The Monster of Florence (4 page)
There was more. Spalletti insisted that he had immediately returned home after greeting Fabbri. But his wife said that when she went to bed at two o’clock in the morning her husband had still not come back.
The interrogators turned back to Spalletti: where had he been between midnight and at least 2 a.m.? Spalletti had no answer.
The police locked Spalletti up at the famous Florentine prison of Le Murate (“The Immured Ones”), accusing him of
reticenza
, reticence—a form of perjury. The authorities still did not yet believe he was the killer, but they were sure he was withholding important information. A few days in jail might just shake it out.
Forensic crime scene investigators went over Spalletti’s car and house with a fine-toothed comb. They found a penknife in his car and in the glove compartment a type of gun called a
scacciacani
, a “dog flattener,” a cheap pistol loaded with blanks for scaring off dogs, which Spalletti had bought through an ad on the back of a porn magazine. There were no traces of blood.
They interrogated Spalletti’s wife. She was much younger than her husband, a fat, honest, simple country girl, and she admitted that she knew her husband was a Peeping Tom. “Many times,” she said, weeping, “he promised me he’d stop, but then he’d get back into it. And it’s true that the night of June 6 he went out to ‘have a look,’ as he used to call it.” She had no idea when her husband had returned, except that it was after two. She went on, protesting that her husband had to be innocent, that he could never have committed such a terrible crime, since “he’s got a terror of blood, so much so that at work, when there’s been a highway accident, he refuses to get out of the ambulance.”
In the middle of July, policed finally charged Spalletti with being the killer.
Having first broken the original story, Spezi continued to cover it for
La Nazione
. His articles for the paper were skeptical and they pointed out the many holes in the case against Spalletti, among them the fact that there was no direct evidence connecting him with the crime. Nor did Spalletti have any connection to Borgo San Lorenzo, where the first killing occurred in 1974.
On October 24, 1981, Spalletti opened the paper in his prison cell and read a headline that must have brought him great relief:
THE KILLER RETURNS
Young Couple Found Brutally Murdered in Farmer’s Field
By killing again, the Monster himself had proved the innocence of the Peeping Tom ambulance driver.
M
any countries have a serial killer who defines his culture by a process of negation, who exemplifies his era not by exalting its values, but by exposing its black underbelly. England had Jack the Ripper, born in the fogs of Dickensian London, who preyed on the city’s most neglected underclass, the prostitutes who scrabbled for a living in the slums of Whitechapel. Boston had the Boston Strangler, the suave, handsome killer who prowled the city’s more elegant neighborhoods, raping and murdering elderly women and arranging their bodies in tableaux of unspeakable obscenity. Germany had the Monster of Düsseldorf, who seemed to foreshadow the coming of Hitler by his indiscriminate and sadistic killing of men, women, and children; his bloodlust was so great that, on the eve of his execution, he called his imminent beheading “the pleasure to end all pleasures.” Each killer was, in his own way, a dark embodiment of his time and place.
Italy had the Monster of Florence.
Florence has always been a city of opposites. On a balmy spring evening, with the setting sun gilding the stately palaces lining the river, it can appear as one of the most beautiful and gracious cities in the world. But in late November, after two months of steady rain, its ancient palaces become gray and streaked with damp; the narrow cobbled streets, smelling of sewer gas and dog feces, are shut up on all sides by grim stone façades and overhanging roofs that block the already dim light. The bridges over the Arno flow with black umbrellas held up against the unceasing rain. The river, so lovely in summer, swells into a brown and oily flood, carrying broken trees and branches and sometimes dead animals, which pile up against the pylons designed by Ammanati.
In Florence the sublime and terrible go hand in hand: Savonarola’s Bonfires of the Vanities and Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus
, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and Niccolò Macchiavelli’s
The Prince
, Dante’s
Inferno
and Boccaccio’s
Decameron
. The Piazza della Signoria, the main square, contains an open-air display of Roman and Renaissance sculpture exhibiting some of the most famous statues in Florence. It is a gallery of horrors, a public exhibition of killing, rape, and mutilation unmatched in any city in the world. Heading the show is the famous bronze sculpture by Cellini of Perseus triumphantly holding up the severed head of Medusa like a jihadist on a website video, blood pouring from her neck, her decapitated body sprawled under his feet. Behind Perseus stand other statues depicting famous legendary scenes of murder, violence, and mayhem—among them the sculpture that graces the cover of this book,
The Rape of the Sabine Women
by Giambologna. Inside Florence’s encircling walls and on the gibbets outside were committed the most refined and the most savage of crimes, from delicate poisonings to brutal public dismemberments, tortures, and burnings. For centuries, Florence projected its power over the rest of Tuscany at the cost of ferocious massacres and bloody wars.
