I love the sense of time found in many frescoes: The whole sequence of a narrative is composed as one painting, with past to present depicted from small to large or left to right; the viewer first perceives the whole simultaneously happening event, then “reads” the progression. Time collapses, as it so often does in memory. The painter, seeking to tell a story, is bound by the Alpha-Omega concept of time, but the structured composition of the whole fresco runs back to an earlier intuition: All time is eternally present.
In the next fresco, four monks cannot move a large stone. Look closer—there's a devil in the stone. The monks have long iron poles exactly like ours and have wedged them under the stone, but the evil force keeps it immovable until Benedetto makes the sign of the cross over it. We have confronted many such stones, without the help of divine intervention. Now I'm understanding his sainthood. The power to lift stones surely qualifies him.
Off to the side in another Signorelli, a woman in blue is three-quarters turned away from the viewer. She's as lovely as the famous Vermeer painting of the woman pouring from a pitcher at a window. Two monks, against the rules of their order, are having a fine meal in a house outside the monastery. They're focused on a laden table, which is served by two women and a boy carefully holding a bowl. The woman in blue pours wine from a pitcher into a glass and you almost can hear it splash. Her hair is caught up in a cap which pushes out her ear. The long line of her neck and the faint indentation of her backbone through her dress give you the muscular sensation of her body in the act of pouring. Everything about her feels intent on what she's doing. The other woman in sea-foam green has rushed over from the fireplace, skirts in motion, carrying aloft what looks suspiciously like a torta della nonna. For all her delicate, almond-eyed beauty, she has exceptionally large hands and feet. Perhaps an assistant stepped in and painted them while Signorelli himself went out for a pitcher of cool wine. These women flanking the fresco are two of the most arresting images in the whole cycle. Just out the window, it's later. The two well-fed monks have been found out by Benedetto. They're on their knees begging forgiveness, with the taste of the wine and torta still lingering in their mouths.
During the decoration of Monte Oliveto, which he began in 1495, Signorelli left after painting six frescoes, and the Benedetto cycle became Sodoma's project in 1505. Il Sodoma, what a name. He was born Giovanni Antonio Bazzi. The monks called him “Il Mattaccio,” which means idiot or madman. On the way over, I pulled Vasari's Lives of the Artists out of our travel books in a box on the back seat of the car and read aloud to Ed, “His manner of life was licentious and dishonorable, and he always had boys and beardless youths about him, of whom he was inordinately fond. This earned him the name of Sodoma; but instead of feeling shame he gloried in it, writing stanzas and verses on it, and singing them to the accompaniment of the lute. He loved to fill his house with all manner of curious animals; badgers, squirrels, apes, catamounts, dwarf asses, Barbary racehorses, Elba ponies, jackdaws, bantams, turtle-doves . . . so that his house resembled a veritable Noah's ark.”
“Maybe his nickname comes from his love of beasts instead of what we assume—bestial,” Ed muses. “I saw somewhere that he also had three wives and fathered thirty children. That seems impossible.”
“He thought of nothing but pleasure. . . .” Vasari continues. There's where he's wrong. I've seen his frescoes all over Tuscany. He thought a great deal about working at his art. Oddly, I think of Warhol, who seems decadent and frivolous, tossing off his art. A visit to the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh cures that impression. He worked like a demon, amassing an immense body of varied, imaginative, playful, and seriously iconographic work.
It's easy to see where Sodoma stepped in because his menagerie starts to appear on the walls—ravens, swans, badgers, an anteater, various dogs, and what I take to be an ermine. His seven dancing women represent the temptations of the flesh, which Benedetto was able to resist. He has a whole fresco devoted to the saint's temptation, in which he restores himself by stripping off his robe and throwing himself onto a bush of thorns—probably more effective than a cold shower. He peers down from a balcony, directing the departure of his monks with a mule; obviously he's orchestrating their escape from the seductive women. This is one of the most beautiful frescoes, with the lovely flowing dresses of the women contrasting with the cumbersome robes of the monks, and the two groups divided by a doorway through which we see a distant curving road leading to a lake. I can't help but think that the rowdy Sodoma took special pleasure in creating gorgeous women for the monks to pass every day. When Sodoma painted them, the viewers experienced even more tension because the lovely women were nude. Someone later dressed them, cutting down on the perpetuation of temptation.
