Four metres away, lying face down across a boulder, was the man it belonged to.

Nobody took the axe. Not the bow, not the quiver or the dagger. It all stayed there, for millennia.

And the copper in that blade wasn’t even Alpine. It came from the copper deposits of southern Tuscany, hundreds of kilometres to the south. Metal that had crossed half the peninsula, left on a Tyrolean glacier beside a dead man.

The man carried an unfinished bow and, out of fourteen arrows, only two ready to shoot. He’d been born and spent his entire life within about sixty kilometres of that spot, always south of the watershed.

He was about forty-six, and he’d died around 3300 BC, deep in the Copper Age.

Today we call him Ötzi, and he’s probably the most studied body in archaeology.

We’ve read his genome, counted his tattoos, reconstructed his last meal, sequenced the bacteria in his gut. On one thing, though, we still don’t agree: how did he die?

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From accident to murder

For ten years the answer was simple.

He’d lain down in a hollow, worn out, and frozen to death. An accident: a man alone, caught by bad weather too high up.

Then, in 2001, an X-ray showed an arrowhead in Ötzi’s left shoulder. It had gone in from behind. The entry wound, clean-edged, measured two centimetres.

In one day, the frozen hiker became the victim of a murder.

But this wasn't his only wound. A deep cut ran across his right hand, between thumb and forefinger, inflicted a few days before he died. Possibly a defensive wound, the mark of a fight at close quarters. His death had a backstory.

The case seemed to have been solved quickly. The arrow had torn the subclavian artery, and he’d bled out in minutes. Then someone added a head injury to the picture: a fall, or a last blow to the skull.

It didn’t close.

The same finds, different deaths

Look closer, and even the scene splits in two. Some, studying how the objects lay scattered around the body, decided Ötzi had died right there, and that the ice had dragged his gear about over the millennia. Others, from the same objects, read a burial: he’d died down in the valley in spring, been carried up high and laid to rest with his things.

The same handful of finds, two different deaths.

His last hours divided researchers too.

From the pollen left in his gut, someone traced a route: in his final thirty-three hours Ötzi had gone down to the warm broadleaf woods, at twelve hundred metres, and then climbed back above three thousand.

Some interpreted that rapid descent and ascent as evidence of flight.

But his stomach said otherwise. For years they’d thought it empty; then it turned out to be full. A few hours before he died, Ötzi had eaten well: ibex and red deer, einkorn, cooked over a fire. A man on the run doesn’t stop to eat like that.

Maybe he’d stopped to rest, and the arrow caught him off guard, from behind?

The case reopens

In 2022, just over thirty years after the discovery, a reappraisal shifted everything again. Researchers who study how ice preserves and moves whatever lies on its surface concluded that the Tisenjoch scene is no snapshot of a death.

The body and the gear had slid into a gully over centuries of melt. The ice may have arranged what we see today, over five thousand years. Even the blow to the head might be damage that came later.

The supposed “time capsule” had never existed.

The latest reconstructions, from 2025, reassessed the arrow wound itself.

The bleeding, they say, was mostly internal, too little to kill him outright. Ötzi may have survived for hours. One of the two teams adds that there’s no proof of a head blow at all, and that the cracks in the skull can be explained by the ice.

They also point out that his right hand, the wounded one, seems to have been bandaged when he died. Maybe it’s no accident that among the mosses found with Ötzi there’s Sphagnum, which was used to dress wounds.

So, in 1991, in the days after the Similaun mummy turned up by chance, we knew how Ötzi had died. Today we know less.

Every answer has called the one before it into question.

The axe remains

The axe remains, a precious thing back then, and with it the old question: why didn’t the killer take it?

If Ötzi survived for hours and dragged himself higher, the archer may never have reached the body, and there was no axe to take because nobody got that far.

If he was buried, the axe was a gift. If he was ambushed while fleeing, it was left in haste. Three stories, and no way to choose between them.

Someone has pointed out a simple thing. The likeliest reconstruction involves one thaw after another, a confused sequence that is hard to tell as a story. The old reconstruction, the flight and the sudden freeze, makes a good story. And maybe that’s why it’s still told.

The axe remains.

Tuscan copper, on a piece of hide, in a crack in the rock, where someone left it five thousand years ago.

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Further reading

Ötzi is housed at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, and its website is the place to follow him: iceman.it. It’s a rich, well-kept resource: the body and its equipment, the full research history, and the latest discoveries as they’re published.

Bibliography

• W. Müller et al., Origin and Migration of the Alpine Iceman, Science 302 (2003).

• E. Egarter Vigl, P. Gostner, Insight: Report of Radiological-Forensic Findings on the Iceman, Journal of Archaeological Science 29 (2002).

• A. Nerlich, B. Bachmeier, A. Zink, S. Thalhammer, E. Egarter Vigl, Ötzi had a wound on his right hand, The Lancet 362 (2003).

• P. Pernter, P. Gostner, E. Egarter Vigl, F. Rühli, Radiologic proof for the Iceman’s cause of death (ca. 5300 BP), Journal of Archaeological Science 34 (2007).

• K. Oeggl et al., The reconstruction of the last itinerary of “Ötzi”…, Quaternary Science Reviews 26 (2007).

• A. Heiss, K. Oeggl, The plant macro-remains from the Iceman site (Tisenjoch), Vegetation History and Archaeobotany (2009).

• A. Vanzetti, M. Vidale, M. Gallinaro, D. Frayer, L. Bondioli, The iceman as a burial, Antiquity 84 (2010).

• P. Gostner, P. Pernter, G. Bonatti, A. Graefen, A. Zink, New radiological insights into the life and death of the Tyrolean Iceman, Journal of Archaeological Science 38 (2011).

• G. Artioli et al., Long-distance connections in the Copper Age: New evidence from the Alpine Iceman’s copper axe, PLOS ONE 12(7) (2017).

• L. Pilø, T. Reitmaier, A. Nesje, A. Fischer, J. Barrett, Ötzi, 30 years on: A reappraisal of the depositional and post-depositional history of the find, The Holocene 33 (2022).

• J. Weber, J. Wahl, M. Samadelli, A. Zink, New insights on Ötzi’s injuries from a clinical perspective, Scientific Reports (2025).

• C. Villa, N. Lynnerup et al., Ötzi the Iceman: forensic 3D reconstructions of a 5300-year-ago murder case, International Journal of Legal Medicine (2025).

I take them apart to see. Every so often three of them belong together: here they are.

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Libro/Book

Foglio/Sheet

Codice/Code

Read enough of them and you have walked through a wood after all.

Andrea Dandolo, a doge and chronicler, is writing about the Peace of Venice: the year Alexander III and Frederick Barbarossa made their peace, after Legnano. The men of Ancona present two of them, he says, unam Papæ, Imperatori aliam.

They’re a mark of honor.

The word is already there: umbrella. It comes from ombrella, from ombra, from the Latin umbra. It says what the thing does, or did: shade. In hot countries shade is a privilege, and someone holds it over you while you walk.

Four centuries on, it’s still a sun thing.

In a 1595 album, the keepsake book of a German soldier passing through Italy, a rider on a white horse holds up a ribbed parasol, fringed with gold. Beside him, the caption: “A questo modo se cavalchano l’istate in Itallia.” This is how they ride in summer in Italy.

Sixteen years later an English traveler, Thomas Coryat, writes it down too. Between Pizzighettone and Cremona he sees Italian horsemen carrying it by hand, the handle braced against one thigh, a canopy of leather:

things that minister shadow unto them for shelter against the scorching heate of the Sunne.

Against the sun. He calls it by the Italian word: umbrella.

Then the word travels north, to England, and there the little shade changes its meaning. Against the rain.

At first it’s a women’s thing, a lady’s accessory. The first men to open one in the street get laughed at.

Around the middle of the 18th century Jonas Hanway walks through London in the wet with his umbrella up, and people jeer at him. They take him for a foreigner, a fop. Probably for a cheapskate too, since he’d rather keep himself dry than pay for a carriage like everyone else.

From the end of the century the habit spreads fast, at least in the cities.

The word, though, stays unchanged. You still carry a “little shade” even when you open it to keep dry.

The French were more honest. They had the same fossil word, ombrelle, taken from Italian. But for the thing that keeps off the rain they found a new, plain name: parapluie, “against the rain,” built on the model of parasol, “against the sun.”

The word first shows up in 1622. Over time the shade stayed with the sun, and the rain got its own name.

The thing you open tonight against the rain is still called a shade. Once they held it over a pope. Now you leave it on the train.

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Bibliography

• Andrea Dandolo, Chronica (XIV sec.), sotto l’anno 1177, cit. in Du Cange, Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, s.v. “umbrella”.

• Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities (Londra, 1611).

• John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes (Londra, 1598), s.v. “ombrella”.

• Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “umbrella”.

• Trésor de la langue française informatisé (CNRTL), s.vv. “parapluie”, “parasol”, “ombrelle”.

• Les Œuvres de Tabarin (1622).

• Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel (1690), s.v. “parapluye”.

• Chronique bordeloise (1580).

A huge man in a red coat stands in the middle of a room. He raises his arm, and a man taller than average walks under it. He’s dressed as a gentleman: a tricorn hat, lace at the cuffs and buckles on his shoes.

A sheet pinned to the wall explains to visitors: “True Portrait of the Giant Cornelio Magrat the Irishman”.

Longhi painted it on commission from the patrician Giovanni Grimani dei Servi, the same man who had commissioned the rhinoceros six years earlier.

The boy’s name was Cornelius Magrath, born near Nenagh, in County Tipperary, in 1736 or 1737.

Until he was 11 he was a child like any other, then he started growing fast.

At 15 his legs began to hurt, so they sent him to Youghal, on the Cork coast, to bathe in the sea: they thought saltwater would heal him.

People crowded around this extraordinarily tall boy, until someone convinced him to exhibit himself for money.

From Youghal he went to Bristol, then London. In January 1753 his promoters ran an ad in the Daily Advertiser: the prodigy could be seen at the Peacock, at Charing Cross, “from eight in the morning till ten at night.”

Then Paris, and the great cities of the continent.

The signs changed the numbers at every stop. In 1752 the London Magazine gave him as 7 feet 9¾ inches (about 2.38 m); in London, the next year, 7 feet 3 inches (about 2.21 m), “the finest and best proportioned figure ever seen,” able to beat Cajanus the Swede, a rival giant already on the market.

They were sideshow numbers, inflated and never the same.

In Germany an engraving showed him well-built, straight-limbed, pleasant-featured, dressed in the fashion of the day: a fine big lad.

