desperately looking for something to clutch before the friction is no longer sufficient to hold me.

    I take one last look backwards into the shadows wherein lies the hateful Fat Boy Filter, and I think of all the lovely dinners at Mulino and Da Sandra and Rondine and that nice place in Vallico Sopra that I will have to miss, and the amount of bloody running I will have to do to get through that hole. And you want to know the expression on my face at that moment? Well, I tell you. Sullen ain’t the word.

    The Palace of Ismeno

    Posted on

    by Mike Towler

    “Can you see the carving?”, I call from the base of the ladder.

    My English friend Huw from Benabbio peers over the lip of the cave forty feet up the cliff and grins. “I think you should come up here and have a look.”

    Actually, and I apologize for breaking up the flow of the story already, we’re not going to call him Huw. Some Italians might read this. And while they have many virtues, Italians are generally not capable of pronouncing the letters H and W, so this is something like the worst word in the world. When called upon to say it most of them grimace slightly, eventually splutter something like “Urgh..” and then throw up their hands in resignation. So let us, as they do, call him “Evans”.

    Anyway, Evans beckons for me to ascend the ladder. It’s quite a construction. The previous year I had a bunch of visiting physicists drag the twelve-metre ladder I bought to work on the roof of our church – the longest they had in the DIY store – all the way up here but it was a couple of metres too short to reach the cave. This summer I call Evans, who fixes things. He’s a problem solver. His response was to strap his telescopic ladder on to the end of mine, and now it’s long enough. It looks pretty terrifying, but we’ve secured it with a rope and now it seems stable enough.

    Evans has just climbed it. He has entered the Palace of Ismeno. As far as I can tell, he’s the first person to get up there in 127 years.

     ladders1

    Here’s what Barga priest Canon Pietro Magri had to say in his book An excursion to Mount Gragno and the cave of Cascaltendine, on his approach to this spot in the year 1880:

    And what a beautiful sight! The wide entrance to the cave opens up at the base of an enormous hollow in the mountain which has the general shape of a parabolic curve, though this is somewhat irregular and imperfect lower down on the left-hand side. The upper edge of this great cavity is the edge of the summit plateau of the mountain and is garnished with holm oaks.

    That’s Cascaltendine itself, which is easily accessible and well-known and which I may have mentioned in er.. both of my previous contributions to Barga News (I’m really not obsessed with caves, OK? I’m just working this through.). Anyway, this article is not about that. However if you stand in front of Cascaltendine, look up to the left, and track your eyes around the giant overhanging cliff then according to Magri you see “a hole of considerable size some way above a wild fig tree“. It’s not obvious and you probably wouldn’t see it if it wasn’t pointed out to you, but it’s there. That is the Palace of Ismeno. That’s what we’re doing today.

    Magri goes on to say that Bertacchi, a gentleman who published the first description of Cascaltendine sometime in the 1700s “was not able to investigate this hole on account of not having any ladders, but it was visited by members of our party and Ferruccio Salvi has communicated the following description to me.

    Salvi’s prose style is not up to that of the priest, and there follows a somewhat leaden description (see later) which ends:

    Before coming down from the cavern we used a chisel to inscribe our initials and the year 1880 on both walls of the passage near the entrance.

    Magri continues.

    A most curious thing at this point was the sight of people appearing at the mouth of this barren and empty cave at such a considerable height. This was a most astonishing spectacle and we were able to enjoy the effect at the very moment of Diversi’s appearance at the hole. We called out to him as he popped out with a cap on his head, wearing glasses, with a mattock in one hand and a piton in the other, but it no longer seemed to be him; there was something strange, something fantastical, something idealized about him. [My brother] Magri, who went up there and saw him inscribe our names, painted a verbal picture of him as a kind of wizard. The idea never went away and our friends christened the cave “The Palace of Ismeno”.

    Ismeno being the counsellor and wizard of the King of Jerusalem who stars, for example, in Tasso’s epic Gerusalemme Liberata and, later, in Milton’s Paradise Lost. But of course you knew that. Obvious required knowledge for your sophisticated man about Barga in 1880.