One of Sodoma's great moments is easy to miss. In an archway, Ed happened on his Christ bound to a pillar, with rope-burns swelling on his arms and criss-crossed blood marks of flagellation on his torso. Like Piero della Francesca's Christ in Resurrection, Sodoma renders him not as slender and pathetic but as a virile, big guy with powerful muscles. Nearby, Sodoma's own self-portrait appears in the fresco of one of Benedetto's first miracles, the mending of a broken tray, again a homely little act accomplished through prayer. Posed as a courtier, Sodoma looks straight out at the viewer with a direct, bemused gaze. At his feet are two badgers and a bird. He's full of life. I'll bet he was a handful for the Benedictines.
Although no one seems to follow the Sodoma trail, as they do the Piero della Francesca route, we could. In the time-stopped town of Trequanda, in a church with a checkerboard facade, SS. Pietro e Andrea, he's left a fresco. In the Pinacoteca and in Sant'Agostino in Siena, I've come upon paintings and enamels. His San Sebastiano in the Pitti Palace in Florence again shows his luminous talent for the glories of the male body: the delight in shoulder and stomach muscles, the filmy scarf around the genitals looped just so to suggest what is covered. I hardly notice poor Sebastiano's upturned face imploring an angel, or the arrow piercing his neck.
We take a stone stairway up to see the library. On the way, we pass a door marked “Clausura,” behind which monks are cloistered, then we pass the door to the monks' dining room, which is open for a deliveryman to wheel in cases of water. The enormous U-arrangement of tables is covered in white cloths. Flowers, water and wine bottles, and a delicious smell drifting from the kitchen tell us that monks don't have to creep outside the walls for a good meal anymore. The room looks inviting and the lectern suggests that they will hear a reading while they eat in silence. I would love to join them.
Despite fellow-tourists here, it's easy to absorb the isolation of this place, the silence that exists in the closed parts and in the courtyard when the last visitor departs. The men are left to commune with time. I leave feeling that I have read a complex biography, and I have. The scenes from the lives of the holy are everywhere in Italian painting. Each panel or fresco is a chapter. “Put the action into scene,” my fiction colleagues tell their writing students. Sodoma and Signorelli were particularly good at that.
I collect more images to conjure in nights of insomnia: The pink pate of the monk who nodded to me in the corridor; the fir and spice smell of the frankincense and myrrh in the chapel; an African child staring at the only fresco with a black person in it; a bold intarsia cat on a lectern, a wild-looking thing with eyes fixed on what must be a mouse; a monk singing in the cypress lane. He could be good Benedetto, walking out to help plague victims, or maybe he's just going out to check the hives, to see if the bees have awakened to spring.
Bagno Vignoni and Pienza
Ed is limping from a stone bruise. He leapt when his hoe suddenly disturbed a snake. His foot came down on a jagged rock. “What kind?” I asked.
“A very snaky-looking snake. Scared hell out of me. We were eye-to-eye.” He's rubbing his foot with lotion.
“Let's go take the cure. We can be there by four.”
“Then we can go on to Pienza for dinner. I'd like to drive up to Monticchiello, too. We've
never been there.”
Bagno Vignoni, the tiny hilltop town near San Quirico d'Orcia, and within sight of the castle on top of Rocca d'Orcia, is built around a large thermal pool where the Medicis used to soak themselves. Where the central piazza is located in most towns, the pool (no longer used) reflects tumbling plumbago, tawny stone houses and stone arcades. Not much is going on in Bagno Vignoni. Right behind the village, a hot stream runs downhill, through a travertine ditch. On either side you can sit down and soak your feet, just as Lorenzo il Magnifico did in 1490.
