The Monster of Florence

by Douglas Preston; Mario Spezi

  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.

  The heart of Monster country.

  For weeks after hearing the story of the Monster of Florence from Spezi, I found myself wondering about the murder scene so close to our house. One fall day, after a frustrating struggle with the Masaccio novel, I left the house and climbed up through the grove to the grassy meadow to see the spot for myself. It was a lovely little meadow with a sweeping view of the Florentine hills running southward toward some low mountains. The crisp fall air smelled of crushed mint and burning grass. Some claim that evil lingers in such places as a kind of malevolent infection, but I could feel nothing. It was a place outside good and evil. I loitered about, hoping in vain to extract some glimmer of understanding, and almost against my will I found myself reconstructing the crime scene, positioning the VW bus, imagining the tinny sound of the Blade Runner score playing endlessly over the scene of horror.

  I took a deep breath. Below, in our neighbor’s vineyard, the vendemmia was in progress, and I could see people moving up and down the rows of vines, heaping clusters of grapes into the back of a three-wheeled motorized cart. I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of the place—a cock crowing, distant church bells, a barking dog, an unseen woman’s voice calling out for her children.

  The story of the Monster of Florence was taking hold.

  CHAPTER 31

  Spezi and I became friends. About three months after we met, unable to shake myself loose from the Monster story, I suggested to him that we collaborate on an article about the Monster of Florence for an American magazine. As a sometime contributor to The New Yorker, I called up my editor there and pitched the idea. We got the assignment.

  But before putting pen to paper, I needed a crash course from the “Monstrologer.” A couple of days a week I shoved my laptop into a backpack, hauled my bike out, and pedaled the ten kilometers to Spezi’s apartment. The last kilometer was a murderous ride uphill through groves of knotted olive trees. The apartment he shared with his Belgian wife, Myriam, and their daughter occupied the top floor of the old villa, with a living room, dining room, and a terrace overlooking Florence. Spezi worked in an upstairs garret, crammed with books, papers, drawings, and photographs.

  When I arrived, I would find Spezi in the dining room, a Gauloise invariably hanging from his lip, layers of smoke drifting in the air, papers and photographs spread out on the table. While we worked, Myriam would bring us a steady stream of espresso in tiny cups. Spezi would always put away the crime scene photographs before she came in.

  Mario Spezi’s first job was to educate me about the case. He went through the history chronologically, in minute detail, from time to time plucking a document or a photograph from the heap by way of illustration. All our work was conducted in Italian, as Spezi’s English was rudimentary and I was determined to use the opportunity to learn the language better. I took notes furiously on my laptop while he spoke.

  “Nice, eh?” he often said when he had finished recounting some particularly egregious example of investigative incompetence.

  “Si, professore,” I would answer.

  His view of the case was not complicated. He had nothing but contempt for the conspiracy theories, alleged satanic rituals, hidden masterminds, and medieval cults. The simplest and most obvious explanation, he felt, was the correct one: that the Monster of Florence was a lone psychopath who murdered couples for his own sick, libidinous reasons.

  “The key to identifying him,” Spezi said repeatedly, “is the gun used in the 1968 clan killing. Trace the gun and you find the Monster.”

  In April, when the vineyards were beginning to stripe the hills in fresh green, Spezi took me to see the scene of the 1984 killing of Pia Rontini and Claudio Stefanacci, outside Vicchio. Vicchio lies north of Florence in a region known as the Mugello, where the
hills grow steep and wild as they pile up toward the great chain of the Apennines. Sardinian shepherds settled in this area in the early sixties, after the migration to Tuscany, to raise sheep in the mountain meadows. Their pecorino cheese was highly prized, so much so that it became a signature cheese of Tuscany.

