by Timothy Egan
A mob lit the Bonfire of the Vanities on February 7, 1497, in the Piazza della Signoria, the living room of Florence. The flames rose to sixty-five feet, a pyre consuming all the prideful objects that had been confiscated by Savonarola’s brutes. From there, things got colder and crueler. The chill of winter lingered late into spring. Crops were thin, money disappeared from a city that had grown wealthy on free trade. Famine followed. The wicked pope excommunicated the entire city. The next year was so frigid that the River Arno froze, a crumbled ribbon of ice beneath the Ponte Vecchio. New mobs, formed in opposition to the monk, were known as the arrabbiati—hot and passionate, a name later attached to a spiced pasta. The accused turned on the accuser. How could a City of God be starving and freezing? Savonarola and his disciples in terror were arrested, thrown into a dungeon. They were tortured by rack, branding irons, and the strappado, a Florentine specialty—the hands of a victim tied behind the back, then the body strung up, snapping the shoulders. A court found him guilty of heresy, charlatanism, false prophecy. He was hanged, his body burned, and the ashes swept into the Arno. There would be no relics. Thus ended a five-year period when Florence was the living image of Bad Government.
* * *
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TODAY, BUSES CIRCLE past San Marco and come to a stop at a café across the way from the monastery where Savonarola seethed. After nearly six hundred years of Dominican habitation, the last of San Marco’s aging friars are leaving for good—just like at San Miniato. It’s the end. “We are very few,” said one old cleric, “increasingly fewer.” An adjacent museum will take over operations. A painting of Savonarola’s execution is on the walls inside, and a plaque marks the place where he was arrested in 1498. I used to wait outside the monastery for my bus back to the Chianti country, wondering at times how the tranquil enclosure of San Marco turned a monk into a madman. And then I heard a plausible explanation: Savonarola insisted on living in a cell without any art, not even Fra Angelico’s frescoes. Our home was in the oldest officially designated wine-growing region in the world, dating to 1716, symbolized by the black rooster figure of Chianti Classico. In those hills between Florence and Siena, the gallo nero is now far more ubiquitous than the crucifix. You can see why, if faced with a choice between the dark and violent fundamentalism of Savonarola and the craft of turning sangiovese fruit into wine, people would lose themselves in the grape.
But it’s more difficult to comprehend how someone who starts an honest search for the divine by stripping himself of goods and self-gratification ends up as a violent man, swollen with his own sense of pride and power. Savonarola and Francis of Assisi were not unsimilar. Both practiced self-denial. Both rejected the material gluttony of their spiritual overlords. Both sought a purified Christianity. But Francis was not afraid of poetry; he wrote some of the best verse in Europe. Francis did not turn against music, laughter, and art. He was a troubadour. Francis did not call for the execution of people deemed sinful; he befriended the shunned. The spirit in him had wings. In the dichotomy of these two men is the dichotomy of the Christian faith, one side struggling against the other, an open heart against a fist.
Seven years after the immolation of Florentine vanities, a seventeen-foot marble statue of the most perfect and unclothed human form was unveiled in the Piazza della Signoria. Michelangelo’s David was deliberately placed in the very spot of the bonfire, the square D. H. Lawrence called “the center of the human world.” The eyes of the young man who slayed the giant with his slingshot were cast in the direction of Rome, a clear warning. Not that Florence would ever abandon the Catholic Church. Indeed, the Medici would produce three popes, none of them living up to the first part of the title Holy Father. But sanity prevailed. And perhaps if Florence had something like Siena’s Palio, an annual venting of the sacred and the profane, the city never would have gone insane. At times, history is the best hospice for a troubled time traveler, and this history is somewhat of a palliative, as with the story of Saint Fina in San Gimignano. We are drawn to light.
