I’m sitting in a charming square in idyllic Sarzana, Italy, sipping a coffee and watching the town come alive at 11:00 am.  What last night was an open square lined with sidewalk cafes has transformed into an open air market with offerings of shoes, clothes, and jewelry.  Folks are chatting and laughing, but, as best I can tell, the buying has not yet begun.  Perhaps the vendors are awaiting the tourists.

And, tourists there will be later today, though they’ll most likely be shopping for guitars.  The fifteenth annual Acoustic Guitar Meeting gets underway at 7:00 pm and I’ve just finished wandering the event’s site, La fortezza, or fortress, a structure begun in the 900s and completed in the fourteenth century. It’s an extraordinary venue with a central courtyard for each day’s evening concert and rooms for workshops, guitar displays and smaller performance sites hidden in a maze in the interior of the medieval structure.  While wandering about, I hear the echoes of guitar playing bouncing down the thick-walled corridors and surrounding me in a way that renders it impossible for me to discern the direction from which the sound emanates.  So, I happily wander about until I stumble upon a room filled with guitars.  I feel like Indiana Jones in search of acoustic guitar music.

The town of Sarzana clearly has embraced the Festival.  The large calendar of events posted alongside the arch at the city’s entrance lists the Acoustic Guitar Meeting among summer’s major events.  Posters adorn the windows of shops around town, and huge billboards grace the town squares.

Tonight’s concert will be feature music from around the globe:  Don Ross of Canada, Kiko Loureiro of Brazil, and Franco Morone and Lorenzo Favero of Italy.  I’m eagerly anticipating a concert under the stars in the medieval courtyard.  But, until then, I’ll happily sit here and sip my coffee while watching Sarzana go by on these beautiful, old cobble stone streets.