    Anyway, some years ago I was shown a tattered copy of Magri’s very rare little book that lives in a drawer in our neighbour Delma’s dining room table. I ended up translating it, and conceived the idea of writing a little photo essay for our website, matching up the descriptions in the text with the current reality. That was all fine, except that I had no way of getting into the Palace of Ismeno. In 1880 Magri simply hired some big guys with big ladders from Cardoso, but I couldn’t do that. How then could I see if the chiselled initials were still there?

    Well here we are – it’s Friday 3rd August 2007 – and Evans and I are at the cave with ten quantum physicists from around the world who are attending a summer school at my Institute. Now your average quantum physicist is not normally considered essential equipment on a tricky mountaineering expedition but today we have heavy gear to get up to the sheer rock face, and Evans and I are grateful to the quantum Sherpas for helping to carry it.

    Way up on the ledge, Evans’s expression tells me that there is something to see. I grasp the ladder and head upwards. The ladder flexes alarmingly; the rock on which it leans is crumbling and unstable. Forty feet up I step over the parapet. I become aware of a dark, dusty passage, higher than a man, descending into the heart of the mountain. Evans gestures to the right hand wall. I see a piton battered into the stone, an antique rope still attached it. Above it and to the left, chiselled into a low rock shelf, in letters four inches high: D.P. MAGRI 1880 BARGA.

    On both walls, Magri said. I look to the left. Less clear, but there’s an inscription. Blowing away some of the dust, I see: DIVERSI, SALVI 1880. I nod. He didn’t make it up – that’s what we came for. Flash. Flash. Photos.

    initials11

    initials21

    The top of the ladder is moving. There is a scraping sound. The hirsute head of Colin Glass from Switzerland – a man so hairy that my friendly baby daughter Saska is terrified of him – appears above the rim of the cliff. Not without difficulty, he manoeuvers himself onto the platform and descends into the gloom. The first hippy to enter the cave. Not long afterwards, Hamad Alyahyaei the Arabian guy. The first Moslem ever to enter the cave. Then I-Chun Lin the brave Chinese girl. The first female, and the first Asian. Probably.

    It’s time to explore, and we set off down the passage. After a while the ceiling comes down low and we crawl on our hands and knees through the dry dust. There is a junction. It is then I realize we only have one hand lantern between us, and that somehow, stupidly, we have left the head torches at the bottom of the cliff. Colin and I wait in total darkness in the inner chamber as Evans and the others head back to the entrance to retrieve the equipment. If my mother didn’t read this, Colin and I would have communed with a cigarette whilst we waited.

    Presently the others return, the beams of their head torches made visible by the clouds of smoke billowing in the confined space, and I fish out a battered copy of Magri’s book from my back pocket. I read aloud to the others the text of Salvi’s report which Magri quotes, speaking quickly as I pass through the dull bits:

    The entrance is, when facing outwards, to the right of the principal cavern around 12 metres above the level of its floor. It proved necessary to overcome this difference in height by means of a ladder, as the sloping wall containing the entrance is almost vertical and in consequence inaccessible without the ladder.

    At its mouth the cave is 2 metres and 20 centimetres in height with a width of 1.80 metres, but 8 metres inside the ceiling has descended to only 0.90 metres and henceforth it is necessary to proceed on all fours to a distance of 23 metres from the entrance. The initial breadth of 1.80 metres reduces, 8 metres along the passage, to just 1.50 metres and stays that way until the 23 metre point mentioned above, where the cave is 2 metres broad and 1.60 metres high. This is a good place to rest since even though one cannot stand up completely, those of limited stature may, by inclining their head slightly, stretch their back and straighten their knees.

    I note this is where we are now.

    Beyond that point the cavern divides into two branches. The passage on the right descends rapidly with a gradient of 40 percent; the one on the left has a 30 percent upward gradient.