THIRTY
THE MIRACLE OF MONTEFIASCONE
Onward: to the Roman road connecting Siena to the Caput Mundi. This is it, the last stretch, the Via Cassia joined to the Via Francigena, one of the oldest byways in the world tangled with one of the loveliest. No more time for diversions. No more car, either. I’ve set my bearings to the pilgrim compass. The morning is dark and foreboding, a good day for rain, the Tuscans say. They need it. Some grapes have wrinkled into raisins, and sunflowers are head-down and seedy. The earth is hard, fields the color of cornbread, framed at the horizon by cypress trees in formation, the most faithful of flora. Every hilltop in the Val d’Orcia is topped by a castle or villa, most of them occupied over five centuries or more by a single family, for it’s a social crime to sell land to which your name has long been attached.
Mysticism grows well in the southern sun. From here on, no village is without a shrine to the inexplicable. If England is the reason-based start of this Christian trail, and France the cynical center, Italy is soaked in the supernatural near the finish. I’m in Buonconvento, nineteen miles from Siena, on a Sunday, via the first train at dawn. The name means Happy Place in Latin. It’s hard to tell what the predominant mood is, for Buonconvento is inert today. After a pleasant circumambulation, I walk through Porta Siena, which is eight inches thick with iron fittings—a door built to deflect cannonballs and the flings of catapults. Like San Gimignano, this town prospered because of its prime location on the V.F. And it’s flat, a reprieve from the hills, with a restorative fountain of pure drinking water. Near the church of San Pietro e Paolo is a hostel with a sign welcoming pilgrims. I wish I could stay. But I have to get to Montefiascone, hours away, by day’s end. I’m meeting a woman. I’ve promised her magic, a mystery wine so good it killed a man who could not stop himself from drinking, and the Via Francigena at curtain time—the autumnal glow of the tramonto.
When I dropped the car in Siena, Avis showed some leniency; that is, I’m not in jail. I went in poker-faced, hedging somewhat, trying to frame the thing in the dispassionate, blameless way of fate. There’d been an incidente, signore, which left the car in less than perfect shape. What kind of incidente? Involving other people? Other cars or property? No, just a little hit to the vehicle’s vanity. The clerk spent an hour making phone calls, sending forms back and forth, taking pictures and forwarding those to some unknowable place. At least he didn’t call the Carabinieri. In the end, it was a thousand dollars, even though I’d taken all the insurance. That hurt. Was there a pilgrim discount?
“Pellegrino?”
“Sì, sì.”
“Dove va?”
“A Roma.”
“Bravo, pellegrino.”
“Grazie.”
“Mi dispiace . . . ma senza sconto,” said the clerk, shaking his head and handing me the full bill. Don’t be so hard on yourself, he told me on the way out. There’s not a vehicle in Italy that doesn’t have a dent on it. As I walked back through Siena, I felt vulnerable without my wheels, but liberated as well.
* * *
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AT THE EDGE of the largest volcanic lake in Europe, the caldera of Bolsena, the view of the expanse of wind-shredded water stops me in my tracks. It’s an earthly convulsion settled for now, the islands holding out against geological inevitabilities. The storm is lurking. A line of sinister-looking clouds has moved in from the northwest, darkening the land. After using the limited regional train and bus combination to get here from Buonconvento, I’m out of public transportation options for the day. My feet must carry me all the way to Rome. Fresh blisters would kill me. A stabbing pain in the rehabbed quad could also bring an end to my camino. The immediate goal is Montefiascone. It’s only ten miles, which I thought would be just the right distance to reacquaint my legs with the stones of the Via Francigena.
