The Monster of Florence (18 page)
The Story of Douglas Preston
O
n November 4, 1966, after forty days of rain, the Arno River burst its banks and laid waste to Florence, one of the most extraordinary cities in the world.
This was no gentle rise of water. The river flash-flooded; it boiled over the Lungarni embankments and tore through the streets of Florence at thirty miles an hour, carrying along tree trunks, smashed cars, and dead cattle. Ghiberti’s great bronze doors to the Baptistery were bashed down and knocked to pieces; the Cimabue Crucifix, possibly the greatest example of medieval art in Italy, was reduced to a mound of sodden plaster; Michelangelo’s David was fouled to his buttocks with fuel oil. Tens of thousands of illuminated manuscripts and incunabula in the Biblioteca Nazionale were buried under muck. Hundreds of old master paintings stored in the basement of the Uffizi Gallery flaked apart, leaving layers of paint chips in the mud.
The world watched with horror as the waters receded, leaving the birthplace of the Renaissance a wasteland of ooze and debris, its art treasures devastated. Thousands of volunteers—students, professors, artists, and art historians—converged from all over the world to undertake an emergency salvage effort. They lived and worked in a city without heat, water, electricity, food, or services. After a week some rescuers had to don gas masks to protect themselves from the toxic fumes being released by rotting books and paintings.
They called the volunteers the Angeli del Fango, the “Mud Angels.”
I had long wanted to write a murder mystery set at the time of the Florentine flood. The novel, entitled
The Christmas Madonna
, involved an art historian who rushes to Florence to volunteer as a Mud Angel. He is an authority on the mysterious artist Masaccio, the young genius who single-handedly launched the Italian Renaissance with his extraordinary frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, and who then died abruptly, at twenty-six, amid rumors that he had been poisoned. My character goes to work as a volunteer in the basement of the Biblioteca Nazionale, pulling books and manuscripts out of the mire. One day he discovers an extraordinary document, which contains a clue to the whereabouts of a famous lost painting by Masaccio. Called
The Christmas Madonna
, the painting was the central panel in a triptych described vividly by Vasari in the 1600s, which had subsequently disappeared. It is considered to be one of the most important lost paintings of the Renaissance.
My art historian abandons his volunteer work and sets off on a mad search for the painting. He vanishes. A few days later they find his body high in the Pratomagno Mountains, dumped by the side of the road. His eyes have been gouged out.
The murder is never solved and the painting is never found. Now, thirty-five years later, we fast-forward to the present day. His son, a successful artist in New York, hits a midlife crisis. He realizes there is something he must do: solve the murder of his father. The way to do it is to find the lost painting. So he flies to Florence and begins his search—a journey that will take him from crumbling archives to Etruscan tombs and finally to a ruined village high into the Pratomagno Mountains, where a horrifying secret lies buried, and where an even more terrifying destiny awaits him . . .
This was the novel I came to Italy to write. I never did. Instead, I got sidetracked by the Monster of Florence.
Living in Italy was going to be the adventure of a lifetime, for which we were singularly unprepared. None of us spoke Italian. I had spent a few days in Florence the previous year, but my wife, Christine, had never been to Italy in her life. Our children, on the other hand, were at that age of delightful flexibility in which they seemed to meet even the most extraordinary life challenges with a cheerful nonchalance. Nothing in life was out of the ordinary to them, since they hadn’t learned what was ordinary to begin with. When the time came, they boarded the plane with complete insouciance. We were a nervous wreck.
We arrived in Florence in August 2000: myself, Christine, and our two children, Aletheia and Isaac, who were six and five. We enrolled our children in local Italian schools, Aletheia in first grade and Isaac in kindergarten, and we ourselves began taking language classes.
Our transition to Italy was not without its challenges. Aletheia’s teacher reported that it was a joy to have such a happy child in class who sang all day long, and she wondered just what it was she was singing. We soon learned:
I don’t understand anything she’s saying,
She talks and talks all day long,
But I can’t understand a word . . .
