Hidden Tuscany

by John Keahey

  It took more than fifty years for the military to recognize that twenty Nisei and seven Buffalo Soldiers deserved the Medal of Honor. Both groups, it was discovered, had been judged by different criteria than white soldiers, marines, and sailors when the military was handing out its highest honor at the end of the war. The seven black American recipients, only one of whom was still living, were presented their medals in 1997. The twenty Nisei, including Inouye, received their Medals of Honor three years later, in 2000.

  * * *

  The only Buffalo Soldier still living in 1997 when President Clinton presented the medals was another first lieutenant, Vernon Baker. He was twenty-five on April 5, 1945, when he led his heavy-weapons platoon in an attack on Castle Aghinolfi, a German observation post high on a hill just south of Massa in the Strettoia Hills overlooking the narrow plain of the Versilia coastline. With the castle in clear view, Baker destroyed German bunkers, two observation posts, a machine-gun nest, and telephone lines used by the Germans. As other soldiers were retrieving wounded men during the attack, he stood up to draw enemy fire away from their evacuation. The next night, he led a battalion through mine fields and heavy fire in another attack.

  Baker survived the war and elected to remain in the army in Europe. But the military, away from the heat of battle and falling back into its rigid prewar practices of having only a college-educated officer corps, took away his commission in 1947. The reason: the former railroad porter lacked a college degree.

  But that loss of rank didn’t last long. He was recommissioned during the Korean Conflict, ultimately leaving the military in 1968—still as a first lieutenant. In 2008, two years before he died, he was given an honorary doctorate and an award for moral courage and service to humankind from Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

  * * *

  The story of these three men and their comrades in their separate units—and the role of the Ninety-Second Division and 442nd Regiment in liberating this part of Tuscany—came to my attention only because I happened to look up—in the haze of sweat and labored breathing, as I pumped the pedals of my landlady’s bicycle for a day at the beach—and glimpse the statue of Sadeo Munemori.

  These soldiers had been untrusted by their white field officers who resented orders to command them in battle. As the war progressed and the casualties mounted, the United States needed more and more men to send overseas. They rose to the occasion, helping to push the Germans up the ancient peninsula and out of cities, towns, and villages. En route, they earned the everlasting gratitude of Italians who had never seen a black or Japanese man before and who had none of the prejudice of so many white Americans. Italians saw them only as heroic liberators. And here, in this narrow corridor along the Ligurian Sea, these American soldiers found the love and acceptance that they could not get from their country.

  In 1948, President Harry Truman signed the order desegregating the military.

  EIGHT

  Far from the Madding Crowd

  Pisa became a refuge, an exotic setting, in Shelley’s words, a “Paradise of Exiles.” In truth, it is hard to point to anything particularly paradisiacal about Pisa in the early nineteenth century.… Pisa was not a principal stop on the Grand Tour, something that Byron and Teresa Gamba appreciated because it enabled them to avoid, in the poet’s words, the “gossip-loving” English who flocked to Florence, Venice, and Rome.

  —Nicholas Shrady, Tilt: A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa (2003)

  VISITING PISA never appealed to me. Visions of stopping there just to see the Leaning Tower in the midst of massive numbers of tourists and overwhelmed by T-shirt and trinket stands lined up for a quarter mile along the square, the Campo dei Miracoli, or Field of Miracles, kept me, over the years, on trains passing through while en route to somewhere else.

  But while living for several months just twenty minutes north by train, I reconsidered, and ended up going to the city three times. I saw the crowd-infested area around the Leaning Tower—begun in the twelfth century and completed in the thirteenth. I knew that preservation officials had determined that if the tower was left untended, it surely would come crashing down on their watch. Such a disaster happened to the bell tower in St. Mark’s Square in Venice in the early twentieth century, and Pisans did not want their best tourist draw to suffer the same fate. While Venice’s bell tower was rebuilt much sturdier than its twelfth-century predecessor, it is unlikely a fall-proof “leaning” tower could be raised from rubble to match its predecessor in such heroic fashion. Therefore officials spent the $30 million or so necessary to fix it, working through much of the 1990s to correct about sixteen inches of tilt. It was reopened in 2001. Work to clean and restore its stone was finished in 2010.