The archway into town proclaims Bolsena, the town on the shore, a place of miracles. One
concerned Saint Christina, rising from the lake bottom after her father had her tied to a rock for refusing to renounce her faith. The other was with a doubting priest, who did not think a thin bread wafer at Mass could become the body of Christ. But when he held the host aloft in 1263, blood dripped down off his fingers. Those dried drops are here today, in a chapel, as is a stone with Christina’s footprints embedded into it. Both stories sound suspect. I know, I know: it’s late in the pilgrimage, and I still haven’t found a way to keep my rational side in check. I’m trying. I have to think in another dimension, to remember Augustine’s line about miracles not being contrary to nature, but only “contrary to what we know about nature.” There is so much more to know, and anyone who doesn’t believe that is bereft of imagination. The miracle I want to see, the one that I’ve been thinking about since France, is lying in a crypt in the basement of the tallest structure of Montefiascone. It’s another woman, Saint Lucia Filippini, who died in 1732. She is one of the uncorrupted—her body preserved without embalming, as if she passed away a few days ago. I’m skeptical. But also intrigued by the do-it-yourself nature of the investigation. Any person of faith, or even those of little faith, can examine her corpse from a few feet outside its glass casket.
I hasten to the road, trying to beat the storm. The first three kilometers out of Bolsena are not designed for pedestrians. I’m walking against traffic, no room for a misstep. After an hour, the V.F. leaves the busy road for a tarmac, up a hill, then a long gradual descent before a stream, to a deserted-looking church with an overhang. I hear voices. An elderly couple, loaded down with lopsided backpacks, is taking a break from their camino. They introduce themselves; married for forty years, they tell me before even giving their names, hailing from the island of Sardinia. Did I say elderly? They seem so because they’re fussing and passing half sentences back and forth like you would expect of a pair that’s been together that long. But I’m sixty-two and age-phobic, so what do you call my reaction—projection?
The woman, Fulvia, is on the V.F. because she wants to be closer to God. And how’s that going? I ask her. They just started a few days ago, in Acquapendente, twenty miles back. They’re taking their time, doing about ten miles a day. Check with me in Rome, she says. Her husband, Sergio, is not interested in spiritual renewal. He thumps his chest. He wants to be forte, strong; walking the V.F. is a great way to get in shape. He can’t wait to tell all his buddies in Speedos back at the bocce ball court in Sardinia that he walked the pilgrim’s trail to Rome. The couple sets a rumpled cloth on a makeshift table and prepares a meal—slices of dried meat, an olive bruschetta spread of some sort over bread, grapes from a plastic container, and a little vino for each of them. They ask me to join. I’m not hungry. Watching the Sardinians, listening to them talk, seeing how gently they treat each other, I realize I was wrong about the fussing. This is love, refined.
When my mother was thirty years old, she decided she’d had enough of her marriage to my father. He was often on the road, with a foot-dragging sales job he took after his days as a delivery truck driver. All week he was gone, in Idaho and Montana, one dumpy town after another, trying to get miners and loggers to buy life insurance. You’d think it would be an easy sell. On Friday night, he’d tumble into his chair in our house, exhausted, draining a six-pack in two hours. When my mother talked about her week, he’d nod dutifully. But he was somewhere else. On rare occasions, she would tell him how much she was suffering inside, that life was slipping by, and there was so much she wanted to do. She was a caged bird. The babies kept coming. The money did not. They fell apart. They fought. My dad slept in a basement room. It was because of his snoring, he told us.
She met a man at the branch library where she loaded up on books every two weeks. He was a reader. He listened. He loved history, music, and art. He raved about her choice of novels and the way she wore her scarf. He suggested other titles, praised her for her intellect. And he was French, even wore a beret—the most exotic of creatures in the north end of Spokane, Washington. My mother started going to the library every few days. She began to fantasize about another life, somewhere, with this little foreign-accented bibliophile, a man who gets her. She withdrew even more from my dad. She thought about leaving. But she could not do it—not to us, not to him. It broke her up, this decision to stay; now she was trapped for life. But then . . . my dad improved in her eyes. As she observed the way he treated us, the tenderness, becoming the father he never had growing up on the South Side of Chicago, she fell in love with him—for the first time, actually. The kids had seen this side of him. I was flying a kite with him when I was six or seven, on a blustery spring day. A windstorm came out of nowhere. The string snapped; the kite spiraled down, crashed, and took off with the gust. He grabbed my hand and told me to run, to beat the squall. All the way home, he kept squeezing my hand. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll never let you go.”