    After 4.60 metres the first passage leads to a little lake at which point the cave ceiling descends to within only 60 centimetres of the mirrored surface of the water. This is matched by the depth of the lake and so the total distance from ceiling to cave floor is only one metre and twenty centimetres. Proceeding beyond this point is exceedingly painful, for although the water only comes up to the level of the knees one is obliged to maintain the back bent almost horizontally. Moreover the water is exceedingly cold and indeed almost freezing even in summer. Nonetheless, as we wished to know if new passages existed beyond the lake one of the guides was persuaded to try to pass this obstacle and he succeeded, though not without some fatigue and discomfort. After proceeding another 6 metres and happening upon the other side of the lake, our explorer found a sudden elevation in the ceiling which permitted him to stand up but 1.20 metres beyond this point the chamber came to an end.

    Those who enter the left-hand branch may like to know that it is a metre in height with a breadth of 0.90 metres. One must climb, as I said, up a 30 percent slope and 3.10 metres inside the cave bends sharply to the left where unexpectedly we encountered a great abyss in the floor, providentially made visible by the light of our lamps. We threw a stone into it and immediately heard the splash of water.

    One of the guides undertook to climb down into this sinkhole, where the damp walls – only 0.8 metres apart – allowed him to support himself by pushing against them. As soon as we saw his head disappear and had lowered a lamp to provide him with light, the guide told us that he was touching the water with his feet and immediately afterwards he found the bottom.

    While the walls of this well were being examined, one of us happened to be still at the edge of the pool in the right-hand passage described above and he observed that he was able to see the light of the lamp held by the man in the hole. In this way we discovered that the two branches of the cavern were in fact connected through an extension of the little lake as far as the sinkhole in the left-hand passage.

    This whole cavern is clearly undergoing a process of natural enlargement through the action of the waters, which presumably flow into the lake through the vault of the sinkhole and then exit through the cave mouth. Both the floor and the walls which curve down to them show obvious signs of erosion, and this is without doubt produced by the action of the water which in times of heavy rain must infiltrate the little lake, raising it to the level of the highest point of the cavern whereupon it discharges through the entrance.

    The rock in which the cave has formed is the usual Albarese stone [an expensive ivory-coloured local limestone used e.g. for the facade of Barga cathedral] – carbonate, that is, limestone from the Cretaceous epoch perhaps with some Pleistocene character though as we were unable to recognize any traces of fossils there must remain some doubt about this.

    Before coming down from the cavern we used a chisel to inscribe our initials and the year 1880 on both walls of the passage near the entrance.

    Ten minutes of exploration show us that sometime during the previous century and a bit the underground lake has disappeared; whether temporarily on account of this summer’s dry weather or permanently is unclear (Magri was here in late September). Magri’s supposition that the two passages are connected turns out to be correct, and we are able to crawl down the sinkhole in the left-hand branch and end up near the lowest point of the right-hand one. Just before I get back to the junction having traversed this loop I find Evans. He is waiting for me. He is determined I should do something first today and he points out that as the cave was flooded on the only known previous visit I could be the first person ever to complete the full circuit of the two branches. Oh yes. Bow. Elvis impersonation. Thank you very much.

    Back at the entrance, Evans, I-Chun, Hamad and Colin in turn step over the parapet high in the air – some with more confidence than others – and descend the ladder back to base camp. I begin preparing to follow them, but then I see that some of the other guys want to come up here. Matus Dubecky – the first Slovakian tough guy to visit the cave – arrives. Then Amit Raj Sharma. The first Indian Professor. Then Aleksandra Vojvodic and her ‘husband’ Jonas Hartwig. The first Swedish vegetarians. And finally Mikhail Kibalchenko. The first Russian. Maja Stojkovic and Dan Fors, apparently not being slightly mad, seem happy to sit at the base of the cliff.

    I hadn’t really planned on bringing them all up here, but the students seem excited to be doing something slightly dangerous. In today’s risk-averse world, you can bet that there are some of them who have never been allowed to sneeze without a safety rope. Maybe today will be thrilling for them, maybe it will be scary. I just hope we don’t kill one.

    Anyway, after a little more exploration we evacuate. I help the last group of students to descend without incident and I am left alone in the Palace of Ismeno. Remembering Diversi, I ask Evans to take a photo of me from the ground. As he lifts the camera, I wonder how best to look like the wizard of the King of Jerusalem. Realizing that I don’t know, I shrug, and in the absence of a mattock (whatever that is) I wave a tiny hammer. As I step off the parapet, I wonder how long it will be before someone makes it up here again..