  For my inaugural journey, I boarded a southbound train at Pietrasanta, and twenty minutes later disembarked with several hundred young people who commute daily to their classes at the University of Pisa. These students swarmed across the tracks at Pisa’s San Rossore station, not bothering with the pedestrian tunnel underneath them. Over the loudspeaker, a recorded female voice was reminding them it is illegal to cross the tracks and please, stand behind the yellow line. The students paid no heed; I am sure this is a daily ritual for them, and it would be futile indeed for authorities to stand there to stop the hordes that get off each train early in the morning. I brazenly joined the masses, jumped the tracks, and headed for the Field of Miracles.

  It was early, about eight o’clock on a weekday morning, and the square, thankfully, was nearly empty. Vendors’ stalls along one long side were shuttered, except for one or two stands selling caffè e cornetti. The Duomo, the Baptistery, and the cemetery/cloister from the Middle Ages, Campo Santo, or sacred ground, were closed and not opening until ten o’clock. A small line outside the tall bronze doors of the great church was beginning to form anyway. I could see visitors high atop the Leaning Tower, so that site obviously opened early. A man standing guard near the tower’s entrance was telling a group of German tourists they first must go to the nearby ticket office and purchase tickets that stipulate the time they could enter.

  I went to the office and discovered the earliest entry time they were selling tickets for was somewhere past eleven o’clock. Waiting three hours to climb to the top of this fabled tower—something a million people do each year—was not for me. I moved along, out of the square and into the old city.

  Pisa, of course, is significantly larger than Pietrasanta. And it has more visitors in a week than Pietrasanta likely has in a year or two, despite Pietrasanta’s appeal to sunbathers and appassionati di arte. So it is harder in Pisa to keep streets swept clean of visitors’ trash; an army of sanitary trucks, a bar waiter told me, are constantly on the move. Despite enduring a long, hot summer and unrelenting waves of tourists, the locals I met were delightfully friendly. Such massive tourism creates jobs, and with Italy facing a 12.5 percent unemployment rate, putting up with hundreds of thousands of visitors has become a way of life here. “What would I do,” the waiter said, “if it wasn’t for that tower?”

  I walked east out of the square along Via Pietro Maffi, past a long row of tourist restaurants, their menus posted in four languages and all offering “tourist specials.” I bumped into Largo del Parlascio, the site of some Roman ruins thought to be the baths of the Roman emperor Nero, and one of the original city gates, Porta Lucca. Again, except for the traffic traveling around the Largo and through the city gate, I was the only person poking through the ruins.

  Nearby was a church, and while I have been in perhaps a few hundred churches in Europe throughout my travels, I never tire of going into them—for the serenity they offer away from the clamor of city life and because they sometimes hold surprises. This church and convent of San Torpè, named for an early Christian martyr and with an altar hewn out of Carrara marble, offered up a few surprises: an exquisite stained-glass window showing, in separate parallel panels, what appears to be a crusader knight and a high church official; a marvelous plaster statu
e of St. Anne, Mary’s mother, holding a crucifix; and a nice Madonna and child. I’ve often wondered how many Madonna and child portraits one can absorb in a lifetime, but this one, by Francesco Vanni and executed in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, was worth the walk.

  During this brief Pisan sojourn, increasingly in need of solitude from the rising clamor outside, I stumbled onto two other pleasant churches, the Chiesa Universitaria di San Frediano and the Church of San Martino. San Frediano is named for a sixth-century Irish pilgrim and hermit who became a bishop of Lucca. Canonized just a few years after his death, he was credited with several miracles, including changing the course of the Serchio River, which in his time flowed a lot closer to Lucca than it does today. It was reported that he used a simple rake to trace out, in the dusty ground, a new course for the river. When he was finished, the river immediately shifted to that new course, moving farther away from the city and keeping the Lucchesi safe from spring floods.