But that portrait was not truthful. More than a century later the bones showed it, at Trinity College: Cunningham (1891) described the deformities of the skull and the knock-knees; Swanzy (1894), studying the same skull, concluded that Magrath’s eyesight was probably failing.

Magrath had acromegaly, a disease medicine wouldn’t have a name for until 1886.

Longhi, though, painted what he saw. In the painting you can make out the uneven eye sockets and the crooked knees.

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There’s only one measurement taken seriously while Magrath was alive. In Florence, in July 1757, the anatomist Giovanni Bianchi met him and measured him with a cord: 7 Parisian feet (about 2.26 m).

Bianchi noticed that everyone passed under his outstretched arms, the same gesture Longhi fixed on canvas. Then he wrote to a friend:

His conductors (…) should sometimes take him for a walk, especially by the sea, all the more because he was born in a maritime and cold country; but the desire for greater gain will perhaps cause them to lose all.

So, a contemporary saw the exploitation and wrote it down, back in 1757.

Bianchi understood something else too: the growth was a disease. He worked it out from the parents of ordinary height and the onset at 11, more than a century before doctors read it off the bones.

Magrath reached Venice that same year.

In a city of masks and merchants, a giant in the middle of a room drew a crowd. Longhi painted him and, as with the rhinoceros, he painted the people watching: the faces behind the masks, the poses.

In 1760 Magrath came back to Ireland with a fever he’d caught in Flanders. Already sick, he advertised himself again: at the Golden Ball in College Green, Dublin, “from nine in the morning till eight at night.”

Soon after, he stepped onto a stage. The Theatre Royal was running a pantomime, Jack the Giant-Killer. The part of the Giant, the bill said, was “performed by the REAL GIANT, being his only Appearance on any Stage.”

And sadly it was. On 16 May that year he died, not yet twenty-five.

A few days later, close by at Trinity College, they held the lecture on his dissection, “before a numerous audience.”

A Dublin obituary wrote that the skeleton, “on account of its extraordinary size, will amuse the curious and fill posterity with wonder.”

Cornelius Magrath’s skeleton is still at Trinity College. In 2011 it was displayed for the 300th anniversary of the medical school.

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Bibliography

• Eileen Kane, “An Irish Giant,” Irish Arts Review Yearbook, 1990/1991, pp. 96-98. JSTOR 20492631.

• D. J. Cunningham, “Cornelius Magrath, the Irish Giant,” Man, vol. 3 (1903), pp. 49-50. JSTOR 2840853. (Abstract of a paper read at the British Association, Belfast, 11 September 1902.)

• D. J. Cunningham, “The Skeleton of the Irish Giant, Cornelius Magrath,” The Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. 29 (1887-1892), pp. 553-612. JSTOR 30078824. (Bianchi’s letter is quoted from here, in Henry Dixon’s English translation; letter dated Rimini, 12 July 1757.)

• H. R. Swanzy, “Note on Defective Vision and Other Ocular Derangements in Cornelius Magrath, the Irish Giant,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. 3 (1893-1896), pp. 524-528. JSTOR 20490478. (Read 10 December 1894.)

• J. Buckley, “Cornelius Magrath, the Irish Giant” (Notes and Queries), Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, 2nd series, vol. IV (1898), pp. 139-140.

The man behind it holds a whip and a sawn-off horn, the animal’s horn.

An inscription works as both caption and certificate:

Vero Ritratto di un Rinocerotto condotto in Venezia l’anno 1751 fatto per mano di Pietro Longhi, per commissione Del N.O. Giouani Grimani dei Servi Patrisio Veneto

True Portrait of a Rhinoceros brought to Venice in the year 1751 made by the hand of Pietro Longhi, commissioned by the Nobleman Giovanni Grimani of the Servi, Venetian Patrician.

Grimani, the patrician who paid for it, wanted the painting to say one thing: this rhinoceros was real. It had stood there, in that room, in 1751.

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The animal had a name, and by 1751 it was already famous: Clara.

Clara was born in Bengal, around 1738. Hunters killed her mother; she survived. A director of the Dutch East India Company, Jan Albert Sichterman, took her in and let her wander his estate like a pet. They say she was tame.

In 1740 a ship’s captain, Douwe Mout van der Meer, bought her. He loaded her aboard and brought her to Europe. She landed at Rotterdam on 22 July 1741, and was on show within days.

The crowds were good enough that in 1744 van der Meer quit the Dutch East India Company to do nothing else. For seventeen years, from Rotterdam to London, Clara moved from city to city: Vienna, Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, Paris, and down to Venice. People paid to see her.

In Paris, she became a fashion. People wore their hair à la rhinocéros. Jean-Baptiste Oudry painted her life-size in 1749, a canvas as tall as the animal. At Meissen, Johann Joachim Kaendler made porcelain figures of her.

They're said to have rubbed fish oil into her skin to keep it supple, and they moved her in a wooden wagon built to her size. She'd lost her horn in Rome: sawn off for safety, or worn down in close captivity.

Until then, in Europe, the rhinoceros had been mostly an image.

In 1515 Albrecht Dürer engraved one he’d never seen, plated like a knight in armor. That print became the rhinoceros for more than two centuries, copied into books as if drawn from life.

Clara was the thing in the flesh, something you could walk around and draw while you watched. That’s why Grimani had them write: true.

Clara reached Venice for the carnival of 1751.

In a city of masks and merchants, a fabulous creature from India in the middle of the room drew a crowd. Longhi painted her, and even more he painted the people watching: the faces behind the masks, the poses. The rhinoceros is calm. It’s the Venetians who put on the show.

From a river in Bengal to the stages of half of Europe: for seventeen years Clara toured the continent like a seasoned diva, the custom wagon, the portraitists waiting for her in every town.

She died in London on 14 April 1758, still on the road. She was about twenty.

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The Leopard is a novel to which I feel deeply connected. It tells a crucial moment in Italian history — the Risorgimento — through the disenchanted eyes of an aristocrat belonging to the old order, a man who watches the future advance and tries, as much as possible, to allow the past to survive.

Over time, I’ve found myself returning again and again to this novel and the world it portrays.

This collection grew out of that.

Who was the real Leopard?

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Novel

The Art of Changing To Stay The Same: Understanding “Gattopardismo”

Scenes and Behind-the-Scenes from the Film

A small museum on the Janiculum Hill, at Largo di Porta San Pancrazio, is dedicated to the short-lived Roman Republic of 1849. It stands on the site of some of the main clashes between republican forces and the French troops sent to restore Pope Pius IX to temporal power.

Among the objects preserved here is a proclamation by the three triumvirs of the Republic, announcing their decision to resist to the end.

They were under no illusions.

Lacking support from the major European powers, the young Republic could rely mainly on the commitment of volunteers who had come from across Italy and from abroad, often poorly equipped and with limited military experience.

One of the triumvirs, Giuseppe Mazzini, had already faced several failures, yet he remained committed. He had returned from exile after receiving a brief message from a young Genoese, Goffredo Mameli: “Rome Republic Come”

Giuseppe Garibaldi, a professional revolutionary deeply committed to the cause of Italian unity, also came to defend the Republic.

The defense lasted only a few months, and many young volunteers were killed in the fighting.

Among them was Goffredo Mameli himself, aged 21, the author of those three words that had brought Mazzini back. He also wrote the words of what is now the Italian national anthem.

Little more than a decade later, the unification of Italy finally became a reality.

Ironically, it took place with the support of French troops.

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The manifesto - one of the tools of cultural and political intervention favored by the Futurists - is written in French and proposes a radical reform of dress: bright colors, asymmetries, dynamic lines, and functional simplicity.

The Futurist suit is the uniform of a new humanity in motion, driven by speed and decisive action.

The outbreak of the Great War

At the end of June 1914, in Sarajevo, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand sets off a chain reaction that, within a few weeks, drags Europe into war - the “war, the world’s only hygiene” invoked by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in his Manifesto of Futurism (1909).

Italy, bound by the Triple Alliance yet uncertain about what to do, initially chooses neutrality.

It is in this climate of uncertainty and tension that the manifesto changes its nature.

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A Program Against Neutrality

On 11 September 1914 a new, expanded version of the manifesto appears. It is written in Italian, bearing a new and unmistakable title: Il vestito antineutrale. Manifesto futurista (The Anti-Neutral Suit. Futurist Manifesto).

It is more of a political rewriting than a simple translation of the French text; to get around censorship, its propaganda content was camouflaged behind the seemingly harmless topics of garments and colors.

The shift from the Futurist suit to the anti-neutral suit marks a qualitative leap: fashion becomes a tool of interventionism.

The declared target is the neutrality of the colors then in fashion, but the sartorial attack conceals a broader aim: Italy’s political neutrality.

Not by chance, the manifesto opens with two epigraphs that immediately set the tone. On the one hand, the famous line from the first Manifesto of Futurism of 1909:

We glorify war, the world’s only hygiene.

On the other, a reference less immediate yet rich in meaning:

Long live Asinari di Bernezzo!

the Risorgimento hero celebrated by Marinetti as early as 1910 for his irredentism.

The message is clear: war is seen as the completion of the Risorgimento, the settling of accounts with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which still controls Trento and Trieste.

In the Anti-Neutral Suit this vision takes the form of a political program. The manifesto lists what “today we want to abolish”: neutral colors; pedantic, “Teutonic” shapes; striped and checked patterns; mourning clothes; symmetry; starched collars and cuffs; useless buttons.

It is a list that strikes at the heart of bourgeois taste, linking it to immobility, cowardice and death. Heroic deaths, it declares, should not be dressed in black, but remembered in red.

One thinks and acts as one dresses. Since neutrality is the synthesis of all forms of past-worship, we Futurists today brandish these anti-neutral suits, that is, joyfully warlike ones.

By contrast, the manifesto defines the qualities of Futurist clothing: it must be

1. aggressive, able to multiply the courage of the strong and unsettle the weak;

2. agile, to support the surge of running and charging;

3. dynamic, with geometric patterns that inspire a love of danger and a hatred of immobility;

4. simple and comfortable, suited to aiming a rifle or plunging into water;

5. hygienic, so the skin can breathe during marches;

6. joyful;

7. illuminating, made of phosphorescent fabrics, capable of igniting boldness, casting light when it rains, and correcting the greyness of dusk;

8. volitional, imperious like commands issued on the battlefield;

9. asymmetrical;

10. short-lived, to renew pleasure constantly;

11. variable, through “modifiers” (pneumatic buttons) that allow the garment’s shape to be changed at will.