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    As I touch the ground I affect insouciance. “Well, quite a successful day all round, don’t you think?” I say breezily. Internally I immediately remind myself not to say things like that till later, it being a well-known fact that ninety per cent of mountaineering accidents happen to cocky people on the way back down. And, sure enough, as the ladder is being pulled off the rockface there is one plan in my head to get the thing horizontal on the ground, and the three other guys helping me turn out to have three different plans. Before I can impose order a shower of rocks gets dislodged from the crumbling parapet, and a largish one smacks into Amit’s head. He’s wearing a helmet, and gets away with a bruised arm, but clearly we’ve been lucky. Cursing inwardly, I pretend everything is OK and tell everyone this sort of thing happens all the time, but I’m annoyed. It takes the gloss off the day.

    As we manhandle the heavy ladders and equipment back down the precipitous slope that leads down from Cascaltendine back to the main path, I begin to reflect on Magri’s final words concerning the Palace of Ismeno back in 1880:

    The people around these parts say that in former times there was a wild fig tree, rather taller than the one we see today, which the local boys could easily climb in order to get into the upper cave. Now one most certainly cannot reach it without the aid of a ladder. There are others who say that the wall we have described was once of such a prodigious height that people could climb up there, but as we could observe no vestiges of masonry near the cave we cannot really assert anything in this regard.

    I don’t believe the thing about the wall (though what remains of it is ancient, impressive and mysterious) but it occurs to me that if some of these eighteenth century local boys were Chinese or Moslem or Swedish vegetarian immigrants then some of the entries in my long list of firsts above are not really true. It’s also possible that Speleoclub Garfagnana have their Annual General Meeting and Official Club Orgy in the Palace of Ismeno every September, but I really couldn’t see any evidence that this is the case. No graffiti apart from Magri’s, no artefacts apart from a ring off a pigeon’s leg (how long does it take a dead pigeon to disappear completely?), and none of the usual speleo paint on the walls. In the absence of any evidence, it seems likely that we’re the first people here since the nineteenth century. At any rate, until the readers of Barga News tell me different, that’s what I’m going to say.

    Finally then, as I trek down the hill, I glance at my watch then slap my forehead in annoyance. It’s 7.45pm. Understand that, following the serious business of the mornings at our Institute schools and workshops, we like to organize various simultaneous group activities in the afternoon. The active athletic people we send to climb mountains and canyons and to explore caves and to do other healthy activities such as swordfighting. The unhealthy lazy people, by contrast, get driven to sunny swimming pools where they rub sun cream into each other’s fat lazy arses whilst eating huge tubs of ice cream and drinking gallons of beer (at least I assume that’s what they do). All the various groups then meet up in the evening at some restaurant to eat (again, in the case of the lazies). Today, as I realize we’re going to be at least an hour late at the rather lovely Mulino in Fabbriche di Vallico, I also recall that my wife Sam is in the lazy group and that in our family lateness is punishable by death. I gulp, and as the sun begins to set on another adventure in the Apuan Alps, it becomes clear that the most dangerous part of the day is yet to come.

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    First Post

    Posted on

    by Mike Towler

    So I’m standing at La Croce, contemplating all the little houses sprinkled about the Middle Serchio Valley far below. I’m perched on a rocky platform jutting into space about two-thirds of the way up the sheer front face of Monte Penna and a few miles to the North, smothering the summit of its own little hill, I can see Barga, home of barganews.com. As you’d hope someone has carted a huge metal cross up here, and I’m holding on tight to it as it’s a hell of a long way down and the wind is blowing my hat off.

    I turn round and make my way back to the main path where I go right and head north again. I’m looking for a cave. Not the Tana di Cascaltendine, well-known and about ten minutes behind me, but another one. See, on a wooden hoarding in San Luigi, there’s this rough map of the Turrite Cava valley and dotted all over it are caves (the circular black and white splotches):

    sanluigi_map11

    The trouble is – apart from the famous one I can’t find any of them. Who cares? Well, I got interested in this sort of thing a while back when I found an old manuscript about an 1880 expedition to the Cascaltendine cave by a priest from Barga and his mates from the nineteenth-century equivalent of Ariosto’s Bar (see my translation). There’s this footnote near the end:

    Two others caves exist in Mount Gragno (he means Monte Penna) above the Fosso di Bolognana, one of which was visited by some of our party including Ferruccio Salvi. He has made a sketch plan of it which he has kindly forwarded to me along with the two sketches in this pamphlet, and we hope to publish a description of it in the next summer season.

