Read Online The Stones of Florence by Mary McCarthy - Free Book Online
Authors: Mary McCarthy
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Donati, the leader of the Florentine Blacks, was described by Dino Compagni in his early fourteenth-century ‘Chronicle’ as a man who resembled Catiline except that he was more cruel. Like Catiline, he was ‘gentle in blood, polished in manners, beautiful in person, of pleasing intellect, and a mind ever intent on evil’. The people called him ‘the Baron’ because of his excessive pride.
The word ‘pistol’ means literally ‘Pistoian’; before the days of firearms, a pistole was a dagger, called after Pistoia, either, says one authority, because daggers were made there or because they were used there so commonly. The first pistols were made there in the sixteenth century. There are still many forges in Pistoia which give off a smell of hot iron. Of all the towns in Tuscany, it is Pistoia that most recalls the dark passages in medieval history. The old civic buildings are made of an iron-grey stone— pietra bigia pistoiese. Fastened to the front of Palazzo del Comune or Town Hall, in the main square, is an ominous head in black marble, with an iron mace or club above it, which the Pistoians say is the head of a traitor who betrayed the town to the Luccans. Scholars think that it is really a likeness of Musetto, the Moorish king of Majorca, who was conquered by a Pistoiese captain in the expedition against the Balearic Islands, led by the Pisans during the twelfth century. Some keys on the building are the papal emblem, put up to honour Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici, the son of Lorenzo), but the local people say that these are the keys of the city that the traitor gave away.
Across the square is the Palace of the Podestà or foreign governor, an office once held by Giano della Bella, the Florentine Gracchus; in its lofty grey porticoed court are a long stone table of justice, a long stone judges’ bench, and, opposite, the bench of the accused. The court that sat here, half in the open air, judging and receiving denunciations, was noted, even in Tuscany, for its iron severity, particularly during the period of the democracy, towards the beginning of the fourteenth century. The democrats, true Catilinarians, detested the nobility, who were deprived of all civic rights and reduced to a state worse than that of felons; if a commoner committed a crime in Pistoia, he was punished by being ennobled. Even in the full Renaissance, Pistoia was regarded by its neighbours as a fated and fateful place. Michelangelo wrote a sonnet against it; Machiavelli described a family called the Palandra, ‘which, though rustic, was very numerous, and like the rest of the Pistolesi, brought up to slaughter and war’. It was even believed that the Guelph—Ghibelline factions took their names from two rival brothers of Pistoia, called Guelph and Gibel.
To those who know its history, however, the most striking fact about Pistoia is that so much of it is, literally, black and white. The wealth of Pistoia was lavished on a series of Romanesque churches and a tall octagonal Baptistery which are faced in horizontal courses of black-and-white marble; the profusion of these churches, the black Moors’ heads (there is another mortised into the striped façade of Sant’ Andrea), the iron club, the dread grey of the civic halls, give the city a strange formidable appearance, at once luxurious and sectarian.
The style of dressing sacred buildings in horizontal stripes of alternating black and white came from Pisa, the mariner-city on the coast, whose sailors had fought the Saracens in Spain, defeated the Emir of Egypt, and gone on crusades; wherever the Pisan influence reached in Tuscany, the black-and-white stripes appear and, with them, a suggestion of the Orient, like the markings of an exotic beast. You find the gleaming stripes in rosy Siena, on the ferocious, tense Cathedral that sits in the Piazza exactly like a tiger poised to spring; you find them in Lucca, the silk town, where the Pisan style was enriched with decorative reliefs,
The word ‘pistol’ means literally ‘Pistoian’; before the days of firearms, a pistole was a dagger, called after Pistoia, either, says one authority, because daggers were made there or because they were used there so commonly. The first pistols were made there in the sixteenth century. There are still many forges in Pistoia which give off a smell of hot iron. Of all the towns in Tuscany, it is Pistoia that most recalls the dark passages in medieval history. The old civic buildings are made of an iron-grey stone— pietra bigia pistoiese. Fastened to the front of Palazzo del Comune or Town Hall, in the main square, is an ominous head in black marble, with an iron mace or club above it, which the Pistoians say is the head of a traitor who betrayed the town to the Luccans. Scholars think that it is really a likeness of Musetto, the Moorish king of Majorca, who was conquered by a Pistoiese captain in the expedition against the Balearic Islands, led by the Pisans during the twelfth century. Some keys on the building are the papal emblem, put up to honour Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici, the son of Lorenzo), but the local people say that these are the keys of the city that the traitor gave away.
Across the square is the Palace of the Podestà or foreign governor, an office once held by Giano della Bella, the Florentine Gracchus; in its lofty grey porticoed court are a long stone table of justice, a long stone judges’ bench, and, opposite, the bench of the accused. The court that sat here, half in the open air, judging and receiving denunciations, was noted, even in Tuscany, for its iron severity, particularly during the period of the democracy, towards the beginning of the fourteenth century. The democrats, true Catilinarians, detested the nobility, who were deprived of all civic rights and reduced to a state worse than that of felons; if a commoner committed a crime in Pistoia, he was punished by being ennobled. Even in the full Renaissance, Pistoia was regarded by its neighbours as a fated and fateful place. Michelangelo wrote a sonnet against it; Machiavelli described a family called the Palandra, ‘which, though rustic, was very numerous, and like the rest of the Pistolesi, brought up to slaughter and war’. It was even believed that the Guelph—Ghibelline factions took their names from two rival brothers of Pistoia, called Guelph and Gibel.
To those who know its history, however, the most striking fact about Pistoia is that so much of it is, literally, black and white. The wealth of Pistoia was lavished on a series of Romanesque churches and a tall octagonal Baptistery which are faced in horizontal courses of black-and-white marble; the profusion of these churches, the black Moors’ heads (there is another mortised into the striped façade of Sant’ Andrea), the iron club, the dread grey of the civic halls, give the city a strange formidable appearance, at once luxurious and sectarian.
The style of dressing sacred buildings in horizontal stripes of alternating black and white came from Pisa, the mariner-city on the coast, whose sailors had fought the Saracens in Spain, defeated the Emir of Egypt, and gone on crusades; wherever the Pisan influence reached in Tuscany, the black-and-white stripes appear and, with them, a suggestion of the Orient, like the markings of an exotic beast. You find the gleaming stripes in rosy Siena, on the ferocious, tense Cathedral that sits in the Piazza exactly like a tiger poised to spring; you find them in Lucca, the silk town, where the Pisan style was enriched with decorative reliefs,
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