The suit must be an amplifier of energy, almost a moral prosthesis.

Futurist shoes, of course, will be “fit to cheerfully kick all neutralists.”

And Futurist colors are vivid, “muscular”… As listed by the manifesto, they read like a Futurist poem in their own right:

violettissimi, rossissimi, turchinissimi, verdissimi, gialloni, aranciooooni, vermiglioni.

(purplest, reddest, turquoisest, greenest, big yellows, big oraaanges, vermilions.)

The manifesto is enriched by several models designed by artists of the group.

These include the white-red-green day suit (the Italian tricolor) by the “Futurist free-word poet Marinetti,” the red one-piece suit (the forerunner of the jumpsuit) by the Futurist painter Carrà, and the green sweater with red and white jacket by the “Futurist noise-artist Russolo, volunteer cyclist.”

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From Page to Street

In December 1914 a third version of the manifesto appears, a reprint of the official version but with a different image on the front page: the tricolor suit worn by the “Futurist free-word poet Cangiullo” during demonstrations against the neutralist professors of the University of Rome.

The caption specifies the context: the protests of 11–12 December 1914.

By now, the manifesto has become a militant document, tied to concrete events and real clashes. Within a few months, the Futurist suit has turned into the anti-neutral suit.

What has changed is not only the language, from French to Italian, but the very function of the project. Here, fashion does not serve to mark an aesthetic avant-garde, but to declare a political position.

The following year, on 24 May 1915, the Futurists finally get what they want: Italy enters the war against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is no surprise that many of them volunteer for the front, often paying with their lives for the consistency between ideas and actions.

In 1914, before the war is fought, Futurism puts it on. The dressed body becomes the first battlefield.

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A quick look in the dictionary told me it means something like “someone taking advantage of the weak”. A theme that, unfortunately, seems to be quite fashionable these days.

Apart from the fact that the sound of the word is so pleasing that I would gladly start a petition to bring it back into use, its origin is just as curious and compelling.

The term comes from a certain Fabrizio Maramaldo, a Neapolitan mercenary captain active in sixteenth-century Italy.

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His military career is said to have begun after he was banished from his hometown for killing his first wife. An encouraging start.

He entered the service of powerful employers, among them the Gonzaga family and Emperor Charles V of Habsburg. In the Emperor’s service, he took part in the infamous Sack of Rome in 1527.

In 1530, still under imperial command, he marched against Florence, targeting the Florentine Republic which had expelled the Medici from power. It was in this context that captain Maramaldo made his name, leaving behind the word that would forever carry his infamy.

In August 1530, Maramaldo clashed with Florentine forces led by Francesco Ferrucci at the Battle of Gavinana. It seems the two men entered the confrontation carrying a considerable load of personal resentment.

Questions of wounded honor. During an earlier siege of Volterra, Ferrucci had ordered the killing of one of Maramaldo’s envoys, sent to demand the city’s surrender. For his part, Ferrucci had the man killed after he returned a second time. On the first occasion, he had merely been driven away, with the threat of hanging should he come back.

It is also said that the envoy was not, in fact, an envoy at all, but a simple drummer, and that this lack of respect enraged Ferrucci.

Be that as it may, Maramaldo’s troops prevailed at Gavinana. When the fighting was over, the wounded Ferrucci was brought before Maramaldo. Maramaldo struck him and then ordered his men to finish him off.

Before dying, Ferrucci is said to have uttered the famous words that sealed his enemy’s reputation: “You vile man, you kill a dead man.”

Or perhaps none of this happened at all.

It is unclear whether the episode truly occurred or whether it was later shaped by pro-republican propaganda. What is certain is that the image of the vile Maramaldo, in imperial pay, tormenting Ferrucci, the defender of liberty, was eagerly taken up by Risorgimento-era rhetoric.

In any case, only a few days after the Battle of Gavinana, Florence surrendered to the imperial forces and accepted the return of the Medici.

Maramaldo died in 1552, having retired from what was, by all accounts, a respectable military career.

Historical memory has not been kind to the Neapolitan mercenary captain: today, in Italy, calling someone a maramaldo is a picturesque insult, with a distinctly vintage flavor.

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Snow shoveler with frozen hands
Avon Fortunato, a tinsmith aged 63, living at San Polo 952, being unemployed, offered his services to the wardens overseeing the men shoveling the snow that had fallen days earlier.

On the 14th of this month, as he began this work, he developed symptoms of freezing in his hands and yesterday, in the doctor’s judgment, he had to go to the Hospital, where he was admitted and where he was declared likely to recover in 25 days, barring complications.

(Gazzetta di Venezia, Thursday 21 February 1929)

Mr. Avon Fortunato, a tinsmith by trade but unemployed at the time, was among the volunteers who at the beginning of 1929 made themselves available to the authorities to shovel snow in Venice.

In the early months of 1929 a major cold wave hit Europe, and Venice was not spared.

How does a city of water like Venice function when the water, its main means of communication, is frozen?

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Snowfall (January 1929)

Local reports told of a heavy snowfall at the end of January, one unlike any seen for a long time in Venice.

Venetians reacted with a mix of surprise and amusement: some brought out skis for a short run in St Mark’s Square, and children played snowball fights in the calli.

At the same time, the disruptions caused by the snow were not overlooked: cleaning and clearing the narrow Venetian streets and the 310 bridges that connected the city internally required a considerable amount of extra staff, volunteers such as Mr. Avon Fortunato, employed by the Municipality or by the company holding the contract for bridge maintenance.

There were numerous reports of falls due to ice, and even of injuries caused by snowballs rashly thrown by mischievous boys in the streets.

A drop in temperatures was expected for February, and it arrived on schedule.

Freeze (February 1929)

At the beginning of February, the so-called “Presages Office” of the Magistrato delle Acque recorded polar temperatures that led to the freezing of the lagoon.

Navigation grew increasingly difficult and, day after day, the city was gradually cut off. Moreover, links between one island and another were also blocked, and some resident families had to be assisted by military means.

Supplies from the mainland began to fail: first milk, then vegetables, eggs, fish and meat. In the mornings, water pipes were frozen, causing problems even for sanitary facilities.

Trains were delayed or failed to arrive altogether. Even the luxury train, the Orient Simplon Express, built up serious delays:

Yesterday at 3.14 p.m. the Orient Simplon Express arrived in Venice… from the day before. Due to violent snowstorms encountered in Yugoslavia, it had built up an exceptionally large delay of twenty-seven and a half hours; it was in fact scheduled to arrive at 11.42 on Monday morning.

(Gazzetta di Venezia, Tuesday 5 February 1929)

The freeze severely affected the much-anticipated Venetian Carnival: “this year, whether or not due to atmospheric elements allied against all outdoor amusement and all square festivities, Carnival did not exist” (Gazzetta di Venezia, Monday 11 February 1929).

And further:

It seemed that the harsh breath of an imported bora wind, since Venice does not recall an equally violent one blowing from the first quadrant, penetrated even into buildings.

As a result, the vigils and festivities organized indoors were affected by the general icy conditions and could not provide the press with enough material to note the traditional crowds of the past.

(Gazzetta di Venezia, Monday 11 February 1929)

To the rhythm marked by the bulletins of the Presages Office, frequent falls of men were recorded and, on the mainland, also of horses, especially in the area of the Mestre railway station.

Shelters for the poor overflowed with homeless and indigents who could not afford heated housing. Some unfortunate individuals died frozen.

Since the ice prevented the use of funeral boats, the authorities converted two vaporetti to transport coffins to the cemetery.

Icebreaker

By an irony of fate, on those very days a film entitled “Krassin” was being shown in preview at the Teatro Malibran.

Krassin was the name of a Soviet icebreaker ship that the year before had played a key role in the rescue of the airship Italia, wrecked on the Arctic pack ice.

The airship Italia was part of a scientific expedition to the North Pole led by Umberto Nobile and financed by the Italian state. During the return journey, on 25 May 1928, it crashed onto the Arctic ice because of a storm.

The survivors set up camp on the pack in a tent coloured with red paint recovered on board, the “red tent”, which became the reference point for the searches.

The rescue operations lasted forty-nine days, caused the death of nine men and also cost the life of the famous explorer Roald Amundsen, who disappeared while taking part in the searches with his seaplane.

The Gazzetta reports that some boats used in those cold days to ply the frozen lagoon were nicknamed “Krassin”: this was the case of boat number 5, which ensured the connection with the island of Sacca Sessola, home of a sanatorium for the treatment of tuberculosis.

Winter games

The spectacle attracted hordes of amateur photographers “armed with Kodaks”, who walked across the frozen lagoon and portrayed this unusual sight.

There were those who explored the lagoon on skates, on skis or on snowshoes.

It is reported that at midday, to faithfully recreate the scene, a group of cheerful revellers (heaven forbid there should be none in this world!) carried a table, chairs, food and a stove onto the ice, and set themselves a small lunch laid out according to all the rules.

(Gazzetta di Venezia, Sunday 17 February 1929)

Toward the end of February the freeze began to ease and the lagoon, slowly, freed itself.

Boats resumed crossing the canals and life began to flow again in the calli.

A few months later, the Gazzetta announced on its front page: “The new Statute of the Fascist Party – ‘The Party is a civil militia at the service of the Nation’”.

On the last page, on that same day, a small article also appeared: “Cyclone on the New York Stock Exchange – Billions of dollars lost to speculation”.

It was 30 October 1929.

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This is what I wrote:

Her pose follows the formal conventions of court portraiture, but Bronzino reveals who this child truly was through careful details. He likely painted her between 1542 and 1545, some time after Bianca de’ Medici (called Bia) had already died.

Cosimo I’s illegitimate daughter lived at the Florentine ducal court, surrounded by affection: her father loved her, as did her stepmother, Eleonora di Toledo, and the rest of the family. Then, sudden illness claimed her in 1542. She was only five.

Bronzino dresses her in white, a nod to her name (Bianca means “white”) and innocence. She wears pearls and a medallion with her father’s portrait, adorned like a grown woman. Yet her hands tell a different story. They fidget with the belt’s tassel, press the chair’s arm with restless energy: these are the hands of a child who would rather be playing than sitting still.

Bronzino captures her as she was: not the woman she might have become, but an impatient little girl dressed like a princess, frozen forever in her finery.

Today, visitors can meet Bia at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Recently I met Bia in Florence.

I had not been looking for her as I walked through the endless corridors of the Uffizi; she appeared before me all of a sudden. The colours were more vivid, and the lines clearer, than in the thousands of images of her circulating online.