  We drove along a country road, following a rushing stream. It had been years since Spezi had last been there, and we had to stop several times before we found the place. A turnoff from the road led to a grassy track at a place known locally as La Boschetta, the Little Wood. We parked and walked in. The track dead-ended at the base of a hill covered with oak trees, opening on one side to a field of medicinal herbs. An ancient stone farmhouse with terra-cotta roofs stood a few hundred yards off. A rushing stream, hidden by poplars, ran through the valley below. Beyond the farmhouse the land mounted up, hills upon hills, receding into blue mountains. Emerald-green pastures had been cut into the shoulders and lower slopes of the hills, pastures that the artist Giotto had wandered through as a boy in the late 1200s, tending sheep, daydreaming, and drawing pictures in the dirt.

  The track ended at a shrine to the victims. Two white crosses stood in a grassy plot. Plastic flowers, faded by the sun, had been arranged in two glass jars. Coins had been placed on the arms of the crosses; the site had become a place of pilgrimage for young couples from the area, who left the coins as a way to pledge their love for each other. The sun poured in across the valley, bringing with it the scent of flowers and freshly mown fields. Butterflies fumbled about, birds twittered in the woods, and puffy white clouds scudded across a sky of blue.

  Gauloise in his hand, Mario sketched out the scene of the crime for me while I took notes. He showed me where the light blue Panda of the two lovers had been parked and where the killer must have been hiding in the dense vegetation. He pointed out where the shells had lain, ejected after each shot, which told the pattern and order of shooting. The boy’s body had been found trapped in the rear seat, almost in a fetal position, curled up as if to defend himself. The killer had shot him dead and then, later, stabbed the body several times in the ribs, either to make sure he was dead or as a sign of contempt.

  “It happened at about nine-forty,” Spezi said. He pointed to a field across the river. “We know that because a farmer, plowing that field at night to escape the heat, heard the shots. He thought it was the backfiring of a motorino.”

  I followed Mario into the open field. “He dragged the body and laid it down here—within full view of the house. An absurdly exposed place.” He gestured toward the farmhouse with his cigarette hand, tufts of smoke drifting off. “It was a terrible scene. I’ll never forget it. Pia lay on her back, arms thrown wide as if crucified. Her bright blue eyes were open and staring into sky. It’s awful to say this, but I couldn’t help noticing how beautiful she was.”

  We stood in the field, drowsy bees visiting the flowers around us. I had finished taking notes. The whisper of the river came up through the trees. Again, no evil lingered. On the contrary, the place felt peaceful, even holy.

  Afterwards we drove into Vicchio. It was a small town set amid lush fields alongside the river Sieve. A ten-foot-tall bronze statue of Giotto, holding his palette and brushes, stood in the center of the cobbled piazza. The shops nearby included a small household appliance store still owned by the Stefanacci family, where Claudio Stefanacci had worked.

  We ate lunch in a modest trattoria off the piazza and then walked down a side street to pay a visit to Winnie Rontini, the mother of the murdered girl. We came to a high stone wall with iron gates surrounding a grand in-town villa, one of the most imposing in Vicchio. Through the gates I could see a formal Italian garden gone to seed. Beyond rose the three-story façade of the house, badly run-down, the pale yellow stucco cracked and peeling off. The villa’s windows were shuttered. It looked abandoned.

  We pressed the buzzer on the iron gate, and a voice quavered out of the tinny speaker. Mario gave his name and the gate clicked open. Winnie Rontini met us at the door and invited us into the darkened house. She moved slowly and heavily, as if under water.

  We followed her into a dark sitting room, almost devoid of furniture. One window shutter was partway open, admitting a bar of light like a white wall dividing the darkness, through which drifted dust motes that blazed for a moment and vanished. The air smelled of old fabric and wax polish. The house was almost empty, only a few shabby pieces of furniture left, as all the antiques and silver had been sold long ago to finance the search for her daughter’s killer. Signora Rontini was so impoverished she could no longer afford a telephone.

  We seated ourselves on the faded furniture, raising a storm of motes, and Signora Rontini seated herself opposite us, settling into a lumpy chair with slow dignity. Her fair skin, fine hair, and sky blue eyes revealed her Danish heritage. Around her neck she wore a gold necklace with the initials of P and C on it, for Pia and Claudio.