  The Church of San Martino sits a short distance from the left bank of the Arno River on Via San Frediano. In an inside niche hangs a marvelous, discreetly lighted thirteenth-century crucifix, in wood, tempura, and gold, by Enrico di Tedice. Based on comparison with earlier photographs, it appears today to be heavily restored. The church’s interior, with its many art-filled niches, is worth seeing when the visitor to the city gets tired of the Leaning Tower and fighting the masses.

  I take a secular view of churches. They are magnificent works of art. Craftsmen and artists devoted to their creations—and, most likely for most, devoted to their faith, whatever it was for them—made things for eternity, and we all are the better for it.

  I hedge my nonsectarian bets by lighting candles for troubled family members and friends or those who have passed on. But perhaps the biggest reason I enjoy entering churches is that as an amateur historian (a university BS degree in history does not make one a professional) I want to see the artifacts of actual historical events that are kept in them—not just objects that symbolize something and came through history as an act of faith.

  I found this kind of history a few moments later when I came upon the Church of Santo Stefano dei Cavalieri, located in central Pisa, a short walk from the Campo dei Miracoli. It is a lynchpin of the great Piazza dei Cavalieri.

  The Medici grand duke of Tuscany had commissioned the structure in 1561 when he founded the order of Knights of Santo Stefano. To belong, a man had to be at least eighteen and have the financial means to support himself. Most important, members could not be descended from heretics. They fought in battles all over the Mediterranean against Ottoman Turks. The order’s last battle was in 1719; the order evolved into an institute for educating noble Tuscans. Images of eight-pointed Maltese crosses are peppered throughout the square, on the church exterior, the façades of the surrounding buildings, as ornaments on light poles. That same cross dominates the flag of Pisa, which flutters on the tops of buildings everywhere.

  The Tuscan painter, architect, and art historian Giorgio Vasari not only designed this magnificent church, which took three hundred years to finish (it was completed in 1859), but he also did the baptismal font and painted a picture of a beheaded St. Stephen being placed in his tomb. Such work is worth seeing; my favorite was a portion of the wood-carved ceiling that depicts a painted scene from the Battle of Lepanto—that pivotal sixteenth-century battle between Turks and Christians.

  The Battle of Lepanto was fought on October 7, 1571, on the Adriatic, at a spot between southern Italy and the Gulf of Corinth in western Greece. The pope, Venice, and Spain had formed a Holy League to confront the Turks and stop, once and for all, their western expansion ambitions. The League succeeded but at great cost in terms of both ships and human lives. The outcome clearly divided the Mediterranean into two zones controlled by great powers: the Turks in the east—except the island of Cyprus that had been reclaimed by Venice—and Spain in the west.

  Historian Fernand Braudel described the battle as “the most spectacular military event in the Mediterranean during the entire sixteenth century.” In addition to the carved wooden ceiling, the captured Turkish banners taken from the ships of the vanquished ironically hang in the Church of Santo Stefano dei Cavalieri. As Abulafia said it: these banners are “daily proclaiming the faith of Islam amid the incense of Catholic ritual.” These nearly 451-year-old banners, sheathed in giant glass frames, dominate the interior walls.

  * * *

  Now, as someone who was raised Protestant but no longer claims to practice a specific organized faith, I have my reasons for haunting churches in Europe. I have friends who have fallen away from their Catholic faith and cannot bear to enter a church, no matter how grand or famous it is or what glorious pieces of art or historical relics it may contain. One friend is furious that some churches charge entrance fees, either to enter the sanctuary itself or to go into special rooms. He would never go into the Duomo in Pisa, for example, which charges for admittance. I wouldn’t go because of the wait and the overwhelming crowd. In Palermo, Sicily, I paid a few euros to see the tombs of the early Norman rulers in the cathedral there. My friend refused to go. I enjoyed touching the tomb of one of Sicily’s greatest rulers and Europe’s Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II. I like experiencing how their memories linger on through their monuments.