In that moment, Bia was truly there with me.

I could only think back to her story, to her short life – short like that of many other children of her time who died young.

People say that in the past, when death was everywhere, it was met with greater fatalism and resignation than in our present age of denial. I cannot say.

As I stood there looking at Bia, another portrait suddenly came to mind, seen elsewhere and from another period of Italian history.

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In Rome stands one of the most renowned monumental cemeteries established in nineteenth-century Italy, the Verano. Many notable figures and members of prominent families of the Capital are buried in this large resting place.

The Verano contains more than 250 portraits made by Filippo Severati, whose distinctive technique (enamel on lava) has preserved the faces of the people buried there. These images are vivid and show, in their details (hairstyles, jewellery…), the period in which they were made.

Among Severati’s portraits is that of Marietta Fiori who, as her headstone records, died on 22 February 1873, “aged 4 months 6 days 12”. Her parents were Giovanni and Antonia.

More than 330 years separate Bia from Marietta, yet these two girls, both around five years old, shared the same fate.

We do not know exactly what caused Bia’s death: perhaps a malarial fever. Other frequent causes of childhood death at the time, beyond cyclical plague epidemics, were gastrointestinal disorders and smallpox.

By contrast, we do know that Marietta died of diphtheria. I have noticed that at Verano hers is not the only child’s grave whose headstone lists this cause of death in those years. Indeed, looking through the Reports on civil-status activity for the years 1872 and 1873, I found that two epidemics were recorded in 1872 in Rome (smallpox and diphtheria), which caused very high child mortality that year and continued well into 1873.

Diphtheria, an infectious disease affecting the throat and the respiratory tract, was then one of the leading causes of childhood mortality. Only a few years later, in 1894, the arrival of the antidiphtheritic serum began to reduce mortality significantly.

I had not expected to encounter them on the same day, Bia in Florence and Marietta in my memory.

And now, when I think of one, I inevitably think of the other: two blonde girls, dressed in white, wearing jewellery meant for adults yet keeping, in their painted features, the freshness of an untouched childhood.

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Two male members of the family reportedly revealed the jewels’ whereabouts only in 2022, one hundred years after the death of Austria’s last emperor, Charles I.

The news comes just weeks after the spectacular theft of Empress Eugénie’s jewels from the Louvre.
The Austrian treasures, however, were not stolen — they had simply vanished.

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From Vienna to Exile

In November 1918, after the defeat in the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was collapsing.

Charles I ordered his chamberlain to secure the family’s treasure: the jewels reached Switzerland, but within three years they had disappeared.

No official trace, only speculation: a theft, perhaps a slow sale, diamond by diamond. Or maybe a pledge to finance the emperor’s failed attempt to reclaim the Hungarian throne.

The truth now seems now more straightforward. Empress Zita had carried them with her on her journeys across three continents.

No shadowy brokers or political intrigues, just a woman protecting what was left of a dynasty.

The Map of a Vanished Europe

Zita’s itinerary mirrors an entire continent reshaping itself.

Hungary, Switzerland, Hungary again. After the failed restoration, came the exile in Madeira, where Charles died of pneumonia at thirty-four.

Then the Basque Country, eleven years in Belgium, the Nazi invasion of 1940, the flight through France toward the Spanish frontier, then Portugal. The visa for the United States arrived here, when Europe was in the midst of another world war.

Final destination: Quebec.

With her, that same small suitcase.

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The Florentine Diamond

Among the recovered pieces is the so-called Florentine Diamond, a 137-carat yellow stone that has crossed five centuries, changing hands at every turn of history.

Legend says it once belonged to Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, who carried it when he fell at the battle of Nancy (1477).

It later passed to the Medici in Florence, then to Francis Stephen of Lorraine.
When he married Maria Theresa of Austria, the diamond entered the Habsburg patrimony.

Francis Stephen had it set into the imperial crown in 1745.

Nearly two centuries later, Charles I sent it to Switzerland for safekeeping, and in 1921 it vanished.

Rumors and Reappearances

Theories multiplied over the decades.

In 1923, a 99-carat yellow diamond surfaced on the American market, thought by some to be the cut-down Florentine.

In 1966, a Swiss jeweler claimed that Habsburg jewels had been offered to him, many already dismantled.

In 1981, Christie’s auctioned another yellow stone (82 carats this time) again suspected to be a fragment of the legendary diamond.

But, in reality, it had never left.

It had been there all along, intact, inside a Canadian bank vault.

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The Secrets of the Vaults

What will happen now to the recovered treasure remains to be seen; an international dispute seems inevitable.

The story brings to mind another rediscovery: the presumed portrait of Isabella d’Este by Leonardo da Vinci, which resurfaced in 2013 in the vault of a Swiss bank, sparking an international legal battle.

Same pattern: disappearance, oblivion, and an unexpected reappearance in a far-off vault.

Vaults, it seems, hold more than we ever admit to having lost.

Sources

Article by Der Spiegel: The Priceless Habsburg Jewels Are Found - In a Canadian Safe Deposit Box

Article by The New York Times: The Florentine Diamond Resurfaces After 100 Years in Hiding

More on the long, long history of the Florentine Diamond on Wikipedia

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We, Laurentius the Captain aforesaid, (…) decree that the said Matteuccia, having been personally brought before us, that she may not glory in her wickedness and depravity, nor that others, desiring to attempt like deeds, may take example from her, shall be made a public example:

with a mitre placed upon her head, and her hands bound behind her back, she shall be set upon a certain ass, and shall be led and conducted personally to the public place of justice accustomed, where such judgments of justice are wont to be executed (…).

And there she shall be burned with fire, in such wise and manner that she shall utterly die, and that her soul shall be separated from her body.

[translation and emphasis (bold) are mine]

We know very little about Matteuccia di Francesco, who was sentenced to death by fire as a witch in the Umbrian town of Todi on March 20, 1428.

What we do know comes from the trial records: Matteuccia came from the small village of Ripabianca, in the countryside around Todi, a modest community in central Italy.

Her biography is brief; the list of accusations against her, much longer.

Hers is among the earliest documented witch trials in Italy, decades before Europe’s great wave of persecutions swept through the sixteenth century.

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The Accusations

Matteuccia di Francesco (…) a woman of evil life and reputation, a public enchantress, sorceress, and witch, against whom, by the manner and procedure of inquisition, we have proceeded formally, because (…) it came to the ears and notice of the said lord Captain and of his court that the said Matteuccia had not God before her eyes, but rather the enemy of humankind.

(…) many and innumerable times she did enchant the bodies, heads, and other members of the afflicted, both personally and also by signs which she carried upon herself, such as girdles, caps, and other like things, for the aforesaid and other infirmities; and with bands or cords, measuring the said girdles, she would utter her enchantments to many and diverse persons, in divers places and times.

[translation and emphasis (bold) are mine]

The cold, methodical language of the notary strikes like a hammer: slow, rhythmic, inescapable.

Each new “Item non contenta predictis…” (“not content with the crimes already described”) adds another blow, pushing Matteuccia further into a corner.

Then comes the climax: the confession. Voluntary, the notary insists.

And since it is manifest to us and to our court that all and every of the aforesaid things contained in the said inquisition are true, in the places and times expressed in the said inquisition, as appears from the lawful confessions of the said Matteuccia, inquisited, made before us and our court, spontaneously and lawfully in judgment.

And because she has thus spontaneously confessed, she has declared herself to renounce her defence and the time granted for her defence.

[translation and emphasis (bold) are mine]

What follows is the formal condemnation, the humiliating procession through the town, and the fire.

The story of Matteuccia ends here: one of the first, not the last, of an age that was beginning to call itself “modern”.

Matteuccia’s Remedies

Matteuccia was a woman of the people, and it was to her that people turned for relief from pain or for a cure for a wounded heart.

From the surviving papers emerges a small world where the ailments of the body and of the soul blend with ritual religion, superstition and sensuality.

She is said to have spoken incantations to ease her clients’ suffering: some, apparently, worked; others, apparently, brought death.
There is a paradox here: spells intended to heal also became evidence of a pact with the devil.

Matteuccia’s specialty was love magic: wives seeking to rekindle desire, betrayed women, those wishing to avoid pregnancy and men yearning for another man’s wife —all turned to her.

For each of them, Matteuccia had an answer.

A certain man and his wife from the castle of Collismedio, in the county of Todi, went to the castle of Ripabianca.
The said wife went to Matteuccia, complaining of her husband and saying that he treated her badly; therefore she begged Matteuccia to give her some remedy whereby her husband might restore to her the gifts he had formerly given and cease to despise and insult her, as he did every day.

And the said Matteuccia gave to the aforesaid woman an egg and an herb called “costa cavallina”, and told her to cook them together and give them to her husband to eat, assuring her that thus he would fall in love with her again.

And after some days, as the said woman did according to her instruction, the husband, enamoured and almost mad with love, remained in such condition for three days.

[translation and emphasis (bold) are mine]

Her remedies ranged from harmless (hair, water, salt) to disturbing (the belt of a virgin girl) and macabre (the bones of pagan dead exhumed from their graves, the fat of a drowned man, the blood of children).

Sacred and Profane

In the formulas Matteuccia spoke, Christianity was far from absent. She invoked Christ, the Virgin, saints and holy women who blessed, commanded, protected.

In 1426, it is said, she healed the sick by throwing three grains of salt into the fire while reciting this spell:

Worm, little worm, who holdest heart and soul,
who holdest little lungs,
who holdest little liver,
who holdest the moving of the nose,
who holdest the moving of the head,
who holdest the moving of the feet,
who holdest every good of man.

Saint Susanna casts linen forth,
Saint Jolecta throws linen forth,
Saint Bruna turns to the backside and throws linen forth —
one by one, until none shall remain.
Amen.

[translation, formatting and emphasis (bold) are mine]

The spell has the cadence of a prayer: saints called by name, and an Amen to conclude. It borrows from the liturgy, learned by heart and repurposed to heal a body, or to bind a heart.

It is religion (and medicine) spoken in the idiom of ordinary people, reusing familiar symbols like candles and wine and imbuing them with magical meaning.

Sacred and profane coexisted in the same hand, a woman’s hand.

And it is precisely in that confusion between prayer and spell, between blessing and curse administered by someone outside official authority, that suspicion quietly took hold.

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March 20, 1428

The sentence was carried out on March 20, 1428.

Matteuccia was led through the streets of Todi on the back of a donkey, her hands tied behind her, a mitre of infamy on her head.

