Read Online The Stones of Florence by Mary McCarthy - Free Book Online Page B

Saracens in the expedition against the Balearic Islands, but the Pisans, before turning them over to the Florentines, had passed them through a furnace which destroyed their lustre and their enchantment. Over the door of Santi Apostoli, the church of the Apostles, in the tiny Piazza del Limbo, where unbaptized infants were buried, there is a Latin inscription saying that the church was built by Charlemagne and consecrated by Archbishop Turpin, with Roland and Oliver as witnesses. This little church, where La Pira distributes bread to the poor on Sundays, possesses some chips of stone believed to have been brought back from the Holy Sepulchre by a certain Pazzino de’ Pazzi, who was the first to scale the wall of Jerusalem on the First Crusade; on Holy Saturday, the chips are carried to the Baptistery, where a spark struck from them lights the Easter Fire, which is carried in procession to the Duomo. At the intoning of the ‘Gloria’ at high mass in the Duomo, a mechanical dove with a fuse in it is lit in the apse with the sacred fire and sent out on an iron wire to the Carro, or Florentine war chariot, loaded with fireworks outside; if the dove makes a safe journey and explodes the fireworks, the harvest that year will be good. In such legends and rituals, the Florentine country heritage is evident. The archetypal model of the early Florentine churches, contrasting with the luxury of Pisa, Lucca, Venice, Siena, was perhaps the stable of Bethlehem— before the coming of the Kings. A still more rustic version of the Easter dove ceremony used to take place at Empoli, where the women today sit in their doorways weaving straw novelties for the Florentine Mercato Nuovo; out of the window of the principal church (which is faced with green-and-white marbles in the Florentine geometric patterns), a life-size mechanical donkey was sent shuttling down to the square; the last of these animals is preserved in the little Empoli museum.
    In general, the towns with the striped Pisan architecture were Ghibelline, like Pisa itself, which enjoyed the special favour of the Emperor on account of its navy, and the towns with the geometric patterns were Guelph, like Florence, Fiesole, and Empoli. An exception must be made for Lucca and another for Prato, a Guelph town long under Ghibelline domination. But whatever the style, Florentine or Pisan or Pisan-Lucchese, bichromatism was prevalent throughout Tuscany in the Romanesque period, and the blacks and whites, sun and shadow, sharps and flats, recurring on the old church fronts, evoke what has been called the checkerboard of Tuscan medieval politics, the alternation of Guelph and Ghibelline, Pope and Emperor, Black and White. These were the terms, the severe basic antinomies, in which the Tuscans thought and saw. The last of the geometric church façades, and one of the most beautiful, was completed by Leon Battista Alberti, the exponent of classicism in the Renaissance: this was for Santa Maria Novella, the Dominican preaching church of Florence.
    Lucca was predominantly a Guelph city; Pisa, its natural enemy, was Ghibelline. Prato was Guelph; Pistoia, a few miles off, was Ghibelline. Florence was Guelph; Siena, Ghibelline. Each black square on the board had a white square adjoining it in sharp political contrast. The colours sometimes changed; if Pisa briefly became Guelph, Lucca briefly became Ghibelline. The nearest and most powerful neighbour was the ‘natural’ enemy. Each city, moreover, had within it a faction of the other side. The Florentine Ghibellines, led by the old noble families, supporters of the Emperor, were allied with Siena, and the Sienese Guelphs, merchants and citizens, with Florence.
    The policy of the victorious faction, once it had seized the government of a city, was to burn the houses and towers of the defeated faction and drive their owners into exile, and Italy was full of these fuorusciti, scheming and planning, as exiles do, to come home. The fuorusciti, ready