Cultural differences quickly reared up. A few days after Isaac went off to kindergarten, he came back, wide-eyed, and told how the teacher smoked cigarettes during recess and tossed the butts on the playground— and then she spanked (spanked!) a four-year-old who tried to smoke one of them. Isaac called her “the Yelling Lizard.” We quickly transferred him and his sister to a private school run by nuns on the other side of town. Nuns, we hoped, wouldn’t smoke or spank. We were correct, at least on the former assumption, and came to accept the occasional spanking as a cultural difference we had to live with, along with smokers in restaurants, death-defying drivers, and waiting in line at the post office to pay bills. The school was located in a magnificent eighteenth-century villa hidden behind massive stone walls, which the sisters of the order of San Giovanni Battista had turned into a convent. The schoolchildren took recess in a two-acre formal Italian garden, with cypress trees, clipped hedges, flowerbeds, fountains, and marble statues of naked women. The gardener and the children were constantly at war. Nobody at the school, not even the English teacher, spoke English.
The
direttrice
of the school was a stern, beady-eyed nun who needed only to fix her withering glare on someone, student or parent, to reduce the person to abject terror. She took us aside one day to advise us that our son was
un monello
. We thanked her for the compliment and rushed home to look up the word. It meant “rascal.” After that we brought a pocket dictionary to parent-teacher meetings.
As we hoped, our kids began to learn Italian. One day Isaac sat down to dinner, looked at the plate of pasta we’d prepared, made a face, and said, “
Che schifo
!” a vulgar expression meaning “Gross!” We were so proud. By Christmas they were speaking in full sentences, and by the end of the school year their Italian was so good they began making fun of our own. When we had Italian guests for dinner, Aletheia would sometimes march around the room, swinging her arms and bawling an imitation of our atrocious American accent, “How do you do, Mr. and Mrs. Coccolini! What a pleasure it is to meet you! Won’t you please come in, accommodate yourselves, and enjoy a glass of wine with us!” Our Italian guests would be helpless with laughter.
And so we adjusted to our new life in Italy. Florence and its surrounding villages turned out to be a delightfully small place, where everyone seemed to know everyone else. Life was more about the process of living than reaching some end result. Instead of a once-a-week, efficient trip to the supermarket, shopping became a shockingly inefficient but charming routine of visiting a dozen or more shops and vendors, each of which sold a single product. This meant exchanging news, discussing the quality of the various choices, and listening to how the shopkeeper’s grandmother prepared and served the item under discussion, which was the only way to do it despite what anyone might say to the contrary. Never were you allowed to touch the food being purchased; it was a breach of etiquette to test the ripeness of a plum or place an onion yourself in your shopping bag. For us, shopping was an excellent Italian lesson, but one fraught with danger. Christine made an indelible impression on the handsome
fruttivendolo
(fruit seller) when she asked for ripe
pesce
and
fighe
instead of
pesche
and
fichi
(fish and pussy instead of peaches and figs). It took many months before we felt even a little bit Florentine, although we quickly learned, like all good Florentines, to look with scorn on the tourists who wandered about the city, gaping and slack-jawed, in floppy hats, khaki shorts, and marshmallow athletic shoes, with giant water bottles strapped around their waists as if they were crossing the Sahara Desert.
Life in Italy was a strange mixture of the quotidian and the sublime. Driving the children to school in the morning in the dead of winter, bleary-eyed, I would come over the hill of Giogoli—and there, rising magically from the dawn mists, would be the cloisters and towers of the great medieval monastery of La Certosa. Sometimes, wandering about the cobbled streets of Florence, on a whim I would duck into the Brancacci Chapel and spend five minutes looking at the frescoes that launched the Renaissance, or I would take a turn through the Badia Fiorentina at Vespers to listen to Gregorian chants in the same church where young Dante gazed on his love, Beatrice.
We soon learned about the Italian concept of the
fregatura
, indispensable for anyone living in Italy. A fregatura is doing something in a way that is not exactly legal, not exactly honest, but just this side of egregious. It is a way of life in Italy. We had our first lesson in the fine art of the fregatura when we reserved tickets to see Verdi’s
Il Trovatore
at the local opera house. When we got there, the box office informed us they could find no record of our tickets, despite our presentation of the reservation number. There was nothing they could do—the opera was completely and totally sold out. The large crowd seething in front of the box office attested to the truth of that.