The procession wound through the city before the final act: the public burning, both warning and spectacle, both punishment and purification.

Those who watched her pass that day were the same people who had once turned to her, seeking a remedy, a word, a fragment of hope that poverty had denied them.

Many of them had become her accusers.

The act was completed and order restored. The notary recorded the execution, signed, and closed the file with the usual formula.

That is all that remains of Matteuccia.

Bibliography

• Peruzzi, Candida. Un processo di stregoneria a Todi del ‘400. Lares, vol. 21, no. 1–2, Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1955, pp. 1–17.

• “Matteuccia di Francesco da Todi” Enciclopedia delle donne, accessed October 2025.

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(…) For though his messengers came on the run and found the guards as yet aware of nothing, when they opened the doors they found Cleopatra lying dead upon a golden couch, arrayed in royal state.

And of her two women, the one called Iras was dying at her feet, while Charmion, already tottering and heavy-handed, was trying to arrange the diadem which encircled the queen's brow. Then somebody said in anger: "A fine deed, this, Charmion!" "It is indeed most fine," she said, "and befitting the descendant of so many kings." Not a word more did she speak, but fell there by the side of the couch.

(From The Parallel Lives by Plutarch, Antony, 85)

This is how Plutarch described Cleopatra's end: lying on a golden couch, dressed as a queen, her attendants beside her until the last breath. The scene has traveled through centuries, unchanged.

Behind the scene, remains the enigma: how did Cleopatra really die?

Plutarch, writing more than a century after Cleopatra’s death (30 BC), reported several versions. Some claimed she let herself be bitten by a serpent, perhaps smuggled in a basket of figs. Others spoke of a poison concealed in a hollow hairpin.

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Plutarch himself had noted the queen's familiarity with toxic substances:

Moreover, Cleopatra was getting together collections of all sorts of deadly poisons, and she tested the painless working of each of them by giving them to prisoners under sentence of death. But when she saw that the speedy poisons enhanced the sharpness of death by the pain they caused, while the milder poisons were not quick, she made trial of venomous animals, watching with her own eyes as they were set upon another.

She did this daily, tried them almost all; and she found that the bite of the asp alone induced a sleepy torpor and sinking, where there was no spasm or groan, but a gentle perspiration on the face, while the perceptive faculties were easily relaxed and dimmed, and resisted all attempts to rouse and restore them, as is the case with those who are soundly asleep.

(From The Parallel Lives by Plutarch, Antony, 71)

Cleopatra possessed at least basic knowledge of medicine, and she is said to have prepared her own cosmetics.

She lived in Alexandria, a city that had been one of antiquity's premier medical centers since Hellenistic times. The local medical tradition had developed a strong expertise in pharmacology and toxicology: Galen even records that cobras were used there to grant a condemned prisoner a quick and merciful death.

So, in Cleopatra's circles the effects of various poisons would have been familiar territory.

The choice of poison carried a meaning beyond practicality. The cobra, associated with the pharaonic uraeus, was a regal emblem, and Cleopatra could have chosen this form of death for its resonance.

Modern scholars, however, have revisited these testimonies and generally consider the snake-bite theory the least likely. It would have posed too many practical problems: a serpent large enough to kill several people hidden in a basket, visible bite marks, and the long interval required before the poison took effect.

By contrast, a cardiotoxic or paralyzing substance could explain the rapid death and the absence of marks on the body, except for ‘two slight and indistinct punctures,’ as Plutarch reports. A poison concealed in a hairpin fits better with the details transmitted.

Some have gone further, suggesting a disguised assassination.

Octavian had the motive: to eliminate a political rival who might become a symbol of resistance. He also had the means: his court had physicians capable of preparing a lethal mixture that simulated a snake-bite.

A political murder presented as suicide would have avoided unrest in Egypt. After all, Octavian also had Caesarion, Cleopatra's son by Julius Caesar, executed for the same dynastic reasons.

But the assassination theory has gaps: some argue that Cleopatra, as a defeated enemy, could have been executed publicly without such elaborate staging.

Suetonius adds another detail: Augustus, finding Cleopatra dying and wishing to display her alive in his triumph, called for a snake-charmer to suck out the poison. He had no luck.

The anecdote tells us more about the myth than the reality, but it shows how closely the serpent’s image was tied to the queen.

Perhaps the serpent was involved, but the poison did not come from a bite.

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Strabo and Galen had already suggested that Cleopatra might have used a toxic ointment, applied to a self-inflicted wound or to skin broken with her teeth. Galen imagined that she could have pierced her own flesh with a bite, then smeared it with snake venom.

A more intimate, almost ritual gesture:

She wounded her arm with a very large and deep bite. Then, having procured a vessel, she collected the animal’s venom in it and poured it over the wound; thus, as the poison spread, she was soon able to die with ease, escaping the vigilance of the guards.

(From Galen, De theriaca ad Pisonem, 237)

So many theories are possible. Plutarch concluded with an admission which, after all, still holds true: “the truth of the matter no one knows.”

And it is precisely this uncertainty that makes the scene unforgettable.

Cleopatra was not paraded in chains in Rome, as Octavian wished, nor did she die as any common enemy. On the golden couch, with the diadem adjusted by her last attendant, Cleopatra had already slipped beyond his reach.

That day, she lost a kingdom, but won immortality.

Bibliography

• Plutarch, Parallel Lives, Vol. IX, Loeb Classical Library, 1920.

• Galen, De theriaca ad Pisonem, 237 (translation is mine).

• Retief, F.P. & Cilliers, L. “The death of Cleopatra.” Acta Theologica, Supplementum 7 (2005): 79–92.

• Tsoucalas, G. & Sgantzos, M. “The Death of Cleopatra: Suicide by Snakebite or Poisoned by Her Enemies?”, in: Philip Wexler (ed.), History of Toxicology and Environmental Health. Elsevier, 2014.

• Rosso, A.M. “Toxicology and snakes in Ptolemaic Egyptian dynasty: The suicide of Cleopatra.” Toxicology Reports 8 (2021): 676–695.

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(…) Michelangelo had already completed more than three quarters of the work when Pope Paul went to see it. Messer Biagio da Cesena, master of ceremonies and a scrupulous man, who was present in the chapel with the Pope, was asked what he thought of it. He replied that it was most improper to have so many nudes in such a revered place, all so shamelessly displaying their private parts, and that it was more fitting for baths and taverns than for a papal chapel.

This displeased Michelangelo, who wanted revenge. As soon as Biagio had left, he painted him from memory, without needing him to pose, placing him in Hell as Minos, with a large serpent wrapped around his legs amidst a throng of devils.

And neither Messer Biagio's pleas to the Pope nor to Michelangelo were enough to have him removed, the figure was left there as a reminder, and can still be seen today.

(Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori ed. 1568)

Few anecdotes in art history offer such perfect symmetry between crime and punishment. A papal functionary criticizes the nudity in Michelangelo's Last Judgment; the artist responds by painting him naked for eternity, his genitals gnawed by a serpent in hell.

Giorgio Vasari tells the story with evident relish, and it has been repeated ever since with the same satisfaction.

What gets lost in the retelling is that Biagio da Cesena was no prudish amateur offering uninformed aesthetic opinions.

Biagio's harsh criticism…

He was, in fact, hardly a minor functionary. Since 1518, Biagio had served as Master of Ceremonies to four popes, organizing the conclaves that elected Adriano VI (1522), Clement VII (1523), and Paul III (1534).

His family belonged to Cesena's Guelf nobility. He held degrees in civil and canon law, had worked for decades as a lawyer and notary in the papal Curia before his ceremonial appointment. His diaries chronicle the Sack of Rome (1527), diplomatic meetings with Charles V and Francis I, the debates on Henry VIII’s divorce and the daily ceremonial life of the papal court.

The role of Master of Ceremonies was far more significant than the title suggests. Biagio was responsible for orchestrating every aspect of papal liturgy, including the precise sequence of vestments, the timing of processions, the protocols for receiving foreign ambassadors, and the choreography of papal masses.

He was the Vatican's institutional guardian, the man who ensured that the majesty of the papacy was expressed through flawless ceremonial performance.

When Pope Paul III brought Biagio to see Michelangelo's nearly finished Last Judgment [N.B. the Last Judgment was officially unveiled on October 31, 1541], the fresco covered the entire altar wall: over 300 muscular figures across 1,800 square feet.

According to Vasari, Paul asked his Master of Ceremonies what he thought. Biagio's response was direct: the abundance of nude flesh was "disonestissima" in such a place, shamelessly showing "le lor vergogne". This was work fit for "stufe e osterie," not a papal chapel.

His criticism carried weight because of his position: Biagio spoke as the Vatican's guardian of liturgical propriety, the man responsible for ensuring papal ceremonies maintained appropriate dignity.

Michelangelo's muscular saints, rendered with anatomical precision that left nothing hidden, violated the sacred decorum that Biagio spent his career protecting.

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… and Michelangelo's even harsher response

Michelangelo's response was sharp and permanent.

In the lower right corner of the fresco, among the damned being ferried to hell, he painted Minos, the underworld judge from Dante's Inferno. This figure has donkey ears and writhes as a serpent coils around his body, fangs sunk into his genitals.

The face was that of Biagio da Cesena.

Biagio, furious, appealed to Paul III to force Michelangelo to remove the likeness. The Pope's response, it is said, may be legend: had Michelangelo placed Biagio in purgatory, the Pope might have intervened, but his jurisdiction did not extend to hell!

Whether Paul made this remark is uncertain, but the portrait remained. Biagio's protests came to nothing. Giorgio Vasari, writing in 1550, notes simply that Michelangelo left it there for memory, where it can still be seen.

Counter-Reformation concerns

But time would prove Biagio's instincts correct.

His reaction to the fresco's nudity anticipated broader Church concerns that would reshape Catholic art. The Council of Trent opened in 1545, about a year after Biagio died, and ended up establishing stricter guidelines for religious imagery.

By 1565, the Church commissioned Daniele da Volterra to cover the offending anatomy with drapery. The artist earned the nickname "Il Braghettone" (the breeches-maker).

When Michelangelo began work in 1536, Rome was still recovering from the 1527 Sack. German mercenaries, together with famine and disease, had killed much of the city's population. Many interpreted the catastrophe as divine punishment for Church corruption.

Paul III's "Last Judgment" commission served multiple functions: artistic patronage, theological statement, and institutional response to Protestant attacks on Catholic excess.

