WITH an “Evening of Bagpipes and Polenta” (boiled cornmeal, popular in north and central Italy), the mountain town of Barga will on September 3rd launch one of Italy’s more unusual cultural festivals: its annual Scottish Week. This year it features the presentation of a book in Italian on Scottish football and another in English on Barga cathedral (though it has a population of barely 10,000, Barga is officially a city).

The weeklong festival celebrates an unlikely two-way traffic in people, tastes and ideas between this walled, medieval Tuscan town and faraway Scotland. Particularly in summer, when emigrant families come to renew their links, you are as likely to hear Glaswegian-accented English in Barga as Tuscan-inflected Italian. Blue-and-white Scottish flags abound. And to meet the needs of those who return to Barga to retire, there is a bakery offering porridge oats, shortbread from Aberdeenshire and Irn-Bru, a uniquely Scottish beverage. Earlier this month Barga held a sagra: an event at which local people cook local delicacies for visitors. Barga’s was devoted to pesce e patate, or fish and chips.

The origins of the relationship go back to the unification of Italy. For more than five centuries, Barga had been an exclave of, first, the Republic of Florence and later the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, encircled by a hostile Duchy of Lucca. To enable it to survive, the authorities in Florence granted it generous tax exemptions. When Italy was united in 1861, they were abolished, the economy collapsed and large-scale emigration ensued. Luca Galeotti, editor of the Giornale di Barga, says that by the 1960s, more than half his newspaper’s subscribers were living abroad. Most were in Scotland and many were making their living frying fish.

One of two mysteries surrounding the barghigiani is why so many of those who emigrated from the city went to Scotland to improve their lives and, in some cases, achieve distinction. The Archbishop emeritus of Glasgow, Mario Conti, is descended from barghigiani, as is Paolo Nutini, an internationally successful singer-songwriter whose grandfather, Giovanni “Jackie” Nutini, ran a renowned fish-and-chip establishment in Paisley. That points to the second mystery: how come these mountain folk proved so adept at cooking fish? “Well,” ventures Barga’s mayor, Marco Bonini, “it was certainly better than working in the mines.”