The city was founded by Julius Caesar in AD 59 as a retirement village for soldiers from his campaigns. It was named Florentia, or “Flourishing.” Around AD 250 an Armenian prince named Miniato, after a pilgrimage to Rome, settled on a hill outside Florence and lived as a hermit in a cave, from which he sallied forth to preach to the pagans in town. During the Christian persecutions under the emperor Decius, Miniato was arrested and beheaded in the city square, whereupon (the legend goes) he picked up his head, placed it back on his shoulders, and walked up the hill to die with dignity in his cave. Today, one of the loveliest Romanesque churches in all of Italy stands at the spot, San Miniato al Monte, looking out across the city and the hills beyond.
In 1302, Florence expelled Dante, an act it has never lived down. In return, Dante populated hell with prominent Florentines and reserved some of the most exquisite tortures for them.
During the fourteenth century, Florence grew rich in the woolen cloth trade and banking, and by the end of the century it was one of the five largest cities in Europe. As the fifteenth century dawned, Florence hosted one of those inexplicable flowerings of genius that have occurred fewer than half a dozen times in human history. It would later be called the Renaissance, the “rebirth,” following the long darkness of the Middle Ages. Between the birth of Masaccio in 1401 and the death of Galileo in 1642, Florentines largely invented the modern world. They revolutionized art, architecture, music, astronomy, mathematics, and navigation. They created the modern banking system with the invention of the letter of credit. The gold florin, with the Florentine lily on one side and John the Baptist wearing a hairshirt on the other, became the coin of Europe. This landlocked city on an unnavigable river produced brilliant navigators who explored and mapped the New World, and one even gave America its name.
More than that, Florence invented the very
idea
of the modern world. With the Renaissance, Florentines threw off the yoke of medievalism, in which God stood at the center of the universe and human existence on earth was but a dark, fleeting passage to the glorious life to come. The Renaissance placed humanity at the center of the universe and declared this life as the main event. The course of Western civilization was changed forever.
The Florentine Renaissance was largely financed by a single family, the Medicis. They first came to prominence in 1434 under the leadership of Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, a Florentine banker of great wealth. The Medicis ruled the city from behind the scenes, with a clever system of patronage, alliances, and influence. Although a mercantile family, from the very beginning they poured money into the arts. Giovanni’s great-grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent, was the very epitome of the term “Renaissance man.” As a boy, Lorenzo had been astonishingly gifted, and he was given the finest education money could buy, becoming an accomplished jouster, hawker, hunter, and racehorse breeder. Early portraits of Lorenzo il Magnifico reveal an intense young man with furrowed brows, a big, Nixonesque nose, and straight hair. He assumed leadership of the city in 1469, on the death of his father, when he was only twenty years old. He gathered around him such men as Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, Michelangelo, and the philosopher Pico della Mirandola.
Lorenzo ushered Florence into a golden age. But even at the height of the Renaissance, beauty mingled with blood, civilization with savagery, in this city of paradox and contradiction. In 1478 a rival banking family, the Pazzis, attempted a coup d’état against Medici rule. The name Pazzi means, literally, “Madmen,” and it was given to an ancestor to honor his insane courage in being one of the first soldiers over the walls of Jerusalem during the First Crusade. The Pazzis had the distinction of seeing two of their members cast into hell by Dante, who gave one a “doggish grin.”
On a quiet Sunday in April, a gang of Pazzi murderers set upon Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano at their most vulnerable moment, during the Elevation of the Host at Mass in the Duomo. They killed Giuliano, but Lorenzo, stabbed several times, managed to escape and lock himself in the sacristy. Florentines were enraged at this attack on their patron family and, in a howling mob, went after the conspirators. One of the leaders, Jacopo de’ Pazzi, was hanged from a window of the Palazzo Vecchio, his body then stripped, dragged through the streets, and tossed in the Arno River. Despite this setback, the Pazzi family survived, not long afterward giving the world the famed ecstatic nun Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, who amazed witnesses with her gasping, moaning transports when seized by the love of God during prayer. A fictional Pazzi appeared in the twentieth century, when the writer Thomas Harris made one of his main characters in the novel
Hannibal
a Pazzi, a Florentine police inspector who gains fame and notoriety by solving the case of the Monster of Florence.