When I first started spending summers here, I read in an Italian newspaper a heated debate over whether or not health insurance should continue to cover yearly sojourns to spas and thermal springs, a practice many Italians take as a birthright. I had been to Chianciano Terme and had seen people clutching their livers while sipping small glasses of water. They otherwise looked tan and fit. I glimpsed tanks where various body parts or the whole corpo could be immersed for the absorption of the healing properties of local waters. I've heard workers at our house discuss the merits of various waters as though they were discussing wine. Italians are great connoisseurs of the plainest elixir of all. I see them at various roadside springs filling demijohns. Water is not just water; it has properties.
My grandmother used to take the sulphur waters for a week at White Springs, Florida, down near the Sewanee River. I was deeply bored and considered her a holdover from Victorian times. I only accompanied her so that I could swim in the cold black springs, emerging from the water smelling something like an old Easter egg. She waved from the third latticed balcony around the spring, a small paper cup of the odorous water in her other hand.
I did not expect to be drawn into this passion. Then I went to Bagno Vignoni. I converted. Ed's stone bruise takes us now but we must go at least once a year.
“Her dogs are barking,” my aunt would say when we saw a woman whose feet had swollen over the edges of her pumps. After a few weeks of hauling stone, erecting trellises, and navigating stony streets, my dogs, too, are barking. We like to arrive very early, before anyone has revealed their work-torn, ailing, sometimes frightening feet. We're late today. I take off my sandals, and slowly lower my own miserable feet into the running water. Ed plunges his to the bottom. Then we notice a man with a red, red nose paring his yellow-talon toenails into the water. He must not have cut them for months. We stare as his big toenail, like a curl of wax, falls into the water. We move upstream from him.
At fifty-two degrees Celsius, the shock of hot water on a hot day is intense. Ed's size twelves magnify through the water next to my long rabbit feet. Sometimes the water feels merely warm. Rubbing my heels against the smooth travertine streambed, I concentrate on the invisible but potent minerals which are starting to soothe blisters, relax tendons, muscles, even purify nails and skin. Ed says his purple bruise is fading, fading. The water starts to feel as though it's swirling through my feet. When I close my eyes, only my feet seem to exist.
After twenty minutes, I'm back in my sandals, toes glowing lobster-red. Ed slides on his espadrilles under water and squishes out. Cured.
This is the strange part. Walking back into town for a strawberry gelato, not only do I feel a surge of euphoria, my feet feel as if they could levitate. Everyday Italian life continues to astound me. What is in these Italian waters?
We reach Monticchiello by a white road that climbs through fields of purple lupin scattered with the last poppies. The walled town is mysteriously empty. Finally we figure this out: Everyone has simply closed shop and gone home to watch the big soccer match, which we hear blaring from every window. As we wander, we encounter a man peeing outside the closed public W.C. on the edge of town. Much of the castle wall is intact. Inside, the streets are so clean they're like swabbed decks.
“It's tarted up,” a friend had warned us. “I've never seen so many geraniums in my life.” True, they're on every stoop, step, and sill. The effect is stunning against the immaculate shuttered houses and the pencils of sunlight falling into medieval lanes. It's one of hundreds of such hilltowns but one we'd never visited. We'll have to come back to find the fabric shop I read is here and, since the church is locked, to see the Lorenzetti Madonna. Even the priest probably is riveted to a small ball being kicked around a TV screen.
Down, down from Monticchiello, leaving it to its rioting geraniums, through the wildflower meadows, vineyards, passing abandoned and forlorn farmhouses on hills, through the mellow early evening and pig smells, toward Pienza, the first Renaissance town.
Pienza doesn't look like other towns. A pope with the splendid name of Enea Silvio Piccolomini built it in honor of his own birthplace. He must have knocked down most of the medieval buildings to put up his ultramodern Renaissance town because it's a harmonious whole.
There's a story about Rossellino, the architect, that stakes the heart of anyone involved in restoration or building. The architect overspent outrageously and concealed it from the Pope. When the excess finally was revealed, the Pope told him he was right to have hidden the sums because never would the pontiff have authorized such expenditures and never would he have had as his monument such a glorious town. He rewarded the architect with gold and a fancy cape. Perhaps our first builder had heard that story!