As we were leaving, we ran into a shopkeeper from our neighborhood decked out in a mink coat and diamonds, looking more like a countess than the owner of Il Cantuccio, the tiny shop where we bought biscotti.
“What? Sold out?” she cried.
We told her what had happened.
“Bah,” she said, “they gave your tickets to someone else, someone important. We’ll fix them.”
“Do you know somebody?”
“I know nobody. But I
do
know how things work in this town. Wait here, I’ll be back in a moment.” She marched off while we waited. Five minutes later, she reappeared with a flustered man in tow, the manager of the opera house himself. He rushed over and took my hand. “I am so,
so
sorry, Mr. Harris!” he cried out. “We didn’t know you were in the house! No one told us! Please accept my apologies for the mix-up with the tickets!”
Mr. Harris
?
“Mr. Harris,” said the shopkeeper grandly, “prefers to travel quietly, without a large entourage.”
“Naturally!” the manager cried. “Of course!”
I stared dumbfounded. The shopkeeper shot me a warning glance that said,
I got you this far, don’t blow it.
“We had a few tickets in reserve,” the manager went on, “and I do hope that you will accept them as compensation, compliments of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino!” He produced a pair of tickets.
Christine recovered her presence of mind before I did. “How very kind of you.” She swiped the tickets from the man’s hand, hooked her arm firmly into mine, and said, “Come on,
Tom
.”
“Yes, of course,” I mumbled, mortified at the deception. “Most kind. And the cost . . . ?”
“
Niente, niente
! The pleasure is ours, Mr. Harris! And may I just say that
The Silence of the Lambs
was one of the finest—one of
the finest
—movies I have ever seen. All of Florence is awaiting the release of
Hannibal
.”
Front-center box seats, the finest in the house.
It was a short trip by bicycle or car from our Giogoli farmhouse into Florence through the Porta Romana, the southern entrance to the old city. The Porta Romana opened into a warren of crooked streets and medieval houses that make up the Oltrarno, the most unspoiled part of the old city. As I explored, I often saw a curious figure taking her afternoon
passeggiata
through the narrow medieval streets. She was a tiny ancient woman, sticklike, dressed to the hilt in furs and diamonds, her face rouged, lips coral red, an old-fashioned little hat with netted pearls perched on her diminutive head, walking with assurance in high-heeled shoes over the treacherous cobblestones, looking neither to the right nor left, and acknowledging acquaintances with an almost imperceptible movement of her eyes. I learned she was the Marchesa Frescobaldi, from an ancient Florentine family that owned half the Oltrarno and much of Tuscany besides, a family that had financed the Crusades and given the world a great composer.
Christine often jogged though the city’s crooked medieval streets, and one day she stopped to admire one of the grandest palaces in Florence, the Palazzo Capponi, owned by the other great family of the Oltrarno district—and indeed one of the leading noble families of Italy. The palace’s rust-red neoclassical façade stretches for hundreds of feet along the banks of the Arno, while its grim, stone-faced, medieval backside runs along the sunken Via de’ Bardi, the Street of the Poets. As she was gawking at the grand
portone
of the palazzo, a British woman came out and struck up a conversation with her. The woman worked for the Capponi family, she said, and after hearing about the book I was trying to write about Masaccio, she gave Christine her card and said we should call upon Count Niccolò Capponi, who was an expert in Florentine history. “He’s quite approachable, you know,” she said.
Christine brought back the card and gave it to me. I put it away, thinking there was no chance I would make a cold call on Florence’s most famous and intimidating noble family, no matter how approachable.
The rambling farmhouse we occupied in Giogoli stood high on the side of a hill, shaded by cypresses and umbrella pines. I turned a back bedroom into a writing studio, where I intended to write my novel. A single window looked past three cypress trees and over the red-tiled roofs of a neighbor’s house to the green hills of Tuscany beyond.