The death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, in 1492, at the height of the Renaissance, ushered in one of those bloody periods that marked Florentine history. A Dominican monk by the name of Savonarola, who lived in the monastery of San Marco, consoled Lorenzo on his deathbed, only later to turn and preach against the Medici family. Savonarola was a strange-looking man, hooded in brown monk’s robes, magnetic, coarse, ungainly, and muscular, with a hook nose and Rasputin-like eyes. In the San Marco church he began to preach fire and brimstone, railing against the decadence of the Renaissance, proclaiming that the Last Days had come, and recounting his visions and his direct conversations with God.
His message resonated among common Florentines, who had watched with disapproval the conspicuous consumption and great wealth of the Renaissance and its patrons, much of which seemed to have bypassed them. Their discontent was magnified by an epidemic of syphilis, carried back from the New World, which burned through the city. It was a disease Europe had never seen before, and it came in a far more virulent form than we know today, in which the victim’s body became overspread with weeping pustules, the flesh sagging and falling from the face, the stricken sinking into fulminating insanity before death mercifully carried them off. The year 1500 was approaching, which seemed to some a nice round figure marking the arrival of the Last Days. In this climate Savonarola found a receptive audience.
In 1494, Charles VIII of France invaded Tuscany. Piero the Unfortunate, who had inherited the rule of Florence from his father, Lorenzo, was an arrogant and ineffective ruler. He surrendered the city to Charles on poor terms, without even putting up a decent fight, which so enraged Florentines that they drove out the Medici family and looted their palaces. Savonarola, who had accumulated a large following, stepped into the power vacuum and declared Florence a “Christian Republic,” setting himself up as its leader. He immediately made sodomy, a popular and more or less socially acceptable activity among sophisticated Florentines, punishable by death. Transgressors and others were regularly burned in the central Piazza della Signoria or hanged outside the city gates.
The mad monk of San Marco had free reign to stir up religious fervor among the common people in the city. He railed against the decadence, excess, and humanistic spirit of the Renaissance. A few years into his reign, he instigated his famous Bonfires of the Vanities. He sent his minions around door to door, collecting items he thought were sinful—mirrors, pagan books, cosmetics, secular music and musical instruments, chessboards, cards, fine clothes, and secular paintings. Everything was heaped up in the Piazza della Signoria and set afire. The artist Botticelli, who fell under the sway of Savonarola, added many of his own paintings to the bonfire, and several of Michelangelo’s works may also have been torched, along with other priceless Renaissance masterpieces.
Under Savonarola’s rule, Florence sank into economic decline. The Last Days he kept preaching never came. Instead of blessing the city for its newfound religiosity, God seemed to have abandoned it. The common people, especially the young and shiftless, began openly defying his edicts. In 1497, a mob of young men rioted during one of Savonarola’s sermons; the riots spread and became a general revolt, taverns reopened, gambling resumed, and dancing and music could once again be heard echoing down Florence’s crooked streets.
Savonarola, his control slipping, preached ever more wild and condemnatory sermons, and he made the fatal mistake of turning his criticisms on the church itself. The pope excommunicated him and ordered him arrested and executed. An obliging mob attacked the San Marco monastery, broke down the doors, killed some of Savonarola’s fellow monks, and dragged him out. He was charged with a slew of crimes, among them “religious error.” After being tortured on the rack for several weeks, he was hung in chains from a cross in the Piazza della Signoria, at the same place where he had erected his Bonfires of the Vanities, and burned. For hours the fire was fed, and then his remains were chopped up and remixed with burning brush several times over so that no piece of him could survive to be made into a relic for veneration. His ashes were then dumped in the all-embracing, all-erasing Arno River.
The Renaissance resumed. The blood and beauty of Florence continued. But nothing lasts forever, and over the centuries Florence gradually lost its place among the leading cities of Europe. It subsided into a relative backwater, famous for its past but invisible in the present, as other cities in Italy rose to prominence, notably Rome, Naples, and Milan.
Florentines today are a famously closed people, considered by other Italians to be stiff, haughty, class-conscious, excessively formal, backward-looking, and fossilized by tradition. They are sober, punctual, and hardworking. Deep inside, Florentines know they are more civilized than other Italians. They gave the world all that is fine and beautiful and they have done enough. Now they can shut their doors and turn inward, answerable to nobody.
When the Monster of Florence arrived, Florentines faced the killings with disbelief, anguish, terror, and a kind of sick fascination. They simply could not accept that their exquisitely beautiful city, the physical expression of the Renaissance, the very cradle of Western civilization, could harbor such a monster.
Most of all, they could not accept the idea that the killer might be one of them.