The piazza, bordered by the cathedral and several palaces for bishops, canons, and the Pope, is staggeringly, astonishingly beautiful. Pienza is glorious in all its parts, from the felicitous residential street along the ramparts, to the iron flagholders and cunning rings fashioned in animal shapes, where horses used to be secured while their owners did their business in town. Today no horses, and no cars either, which contributes to the silent and unified feeling of the town. We wander the vicoli, the narrow streets, with evocative names: Vicolo Cieco (blind), Via della Fortuna, Via delle Serve Smarrite (the lost servants), Via dell'Amore, Via del Balzello (the heavy tax or, in dialect, the man who looks at women), Via del Bacio (the kiss), Via Buia (dark).
The back end of Rossellino's airy cathedral is sinking, the porous limestone soil beneath it giving way a little every year. An ominous crack that looks as if it has been repaired with a staple gun runs down the wall and continues across the floor. I visit my favorite painting here, the martyred virgin Agata, who refused the attentions of Quintino and paid by having her breasts torn off. She comes down through history holding her severed breasts on a platter, which I originally took for a serving of fried eggs. Women who fear for their own breasts invoke her, and she is the patron saint of bell makers, too. Perhaps in a painting somewhere, the dome-shaped breasts were mistaken for little bells.
I once read in a book about the medieval pilgrimage routes that all the towns along the way were crowded with souvenir shops. So, Pienza's plethora of stores selling ceramics to us on our various pilgrimages has a precedent. This area is famous for its pecorino. The street leading into the centro is lined with so many tempting shops selling the round cheeses wrapped in leaves or ashes that the pungent smell follows us down the street. We buy an aged pecorino (stagionato) and taste a semi-aged one (semi-stagionato). Honey and herbs also are specialties. Some are homeopathic—we see a honey for the liver and one for the respiratory system. One shop has pots of ruta, rue, which I'll add to my herb garden.
I'm drawn by all these food shops and also repelled. Pienza has rather too many; I'd like to see the shoe repair and the grocery store back on the main street. What remains of the ancient craft of ferro battuto, wrought iron, is an upscale shop selling lamps and tables and a few antique gates and andirons to the tourists down from Bologna or Milano for the weekend. And to us, of course. We look at their hanging iron lanterns with glass globes that end in a rounded teardrop, reproductions of old ones still on some streets of Siena and Arezzo. We need a light outside by the limonaia and one for overhead in a bedroom. They have them. I also buy an old iron that opens up to hold hot coals. The worn wooden handle tells me somebody pushed this five pounder over many a work shirt and apron.
Just outside the main gate we find a trattoria with a terrace. I'm thrilled anytime to see fried zucchini blossoms. We fall onto pork tenderloin grilled with rosemary, roasted potatoes with lots of pepper, and a salad of young arugula barely touched with good oil.
Around the cathedral piazza, the dignified pale stone buildings have travertine extensions around the bases. They serve as benches and over the years have been polished smooth by the bottoms that rested there while viewing the great well and the Pope's magnificent piazza. Over one is inscribed “canton de'bravi,” corner of the good. Do we qualify? We're feeling dreamy after dinner, the travertine still warm from the sun. We watch a small girl in a white sailor dress chasing a kitten. The full moon is poised over Piccolomini's perfect piazza. “Amazing what a little egomania and a lot of gold can do,” Ed says.
“Perhaps he even ordered the full moon to drift overhead every night.”
Another soccer match blares from the TV in the bar, so the women and babies are outside, the men inside. In a piazza just off the main one, another TV has been set up outdoors beside a Renaissance well and all the neighbors have brought out their chairs into the early evening to cheer and shout for Italy. The blue light of the screen reflects on the semicircle of rapt faces. Arm-in-arm we walk the rampart road. For the second time today, I'm astounded by everyday life in Italy. Ed holds out his foot and says he feels no pain at all.
Bella Tuscany Page 15