My dad would read only two books in his entire adult life, while she raced through that many in a week. He was asleep before eight p.m., while she was gearing up for Masterpiece Theatre. He could not complete three words on a Scrabble board, while she was maestro in our circle. But he was never mean. Never lost his temper. And she would never leave him. They made it to their fiftieth wedding anniversary, and then put five more on for good measure, before he died.
My mother revealed this story in her final days. What kept them together, she said, was not just her seeing my father in a different way, learning to love a companion who was less than ideal. But also, she was Catholic, as my mother explained, and a Catholic tries to stay in a marriage. She used to scoff at the guidance from the church on this. What did they know?
“They knew enough,” she said. “And now you know.”
I say goodbye to the Sardinians, just steps before the first thunderclap of the day. Back on the trail, through the woods I go. After the crossing, I’m on an empty road made of smooth flagstones, each fitting like a puzzle piece. It’s the Via Cassia Antica, according to my guidebook, Roman footpath of legionaries and missionaries. The clouds collide and form an inky blot, the sky lowers and dumps its load. My raincoat is on, the pack protected as well. The torrent brings water pellets—ping, ping, ping—bouncing off the flagstones, slick and shiny. Rain is so restorative, but then I live in a place where water has been a benevolent master architect. Near town, I’m back on a road with traffic. Puddles have formed on the sides. When cars pass, even slow ones, they splash a heave of muddy water my way. My boots are drenched, so are my legs. I’m wearing shorts, so I don’t care. I love it.
Another group of pilgrims, just starting to ascend the hill toward Montefiascone, welcomes me to join them. They are three women, all on the youngish side of middle-aged, all somewhat tall, all with wet hair, speaking German. I ask them about their journey so far. They started in Siena, headed for Rome. Any blisters yet? Biting dogs? Assholes in cars? Nothing. Not a single problem. Like most Germans, they speak impeccable English, and probably three other languages as well. I remember the line from Casablanca, when an officer of the occupying army, Major Strasser, explained to the French police chief that “we Germans must get used to all climates.” It’s wonderful to replay the line without the Nazi edge. The Germans are a delight, and seem inordinately cheerful. They laugh at themselves in the rain. Every other sentence is punctuated by a guffaw. I’m also impressed by their pace. They’re aggressive walkers, striding briskly. We march through the Porta del Borgo, the main entrance into town, soaked but triumphant. I hear a couple of bravos from people standing under protective doorways. Ahead a few blocks is an enormous archway of thick, finely cut stone blocks, a welcoming, over which is emblazoned:
VIA FRANCIGENA
100 KM ALLA TOMBA DI PIETRO
* * *
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SHE LOOKS BEAUTIFUL. Fresh. Her eyes clear and blue. How does she do it? She crossed a continent and an ocean, three planes, a train, and walked the last half m
ile here with a loaded backpack in the rain. She doesn’t complain. She never does. She sits on the edge of the bed in our little hotel overlooking the Corso Cavour, trying to smile between yawns. It’s early morning in the time zone where she started her forty-hour day. She’s ready to walk the last stretch of the Via Francigena, 100 kilometers to Rome.
“Hello, pilgrim.”
“Ciao, bellissima.”
My wife managed to break away from her cancer chores. It was not easy. She feels terrible leaving Margie. I’d assured her she could be in phone contact with her sister and the doctors. The latest news from Cancerworld is not good, but not bad either. The scans show spots, even after the fresh chemo, which is horrible. But not as many spots, which is somewhat encouraging. Her sister feels weak, and Joni worries about her not eating. Every new round of poison knocks her down again.
I’d promised Joni a tramonto for the ages: the sunset over Lake Bolsena below, with even more color bleeding into the distant Mediterranean to the west. But the sun will not be seen as it slips away today. We’re in for the biggest storm in months. She’s fine with that. She wants a quick nap. And in Italy, you’re never more than a day or two from a theatrical sky at dusk.