  She talked slowly, the words spoken as if weights were attached to them. Mario told her about our writing project and our continuing search for the truth. She stated her opinion, almost as if she no longer cared, that it was Pacciani. She told us that her husband, Renzo, a highly paid marine engineer who traveled all over the world, had quit his job to pursue justice for his daughter full-time. Every week he visited police headquarters in Florence, asking for fresh news and consulting with investigators, and on his own he had offered large monetary rewards for information. He had frequently appeared on television or radio, appealing for help. He had been scammed more than once. The effort eventually ruined his health and drained their finances. Renzo died of a heart attack on the street outside the police station after a visit. Signora Rontini remained in the big villa all alone, selling off the furniture piece by piece, and sinking ever deeper into debt.

  Mario asked about the necklace.

  “For me,” she said, touching the necklace, “life ended on that day.”

  CHAPTER 32

  If you believe you are beyond harm, will you go inside? Will you enter this palace so prominent in blood and glory, follow your face through the web-spanned dark . . . ? Inside the foyer the darkness is almost absolute. A long stone staircase, the stair rail cold beneath our sliding hand, the steps scooped by the hundreds of years of footfalls . . .

  So it was on a cold January morning that Christine and I found ourselves climbing the stairs so vividly described by Thomas Harris in Hannibal. We had an appointment in the Palazzo Capponi to meet Count Niccolò Piero Uberto Ferrante Galgano Gaspare Calcedonio Capponi, and his wife, the Contessa Ross. I had finally made that cold call. Hannibal the film, directed by Ridley Scott, had recently been shot in the Palazzo Capponi, where Hannibal Lecter, alias “Dr. Fell,” was fictionally employed as the curator of the Capponi library and archives. I thought it would be interesting to interview the real curator of the Capponi archives, Count Niccolò himself, and write a “Talk of the Town” piece about it for The New Yorker, to coincide with the release of the film.

  The count met us at the top of the stairs and guided us into the library, where the countess was waiting. He was a man of about forty, tall and solid, with curly brown hair, a Vandyke beard, keen blue eyes, and a pair of schoolboy ears. He looked strikingly like a grown-up version of the 1550 portrait of his ancestor Lodovico Capponi by the artist Bronzino, which hangs in the Frick Museum in New York. When the count greeted my wife, he kissed her hand in a most peculiar way, which I later learned was an ancient gesture in which the nobleman takes the lady’s hand and with a rapid, elegant twist raises it to within six inches of his lips, while making a crisp half-bow—never, of course, allowing his lips to actually brush the skin. Only titled Florentines greet ladies in this manner. Everyone else shakes hands.

  The Capponi library lay at the end of a dim, ice-cold hall decorated with coats of arms. The count settled us in a brace of giant oaken chairs, then perched himself on a metal stepstool behind an old refectory table and fiddled with his pipe. The wall at his back consisted of
hundreds of pigeonholes containing family papers, manuscripts, account books, and rent rolls going back eight hundred years.

  The count wore a brown jacket, a wine-colored sweater, slacks, and—rather eccentric for a Florentine—beaten-up ugly old shoes. He held a doctorate in military history and taught at the Florentine campus of New York University. He spoke perfect Edwardian English that seemed a relic from an earlier age. I asked him where he had acquired it. English, he explained, had entered his family when his grandfather married an Englishwoman and they raised their children speaking English at home. His father, Neri, in turn, had passed his English on to his children like a family heirloom—and in this way the language of the Edwardian age had been fossilized inside the Capponi family, unchanged for almost a century.

  The Countess Ross was American, very pretty, guarded and formal, with a dry sense of humor.

  “We had Ridley Scott in here with his cigar,” said the count, referring to the director of the movie.

  “The group would arrive,” the countess said, “led by the cigar, followed by Ridley, followed by an attentive crowd.”

  “It created quite a bit of smoke.”

  “There was a lot of fake smoke, actually. Ridley seems to be obsessed with smoke. And busts. He was always needing marble busts.”