Michelangelo delivered a vision of unprecedented physicality. His Christ, muscular as a classical Apollo, raises his hand in judgment while the dead rise in actual bodies, not as spirits. The work affirmed Catholic doctrine about bodily resurrection while displaying Michelangelo's belief that the nude human form represented God's finest creation.

Michelangelo lived until 1564, luckily not long enough to watch Daniele da Volterra add modest draperies to his triumphant saints.

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The face that might not be Biagio

But there is an alternative version of this story.

In 1544, three years after the unveiling of the Last Judgment, a satirical sonnet circulated in Rome and was later preserved in the Vatican Library. It makes no mention of Biagio da Cesena.

Instead, it identifies Minos as Pierluigi Farnese, the pope’s own son, whose reputation was already darkened by the violent death of Bishop of Fano, a killing described in the sonnet with unflinching crudity.

The verse belonged to the tradition of the pasquinate, anonymous lampoons posted in public spaces, where Rome’s grievances and scandals were aired without restraint.

Whether Michelangelo truly intended such an allusion remains uncertain; contemporary readers of the sonnet, however, were quick to connect it with the figure on the altar wall, giving Minos a political face the Farnese would have preferred to erase.

Vasari, writing in 1550, repeats the Biagio story, which by then was already the accepted version.

The truth is likely to remain unsettled, and the figure still carries more than one possible identity.

Bibliography

Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori (ed. 1568)

Quel che si nasconde nella figura di Minosse by Antonio Forcellino

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On April 24, 1604, they became the cause of yet another of his many run-ins with Roman authorities.

The incident occurred at the Osteria del Moro, located on Via della Maddalena, near the Pantheon, in Rome's Campo Marzio district. Pietro da Fusaccia, a waiter at the tavern, served eight cooked artichokes to the artist and his two companions.

Caravaggio asked which had been prepared with butter and which with oil. The waiter's response (too vague? too indifferent?) sparked his fury.

The waiter's own testimony, preserved in the police files of the Archivio di Stato, recounts the scene with bureaucratic precision:

Circa le 17 hore stando detto querelato assieme a doi altri a magnare nell'hosteria del Moro, alla Maddalena, dove io sto per garzone et havendoli portato otto carcioffi cotti cioè quattro nel buturo e quattro con olio, detto querelato mi ha dimandato quali erano quelli al buturo et quelli all'olio. Io li ho risposto: che li odorasse, che facilmente haverebbe conosciuto quali erano cotti nel buturo et quelli che erano all'olio. Lui allora è montato in collera e senza dirmi altro ha preso un piatto di terra et me l'ha tirato alla volta del mostaccio, che me ha colto in questa guancia manca dove sono restato un poco ferito. Et poi si è dirizzato et ha dato di mano alla spada di un suo compagno che stava su la tavola con animo forse di darmi con ella, ma io me gli sono levato dinanzi et sono venuto qua all'officio a darne querela…"

At about half past twelve while the accused was eating with two others at the Osteria del Moro in Maddalena, where I work as a waiter, having brought him eight cooked artichokes, that is four in butter and four with oil, the accused asked me which were the ones with butter and which with oil. I answered him: smell them, that he would easily have known which were cooked in butter and which were with oil. He then became angry and without saying anything else took a clay dish and threw it at my face, hitting me on this left cheek where I remained slightly wounded. And then he straightened up and reached for his companion's sword that was on the table, perhaps intending to strike me with it, but I got away from him and came here to the office to file a complaint...

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By April 1604, Caravaggio moved through Rome with the particular volatility of a man caught between triumph and catastrophe. His paintings commanded the most prestigious commissions: the Contarelli Chapel at San Luigi dei Francesi had established his reputation, the Cerasi Chapel at Santa Maria del Popolo had confirmed his genius. Cardinals competed for his work. The Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani collected his canvases with obsessive devotion, accumulating fifteen works.

Yet police records show a pattern of complaints, unpaid rents, and violent encounters. He was first reported in 1598 for carrying weapons without a permit and was repeatedly detained for brawls, threats, and public insults. The precarious foundation of his success was already evident.

Another witness, Pietro Antonio del Madii, reported the painter's exact words:

Era a pranzo all'hostaria del Moro ove da altra banda ci era Michelangelo da Caravaggio pittore. Intesi dimandare da lui se i carcioffi erano all'olio o al burro, essendo tutti in un piatto. Il garzone disse: Non lo so; et ne pigliò uno et se lo mise al naso. Il che havendo hauto a male Michelangelo si levò in piedi in collera et gli disse: 'Se ben mi pare, becco fottuto, ti credi di servire qualche barone.' Et prese quel piatto con dentro i carciofori e lo tirò al garzone nel viso. Non vidi Michelangiolo cacciar mano alla spasa contro lo stesso.

He was dining at the Osteria del Moro where on the other side was Michelangelo da Caravaggio the painter. I heard him ask if the artichokes were with oil or butter, all being on one plate. The waiter said: I don't know; and took one and put it to his nose. Taking offense at this, Michelangelo stood up in anger and said to him: 'It seems to me, you fucking cuckold, you think you're serving some baron.' And he took that plate with the artichokes inside and threw it at the waiter's face. I did not see Michelangelo draw his sword against him.

In Roman idiom, barone could carry a touch of irony — less a nobleman than someone merely playing the part. Caravaggio's outburst wasn't about being mistaken for one, but about being treated as if he weren't worth the seriousness owed to a real client.

For a painter who had risen to prominence and moved with the confidence of a recognized master, yet by most accounts remained acutely sensitive to the traces of his low-born origins, the waiter's offhand manner must have felt like a denial of earned respect.

Even the food on the table subtly reflected this tension. The choice of preparation methods carried its own significance: butter marked northern cooking, the taste of Caravaggio’s Lombard origins; oil belonged to Roman tradition, cheaper and more durable in the southern climate. That the osteria served both suggests a clientele navigating between regional habits, northerners like Caravaggio adapting to Roman life while retaining traces of home.

The legal aftermath proved brief. Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, Caravaggio's protector and sometime host at Palazzo Madama, likely intervened. The case was dismissed from court records without a conviction.

Pietro returned to his duties, while the painter continued his twin careers of artistic brilliance and public violence. Between October and November 1604, he was arrested twice more: once for throwing stones at police officers, once for insulting an official who dared check his weapons permit.

Two years later, in the same Campo Marzio district, another moment of violence would end with Ranuccio Tomassoni dead and Caravaggio fleeing Rome forever.

More than two centuries later, the defense of honor returned… not in a Roman tavern, but outside Paris, and led by a far less likely figure: Marcel Proust.

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But Tanaquil came from Tarquinia: she was Etruscan, and this changed everything.

According to the account given by Livy, Tanaquil belonged to the highest aristocracy of Tarquinia. She had married Lucumo, son of Demaratus of Corinth, a Greek who had fled his homeland during political upheavals and settled in Etruria. Lucumo had inherited considerable wealth, but remained always the son of a refugee. The Etruscans marginalized him for his foreign origins.

It was Tanaquil who could not tolerate this disgrace and convinced her husband to seek his fortune elsewhere. Rome seemed perfect to her: a city of new people, where one became noble quickly and based on merit. For an ambitious man like Lucumo, Rome represented the opportunity that Tarquinia denied him.

So they gathered their possessions and departed.

The Prodigy of the Eagle

By chance, a strong wind had arisen on the Janiculum. There, as he sat in his carriage with his wife, an eagle with wings softly outspread swooped down and took his cap, then flew above the carriage with a loud cry, and as if sent by divine agency, placed it neatly back upon his head. Then it soared away.
Tanaquil, said to be skilled, as Etruscan women generally were, in interpreting heavenly signs, is reported to have received the omen with joy.
She embraced her husband and urged him to hope for lofty and great things. That bird, she said, had come as a messenger from that region of the sky and from that god. It had made its auspice around the highest part of the man. It had lifted the symbol of human dignity from his head, only to return it as a divine gift.

Lucumo, who called himself Lucius Tarquinius Priscus in Rome, indeed became the fifth king of Rome.

The Prodigy of Fire

Livy speaks again of Tanaquil on the occasion of a second prodigious event:

At that time, a prodigy occurred in the royal palace, marvellous both to see and in its outcome. They say that the head of a sleeping boy, whose name was Servius Tullius, caught fire in the sight of many.
A great outcry arose at the wonder of such a thing, and the king and queen were awakened.
When one of the attendants brought water to extinguish the flames, he was stopped by the queen, who calmed the commotion and forbade anyone to touch the boy until he woke up on his own.
Soon, both the fire and the sleep vanished together.

Tanaquil then took her husband aside and said:

Do you see this boy (…) whom we are raising in such humble condition? You may be sure that one day he will be a light to our uncertain fortunes and a protection to our troubled royal house. Let us therefore nurture, with all our care, this source of great honor both public and private.

From that moment, Servius was treated like a son, educated for power and prepared for succession.

Tanaquil had orchestrated this prodigy too: she stopped the panic, managed the scene and transformed an inexplicable event into a dynastic investment.

After making one king, Tanaquil was creating another.

When Tarquinius was assassinated, struck down by two shepherds hired by the sons of Ancus Marcius, the previous king, Tanaquil took charge of every detail of the transition.

The palace was closed on her orders. Eyewitnesses disappeared. She procured what was needed to stitch the wound, as if there were still hope.

Then she called Servius, showed him her husband's nearly lifeless body and said:

The kingdom is yours, Servius, if you are a man. It does not belong to those who committed a vile crime using the hands of others.
Rise up and follow the gods as your guides. They once foretold that this head would be illustrious, when it was surrounded by divine fire.
Let that heavenly flame awaken you now. Rise and truly awaken.
We too have ruled, though we were foreigners. Think about who you are, not where you were born.
If your own plans are numbed by this sudden turn, then follow mine.

When the crowd's uproar became unbearable, Tanaquil appeared at the window overlooking the Via Nova and spoke to the people. The king had been struck treacherously, she said, but the blade had not penetrated deeply. Soon they would be able to see him again.

In the meantime, they should obey Servius Tullius.

Tanaquil “adloquitur populum”, Livy writes. She addresses the people. Not the servants, not the court: the Roman populus. This was not a domestic conversation, but a public act of authority. Her voice fills the gap left by a dying king.

For several days, Servius governed pretending to be a temporary substitute, while consolidating power. Only afterward was Tarquinius's death announced, when the succession could no longer be contested.

According to the tradition, Servius Tullius ruled for more than forty years. And no one remembered anymore whether he was the son of a slave or a noble: even origins can be rewritten, if someone knows how.