    As far as I can tell no such thing was ever published and so after more than a century I thought I’d have a look for these other caves. There’s two of them marked on the display board in San Luigi car park. I’m interested in the one I’ve marked with an arrow (the one next to the green number 2 is on private property and I don’t fancy getting shot today):

    penna_map11

    I’ve got a couple of proper maps of this area from proper map shops that show this cave but the maps are completely different from each other and from reality. I picture the surveying guys “Uh.. yeah. We did that area, boss. It kind of looks like this” handing over the made-up sketch they scribbled down in the pub because they couldn’t be arsed and they never quite figured out how to handle a theodolite.

    Anyway, one of the maps has got the cave sitting at the top of a stream bed. There’s no obvious ones, so I pick a depression in the ground that could have been formed by running water and head up. The slope is steep and it’s an uncomfortable scramble up a mess of leaves and loose soil. I get close to the base of the upper cliff. Nothing. No cave. But then I realize that to the left there’s something like a path climbing upwards. It’s got to be the one that heads up onto the summit plateau of Monte Penna. I tried to find that last year trying to get down off the plateau from the other direction, and the undergrowth was so thick I couldn’t find it. So I figure what the hell – might as well explore something today. Sam said I had to be back in two and a half hours or she would call the police (she worries like that).

    The sun is pretty low in the sky – I reckon I’ve got about half an hour’s daylight left. Rather than retrace my steps or go round the regular footpath at the base of the cliffs to the north I decide to head up the overgrown and maybe long-abandoned path, get up on the plateau and see if I can fight my way through to San Luigi, from where I can get down the road to where I left the car in five minutes or so.

    Nice move though. You really don’t want to get lost up there at night without a torch. It’s overgrown like the Amazon, on three sides of the plateau there’s huge vertical cliffs that you can walk straight off in the dark, and these days nobody ever ever goes up there.

    Let’s go. A big old tree has toppled over and slid down the hill, blocking the path. I have to climb up and around. A disturbance down below to the left, and there’s a family of three wild boar crashing through the undergrowth. I bet they haven’t seen a human for a while. It’s the first time I’ve seen them in the flesh apart from on my plate, though sometimes you can hear grunting and crashing noises from far-off parts of the forest. I finally get to the plateau where, helpfully, the path disappears. Somewhere behind Monte Matanna ten miles to the west the sun is plunging into the Mediterranean and gloom is gathering. I start to jog.

    I figure that as I know the other side of the plateau pretty well I just have to keep going west and finally I’ll find something I recognize. After ten minutes I stumble upon the clearing where somebody is growing dope plants because like me he thinks that nobody ever goes there. Relieved, I head over to the path I know leaves the clearing to the west and follow it. I go past the old ruined metato which belonged to our neighbour Delma’s family when she was a little girl. I get on the main track and ten minutes later I’m at San Luigi. This is an old pastoral hamlet – current population around ten – which is the highest place you can drive to on the road from Fabbriche di Vallico. I start to run down the road from San Luigi towards our car which is waiting at the hairpin bend in the road from where you take the Cardoso footpath – the one that goes down past the Cave of Cascaltendine and on to La Croce. Before I get there in the last few minutes of daylight I linger at the point on the road where the panorama of our new world is laid out underneath me. First the village of Vallico Sopra – the church of San Michele curiously apart. A few hundred metres down from that is Vallico Sotto – our village, where Sam is waiting – and way below is the bottom of the Turritecava valley where the local metropolis of Fabbriche di Vallico lies hidden behind a ridge.