  Still another friend is outraged that early Catholics built churches on top of Greek and Roman temples. In Rome, this is true of just about any older church; pagan foundations and some tombs can be found beneath nearly all of them. A magnificent cathedral in Syracuse in Sicily is built on a Greek temple site, complete with the original stone pillars embedded in the walls. Of course, the Greeks there built their temples on top of the temples of their predecessors, and so it goes. The Catholic Church was just following a historic pattern.

  * * *

  My goal in Pisa—to make discoveries that are off the usual tourist grid—is being met. I found surprises, like the St. Anne statue and the wooden cross. The only church I visited that was mentioned in the one Tuscan guidebook on my shelf is San Stefano. Still, this book, one of the more prominent ones, misses the origin of the pennants hanging there, saying that they had been taken from Muslim pirates off the coast of North Africa. The guidebook had no idea that the banners were from the battle of Lepanto in the Adriatic Sea—one of history’s most decisive moments.

  I sometimes am tipped off to something via guidebooks. And I admit to buying the most recent editions before a major trip. But I refuse to depend on them. I have found that one often copies from another, repeating factual errors. I prefer to let the expectation of discovery be my guide.

  So, I wandered back to the Field of Miracles and its leaning tower. What I saw astounded me. The square that had been nearly empty at eight o’clock, now, at noon, was packed elbow-to-elbow with thousands of people. Several were taking turns standing on the low, rounded marble posts around the perimeter of the grassy area so they could be photographed holding their hands up like they were propping up the tower. One would jump down and another would climb up and strike the same pose. People, jostling for position, were actually lined up at certain key posts waiting for their chance for the quintessential tourist photograph.

  That quarter mile of tiny shops stretched along the campo’s stone wall was alive with hawkers selling trinkets of every description: T-shirts, soccer shirts, plastic ashtrays, plastic blowups of animals, key chains, and, of course, models of the Leaning Tower, ranging from keychain size to three feet tall.

  It took me perhaps twenty minutes to push through this madding crowd and make my way through the gate and to the train station.

  * * *

  I’ve talked to friends in Pietrasanta about my mixed feelings about Pisa: the overwhelming, overheated crowds; the trash that must be a nightmare for crews who have to clean it up, day after day, week after week; the tourist menus that, from restaurant to restaurant, seem to offer the same uninspired fare.

  This, for me, is also countered by the
importance that Pisa holds in the history of Tuscany. Despite being inland today by three or four miles, Pisa was the historic mouth of the Arno River—long ago silted in where entire communities and superhighways now sit—and thus was a major maritime power throughout the Middle Ages. Also, its long-buried port was where coastal ships, loaded with marble harvested from the mountains above Carrara to the north, would transfer their cargoes to riverboats headed upstream to Florence where artists such as Michelangelo would unlock the magnificent figures those stones contained.

  Today, the city of Pisa has no port. Along the modern coastline, about three miles from where it was located in Michelangelo’s day, the rich tie up their yachts and sailboats at the modern Marina di Pisa, and holiday-goers fan out across stunning beaches.

  My goal is to get away from all this, rent a car, and head inland on a journey of discovery. The Plain of Pisa is vast and a major agricultural area. Perhaps fifteen miles from the sea, it bumps up against a line of coastal hills that in turn, farther east, roll up into the Apennine Mountains, the spine of Italy.

  Friends in Pietrasanta encouraged me to see some of these surrounding areas. I took them up on it, a four-day road trip that would take me no farther away from Pisa’s centro than perhaps twenty miles. The result was surprising—and rewarding.

  * * *

  A few miles north of Pisa, the exit from SS1 points toward San Giuliano Terme. This small town, which has several satellite villages in its sphere of influence, marks the beginning of the foothills that slowly rise toward the east and that then boil up into higher hills as they build toward the peaks of Monte Pisano.

  I have a reservation for B and B Zia in La Gabella, a tiny hamlet less than a mile from my first village of interest, Calci. This B and B acts as my base for three days as I roam throughout the Plain of Pisa, from the hilltops to the vast plain of wheat, olive groves with centuries-old trees, sunflower fields, and vineyards.