Cracks in the Narrative

What does Livy tell us about Tanaquil?

She is a woman of noble origins, proud and resolute, who, being an Etruscan, knows the haruspicial arts and, above all, knows how to turn them to her advantage.

She, who can recognize royal qualities even in a child raised as a servant, will raise him to become her husband's successor.

In the heated moments of regicide, she will be the one not to lose her composure and to plan the investiture (which was not hereditary) of Servius Tullius through a clever stratagem.

Servius (…) was the first to reign without the people's command, but with the senators' consent.

Livy's judgment of Tanaquil emerges indirectly, through the words of others. When Tullia, daughter of Servius Tullius, incites her husband Tarquinius to usurp the throne, she complains bitterly:

With these and other reproaches, she goaded the young man on. Nor could she find peace herself, seeing that Tanaquil, a foreign woman, had been able to act with such boldness of spirit that she gave the kingship first to her husband and then to her son-in-law, while she, born of royal blood, had no influence in giving or taking away the crown.

Livy is recounting Tullia's wickedness, but inadvertently reveals Tanaquil's political effectiveness. Even a king's daughter acknowledges her inability to achieve what the Etruscan foreigner had accomplished through schemes and strategy.

Several decades later, Pliny the Elder remembered her differently:

Marcus Varro reports that the wool on the distaff and spindle of Tanaquil, who was also called Gaia Caecilia, had lasted in the temple of Sancus, and that she had woven the wavy royal toga kept in the temple of Fortuna, which had been worn by Servius Tullius.
From this originated the custom that a decorated distaff and a spindle with thread would accompany virgin brides.
She was the first to weave the tunica recta, the straight tunic worn with the toga pura by both young men coming of age and newly married women.

Over time, the powerful figure of Tanaquil was filtered through safer virtues.

Pliny and Varro do not speak of her voice or her role in managing royal succession. They remember her hands: spinning wool, weaving garments, setting bridal customs.

The queen who once spoke to the people became Gaia Caecilia, patroness of order, of looms, of weddings.

There is no contradiction, perhaps - but something went silent.

Bibliography

Livy, Ab Urbe condita, Book I.

Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, Book VIII.

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I wrote these lines immediately after returning from Pompeii, trying to fix on paper the impressions of a summer afternoon among the ruins. This is not an essay, nor a guide. Just scattered notes, gathered while the dust was still on my shoes. I plan to return with more time and focus, but for now, I wanted to hold onto what had struck me the most, those details that escape the official reconstructions.

Pompeii is a name repeated endlessly. The bibliography is extensive and continues to grow. There are school trips (mine was in high school, and I mostly remember not sleeping at all because we stayed up all night), documentaries about the tragedy and the victims' final moments, Hollywood films with their tongues of fire and showers of ash.

And then there is the tourist brand: Pompeii, with a double "i", printed on T-shirts and magnets. It works. It sells.

But a quiet summer afternoon, with just a few heat-weary visitors, is enough to let something else emerge. The paved streets nearly empty. The great stones smoothed by time, still marked by the deep ruts left by carts that passed there again and again, until that day in 79 CE.

The ordinary becomes unfamiliar again.

I walk through the streets, and the prints of my soles blend with those of others: tourists, staff, archaeologists. Around me, languages mix: English, French, Japanese, Spanish, German... I hear broken phrases, comments, laughter, and, in the distance, the honking of tour buses.

Pompeii has lost its original voices, but still hosts voices from across the world.

In a stable uncovered in 1938, the remains of a horse were found and patiently reconstructed on a metal frame. The sign says it stood 1.40 meters at the withers. Its jaw was uneven due to an old injury, and two lumbar vertebrae had fused from wear. It mainly chewed on the left side of its teeth. A poor working animal he was.

Pompeii was not just villas and frescoes. It was also, and perhaps above all, the daily effort of living bodies.

In the so-called "Garden of the Fugitives," you can see the casts of thirteen people caught in the terror of their last moments, buried under more than three meters of pumice as they tried to escape. Among them are children. Today, vines and olive trees grow in that space, which must have stayed empty for a long time.

There is a strange contrast between the anguish of those bodies and the calm greenery of the plants now growing among the ruins.

At many street corners, ancient taverns still stand. In one of them, the dolia are still built into the marble counter. At the bottom, about 170 sesterces were found — small change left behind during the eruption, maybe in the hope of coming back. On the wall, a painted lararium shows Mercury and Dionysus, sacred snakes, and the household Genius. It had been painted over an older one, likely damaged by the earthquakes that came before the eruption.

Then I notice a small line forming outside a modest building. No more than ten people can enter at once. It's the lupanar, and people are drawn in by the promise of something risqué, unsure of what they'll actually find.

Of course, I go in too.

But here the contrast is sharp. The erotic frescoes are still there, showcasing what was on offer; yet the rooms where that business happened are narrow, bare, and uncomfortable. There was far less luxury than one might imagine.

The walls remain, the objects do not. Utensils, pottery, statues: all now scattered across museums. Pompeii has become a city divided from itself, a hollow that we fill with images of the things we've seen behind glass. Even the architectural fragments, gathered in courtyards, often decorate emptiness rather than recompose a whole.

Still, Pompeian red surfaces on the walls. It was made from finely ground iron-rich soil, mixed with lime and water, and applied while the plaster was still wet. A colour that was not bright, but alive. It bonded with the wall like skin and stayed.

Some walls speak, quite literally. Pompeii is full of graffiti, just like our cities today. The words talk of love, of resentment, of politics:

C(aium) Lollium Fuscum aed(ilem) d(ignum) r(ei) o(ro) v(os) f(aciatis)
”Please make Gaius Lollius Fuscus a worthy aedile of the Republic."

There will always be more Gaius Lollius Fuscus.

At the fountains, tourists cool off. It's the same gesture from two thousand years ago. Water flows from a carved face, runs over sweaty hands, and flushed faces.

Tour guides press on under the sun, repeating their lines, changing inflection now and then to keep themselves alert. It's a small act of resistance, repeated every day.

Pompei has become Pompeii™. You find the name on magnets, T-shirts, keyrings, all carried home as reminders of a walk through a city that still manages to speak, every morning.

Maybe, what stayed with me the most were the empty lararia.

In every Roman house, there were Lares, household spirits. Now the niches are bare.

The guardians are gone because after that day, there was no one left to protect.

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My destination was the Abruzzo region.

Murray wrote for English travelers who, in the mid-nineteenth century, came to Italy to rediscover the stages of the Grand Tour. Letters of introduction, mules, authorized taverns: that was a world where access to places required social intermediaries, multiple logistical difficulties, and extended timeframes.

Today, it takes just two hours by car from Rome, along a comfortable highway.

In 1855, these areas were still under Bourbon rule, as the very title of the guide reminds us: Italy, after centuries of foreign domination and political fragmentation, would unite only a few years later, in 1861.

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Alba Fucens: the layers of time

The journey toward the archaeological area of Alba Fucens crosses countryside that Murray would not have recognized.

The site emerges from the hill like a repertoire of ordered ruins: the paved forum, the walls, the amphitheater carved into living rock. The early medieval church of San Pietro in Albe rests on the remains of a pagan temple dedicated to Apollo. Roman columns were integrated into the medieval naves without embarrassment.

From the hill where San Pietro stands, you can admire a spectacle so familiar in Italy: the layers of its millennial history succeeding one another, each leaving its mark as a legacy to the next.

Below, the archaeological area corresponding to the Roman colony of Alba Fucens, founded in the territory of the Italic population of the Aequi. Rome had spent decades subduing these mountain tribes: the Aequi controlled the Apennine passes and resisted until the 4th century BC, when a series of military campaigns definitively broke their autonomy.

Alba Fucens was founded in 303 BC as a Latin colony, serving as a strategic outpost to oversee the conquered territory and a bridgehead toward the territory of Marsica. Six thousand colonists received lands confiscated from the defeated Aequi. The position was not random: it dominated the Fucino plain and controlled access to the Via Valeria, the artery that would connect Rome to the Adriatic.

From the church's elevated position above the Roman site, you can make out the ruins of the medieval village and castle of Albe, ancient fief of the Orsini family.

An earthquake in January 1915 devastated this region, causing the abandonment of the medieval village and the collapse of the church of San Pietro. The church was later rebuilt in the 1950s, but walking along the path, you still step on its rubble. The remains of its decorations are now preserved in the Museum of Sacred Art in Celano.

The lake that is no more

What is now the Fucino plain was once a large lake (extending on average about 155 square kilometers), which was then definitively drained in 1878 by the Roman banker Prince Alessandro Torlonia.

Murray extensively documents the various attempts to "tame" the lake and its devastating floods, dating back to Roman times. He recounts a curious incident that occurred during the reign of Emperor Claudius, who oversaw the first major drainage works on the Fucino, including a spectacular mock naval battle held before the emissary was opened:

The naumachia and gladiatorial games which took place in honour of the event, in the presence of Claudius and Agrippina, are described by Suetonius and Tacitus; but when the waters were let into the passage, they met with an obstruction which caused them to regurgitate with such impetuosity that the bridge of boats, on which the emperor and his court were assembled, was nearly destroyed.

Tacitus, after recording the heroic bravery of the malefactors who manned the fleet for this cruel display, describes the panic caused by this accident, and the accusations heaped by Agrippina upon Narcissus, the director of the works, who recriminated by an attack on her character and ambition.

It is believed that at a subsequent period Claudius completed this magnificent work, which Pliny ranks among his greatest undertakings.

Also in the Celano Museum are preserved the archaeological remains brought to light by the drainage work, which were later entered into the Torlonia collection.

The fishing spears, for example, testify to the fishing activity that was practiced here. The most admired piece, however, is the second-century AD limestone relief with views of the lake and its territory.

Celano: Jacovella, a mother besieged

The castle of Celano, dating to the late 14th century, dominates the Fucino plain from above, a quadrangular mass with cylindrical towers that today houses a museum.

Murray recounts the story of the "misfortunes of the Countess Covella"

The Contado of Celano is noted in Italian history for the misfortunes of the Countess Covella, and for the cruel and unnatural warfare waged against her by her son Ruggierotto.

Covella was the last descendant of the Counts Ruggieri, of Norman extraction, who held a considerable tract of the neighbouring country. Her son, desirous of possessing himself of his mother’s lands, joined the Anjou party, and prevailed upon their captain, Piccinino, to support him in wresting the Contado from her.