    My eyes focus on the highest building in Vallico Sotto. Despite the gathering gloom I can see that the roof has a lot more moss than neighbouring buildings and it needs a bit of work, and there is a cross and an old bell on the ridge beam. That’s our place. This is, or was, the Oratorio del Santissimo Crocifisso. Il Collegio. It’s been there for half a millennium, at least. It has served as a monastery, a church, a hospital, a school, and the Lord know what else. For the last few years we’ve called it the Towler Institute. When we’re dead and gone somebody else will call it some other name.

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    So I get in the car and I roll down the road, park up in Vallico Sotto and crawl up the steep hill up to the monastery. I’m a minute late. The most on-time I’ve ever been so I escape a scolding. I’ve failed completely to find the cave – again – but that’s OK. One of the problem with finishing quests is that you then have to think of another one.

    So anyway, that’s enough of that. From now on, let’s say once a fortnight or so, if anybody turns out to give a toss I’ll be posting “News from the Towler Institute” here courtesy of barganews.com. Let me start by telling you something about it. Sammy and I bought the place in August 2004 (Poor Gordon died and left me a little old falling down house near Bolton, and what with property prices being what they are, I swapped it for a Tuscan monastery. Makes you sick doesn’t it.). For those of you who remember the old Art School Il Collegio (see Barga News archives) – it is, or was, that. Now the website says “The Towler Institute. Science research centre, art studio, conference venue, cinema. The place to be in the Apuan Alps”. All you need to know really. We’re trying to make it into a place where curious people from around the world can come to discuss or talk or learn or do other fairly serious things. In the mornings. Then in the afternoons we use our local knowledge to take them on fabulous activities in the mountains and we take them out for fabulous food in the evenings. Because my main job is in theoretical physics research at an English university we’ve begun, in the first couple of years, by trying to organize scientific conferences a little bit different to the usual ones, and by hosting quantum physics summer schools (oh yes). The response. Things like..

    “It was easily the most enjoyable conference I have ever attended, and in the most beautiful location”

    “Each of the days in Tuscany was amazingly wonderful, can I ever imagine Italian lovely place without any crowd of Japanese tourists?” [from a Japanese person]

    “It remains for me the most profitable workshop I have ever had, associating the top quality of lectures and the excellent practical training, making very difficult things to become accessible. It remains also for me the type of ideal ambience associating work, scientific discussion and entertainments.”

    ..so I hope we’re doing something right. And the future? The church attached to the Institute is fully equipped for film projections on its massive screen (I don’t know how many cinemas there are in the Apuan Alps, but here’s one for starters. All the Vallico people came round for the opening night party last year featuring – what else? – Cinema Paradiso, and the local little boys keep asking me to do it more often). We can also hold concerts (rising opera star Antonio Badinksi did a damned fine impromptu performance there last year). And, of course, my wife Sam – and she’ll hate me for saying this – amongst her many talents she is one of the best fine art bronze sculptors that I’ve ever seen, and she also draws amazing pictures based on sacred geometry. This summer in the church she’ll be making her latest pieces commissioned by various new buildings and public spaces in London. Only trouble is, Ryanair’s goddamned 15kg weight limit.. How the hell are we going to get them back to England?

    I also want over the next few years, mainly through Italian translations with a bit of research on the side, to produce some information in English about the history and geography of the Apuan Alps and the Garfagnana. As there isn’t much of this about, I’ll put it on the Institute web site. Criticism invited and welcome (I only play at translations – you wouldn’t want to hire me professionally). For what it’s worth, see here for what I’m currently working on.

    Finally and before you ask – who the hell said I can name an Institute after myself? Don’t I have to be dead first? The name started off as a joke invented by one of our friends when we were setting it up, and it kind of stuck. Maybe if I fall off a cliff one day while looking for caves it will all seem horribly appropriate.

    Anyway, I’ve gone on too long. If anybody got this far let’s finish this with a couple of questions:

    (1) I realize this must sound really dumb to all the local speleological chaps, but has anyone got any idea where this damned cave is?

    (2) I have at least two large groups of quantum physicists and a bunch of Cambridge University politics students coming to the Institute in the summer and we need to entertain them. I’m looking for challenging fun activities which might just do that. See Things to do in Vallico Sotto on our web site for my suggestions so far. I’d love to hear from anyone with any similar ideas.

    That’s it for now.