After seizing Celano, they besieged the Castle of Gagliano, in which the Countess had shut herself up in the hope of holding out until she should receive aid from Ferdinand of Aragon. But, after a few days, the fortress was carried by storm. Piccinino seized the treasures on his own account, and consigned the strongholds of the Contado to Ruggierotto, who threw his mother into prison.

Napoleone Orsini, who, in the name of Ferdinand and Pius II., destroyed the remnants of the French party in the Abruzzi, defeated Ruggierotto, who set his mother at liberty to plead his cause with the Pope, who claimed the Contado himself. But Ferdinand, to avoid a quarrel, granted it, in 1463, to Antonio Piccolomini, Duca di Amalfi, the pope’s nephew and his own son-in-law, as a dower of his natural daughter, Mary of Aragon.

Jacovella da Celano (1418-1471) was the last heir of the Counts of the Marsi, descendants of Charlemagne. A genealogy that breaks in the 15th century through a sequence of forced marriages, early widowhoods, and a family siege.

Three marriages: the first, still a child, in 1424 to Odoardo Colonna, nephew of Pope Martin V, never consummated and later annulled. The second, in 1439, to Jacopo Caldora, who was almost seventy, and who died after three months. The third in 1440 to Lionello Accrocciamuro, from whom she had three children. When she became a widow for the third time in 1458, Jacovella found herself governing the county alone.

Her son Ruggero, barely of age, claimed his rights by force of arms. In 1462, aided by the condottiere Jacopo Piccinino, he besieged his mother in the castle of Gagliano Aterno. Three days of continuous attacks, then capture. Jacovella had to pay 120,000 ducats to regain her freedom. The fiefs passed to her son; she was left only with the county of Venafro, where she died before 1471.

The castle that today welcomes visitors with guided tours and captions witnessed a mother-son conflict, as documented in its archives.

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Serpents and memory

In the same lands where Jacovella resisted family sieges, Murray observed a millennial cultural continuity:

These mountains abound with lynxes and wild boars; the banks of the lake with vipers, and the lake itself with water-snakes. The ancient Marsi, the inhabitants of this district, are celebrated by the Roman poets for their skill in charming serpents; and their descendants, even at this day, are found all over the kingdom earning a livelihood by the exhibition of their art (…)

In 1855, snake charmers were still practiced in rural areas of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The descendants of the Marsi crossed villages with their baskets, perpetuating knowledge that Latin poets had celebrated two thousand years before.

The Via Valeria had brought Rome to Marsica, but had not erased everything. Certain knowledge was transmitted laterally, outside official channels. Imperial control assimilated, but left margins.

Today this tradition is probably extinct: it did not survive the lake, nor the countesses, nor the centuries that separate Murray from our era of highways and educational museums.

Tagliacozzo: a door worth knocking on

The last stretch of Route 144 winds toward Tagliacozzo, "the most important town of the district." Murray noted the possibility of a "hospitable palazzo" as an alternative to the poor conditions of the local inn:

The inn or tavern is wretched, but an introduction to the Mastroddi family will be sure to obtain admission into their hospitable palazzo on the piazza below the hill. Its fine staircase contains some marble fragments and Roman inscriptions.

It was a world where aristocratic hospitality mediated access to territories. He continues:

Mules or horses and a guide must be hired to proceed to Tivoli, about 30 m. distant. The path follows in great part the Via Valeria.

It is here that temporal distance closes. Murray’s Route 144, designed for English travelers with private carriages and social intermediaries, retraces the Romans’ Via Valeria, an axis of conquest and control. Today it is a state road: democratic, anonymous.

What changes is not the geography, but the way we move through it. Every road belongs to its time.

The invisible road

The Via Valeria still flows beneath contemporary asphalt, the fossil trace of an era when roads organized empires.

Murray traces its itinerary for the curious tourist who might have wanted to rediscover the ancient localities reflected in the modern ones:

The Via Valeria was opened by M. Valerius Maximus, about B.C. 260, from Tibur to Corfinium, and subsequently carried as far as Hadria. The stations on it were—

Tibur, Tivoli.
Carseoli, near Cavaliere.
Alba Fucentia, Albe.
Marrubium, S. Benedetto.
Cerfennia, near Coll’ Armele.
Statulæ, Goriano Sicoli.
Corfinium, S. Pelino.
Interpromium, Below S. Valentino.
Teate, Chieti.
Hadria, Atri.

Something of that past still lingers today: in place names, in the orientation of settlements, in the quiet persistence of certain memories that span centuries without explanation.

Not everything that remains is visible at first glance. But if you look closely, the traces are still there.

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The former gymnasium mathematics teacher had also studied phrenology—the measurement of skull bumps to divine character traits—and was considered something of a mystic. In his systematic mind, the boundaries between pedagogy, pseudoscience, and genuine discovery remained fluid.

The Era of Thinking Animals

This was Berlin in 1904, when the distinction between entertainment and inquiry had not yet hardened into modern categories.

The capital teemed with what the era called "thinking animals", whose performances promised to both marvel and instruct.

These spectacles reflected the era's fusion of scientific optimism and visual pedagogy, when knowledge was transmitted through demonstrations, magic lantern shows, and participatory experiences that engaged public curiosity.

Von Osten's Hans was hardly unique. There was Rosa, a mare who performed in a Berlin vaudeville theater; traveling menageries whose exotic animals seemed to respond to complex commands; circus elephants that appeared to understand human language.

The phenomenon extended across Europe, a "school" of animal intelligence that would persist from the late nineteenth century into the 1950s, sustained by the era's faith in the educative power of spectacle.

These exhibitions served multiple cultural functions simultaneously. They satisfied the period's craving for visual, participatory science and appeared to demonstrate humanity's rational mastery over nature through systematic training.

The careful instruction of animals became a metaphor for civilization itself, proof that the methodical application of human intelligence could transform the seemingly impossible into a routine accomplishment.

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The Mathematical Horse

Von Osten's student was a nine-year-old stallion named Hans, and by September their partnership had attracted crowds to the narrow courtyard.

Hans could add, subtract, multiply, divide. He could spell words by tapping his hoof according to each letter's alphabetical position. When presented with colored rags, Hans would strike the ground the correct number of times to indicate blue, red, or yellow.

The method was entirely orthodox: the same pedagogical principles von Osten had applied to human pupils for decades.

But Hans represented something different from the typical performing animal. Von Osten exhibited no showmanship, employed no obvious tricks. This was presented as pure education, an extension of the classroom to include a species previously considered incapable of conceptual learning.

The distinction mattered to contemporary observers, who had grown accustomed to circus animals performing elaborate routines but had rarely encountered what appeared to be genuine intellectual development.

Scientific Intervention

The controversy that erupted revealed the intellectual anxieties of Wilhelmine Germany. As zoology and physiology established themselves as autonomous disciplines, questions about animal intelligence had gained scientific legitimacy.

Darwin's work had already unsettled traditional hierarchies between human and animal cognition. Von Osten's systematic approach, employing standard educational techniques rather than entertainment training, seemed to offer empirical evidence for animal reasoning abilities.

Berlin's Board of Education felt compelled to intervene, appointing a commission of experts that became known as the "Hans Commission”, whose mandate was to determine whether Hans's performances involved fraud or trickery.

The composition of this group illuminated the uncertain boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate knowledge in the early twentieth century.

Alongside representatives of science appeared military officers, school principals, and a circus director who had initially declared himself "extremely skeptical about the matter," believing Hans had simply learned "a few clever tricks just like other well-known circus horses."

Here was the fundamental question: who qualified as an expert in evaluating animal intelligence?

The commission's mixture of academic authority, military discipline, and entertainment industry knowledge reflected a moment when such expertise remained undefined.

Busch's presence acknowledged that circuses, not universities, had developed the most sophisticated understanding of what animals could actually be trained to do.

The Investigation

The commission's examination proceeded with Germanic thoroughness. Hans performed arithmetic, answered questions about colors, identified musical notes when converted to numerical values. He responded correctly even when von Osten was absent, accepting questions from commission members with apparent equanimity.

The investigators found no evidence of deliberate fraud.

Their cautious report admitted that Hans's performances could not be attributed to conventional training methods. There was, they concluded, no detected "trick" in the accepted sense. But the document's careful language left room for unknown mechanisms.

Carl Stumpf assigned his colleague Oskar Pfungst to conduct more rigorous testing.

Pfungst's investigations introduced experimental controls that would become standard in psychological research: isolating Hans from spectators, using multiple questioners, ensuring the horse could not see his interrogator, and crucially, conducting tests where neither horse nor questioner knew the correct answer.

This final condition proved decisive. When deprived of visual contact with questioners who knew the answers, Hans's mathematical abilities vanished.

Pfungst's meticulous observations revealed the mechanism: unconscious postural changes, pupil dilation, breathing patterns—involuntary signals that questioners transmitted without awareness.

The Clever Hans Effect

Von Osten had been genuinely convinced of his student's intelligence. His signals were entirely involuntary, his faith in Hans's abilities completely sincere.

The discovery's implications extended beyond one horse's abilities. Pfungst had identified what would become known as the "Clever Hans effect"—the influence of unconscious expectations on experimental subjects.

Pfungst's discovery had lasting impact on experimental psychology. The Hans case provided an example of rigorous methodology applied to extraordinary claims. Phrenologists claimed to read character from skull measurements, mesmerists demonstrated seemingly inexplicable mental influences, yet Pfungst's investigation remained methodical and controlled.

It showed how unconscious communication could masquerade as cognitive ability, even when all parties acted in complete sincerity.

After the Discovery

Von Osten never accepted Pfungst's explanation. Despite the scientific findings, the elderly teacher continued exhibiting Hans throughout Germany, attracting enthusiastic crowds who remained convinced of the horse's abilities.

Von Osten died in June 1909 and Hans was then passed to Karl Krall, a jeweler from Elberfeld who remained convinced of equine reasoning abilities despite Pfungst's findings. Krall continued the experiments, eventually acquiring two additional horses to create what became known as "the famous horses of Elberfeld."

Hans continued performing under Krall's direction, but his cooperation had diminished. In 1914, when Europe mobilized for war, Hans likely followed the fate of countless horses conscripted for military service.

After 1916, all records of Hans disappear.

Unverified accounts claim hungry soldiers consumed him: a rumor that, whether accurate or not, marks the distance between von Osten's courtyard in 1904 and the trenches a decade later.

What remained of the whole Hans story was a new understanding of the subtle communications that flow between species, and the recognition that intelligence itself might be less transparent than the Belle Époque had presumed.

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