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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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.

A pistol duel took place yesterday in the outskirts of Paris between Messrs. Marcel Proust and Jean Lorrain, following an article published by the latter under the signature Raitif de La Bretonne.

Two bullets were exchanged without result.

The witnesses for Mr. Marcel Proust were Messrs. Gustave de Borda and Jean Béraud; those for Mr. Jean Lorrain were Messrs. Octave Uzanne and Paul Adam.

Behind that dry chronicle lay something unexpected. Marcel Proust, twenty-five years old, a chronic asthmatic and writer of delicate manners, had challenged one of Paris's most feared journalists to a duel.

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The article that had triggered it all had appeared in Le Journal on February 5, signed with the eighteenth-century pseudonym that Jean Lorrain liked to use for his most ferocious attacks.

Under that libertine mask, he had demolished "Les Plaisirs et les Jours," Proust's first collection published the previous year.

But he had not stopped at literary criticism. He had added personal insinuations, venomous allusions about salon habitués, and veiled accusations of homosexuality.

(…) Mr. Marcel Proust nonetheless managed to get a preface by Mr. Anatole France, who had never written one for Mr. Marcel Schwob, Mr. Pierre Louys, or Mr. Maurice Barrès.
But such is the way of the world, and rest assured: for his next volume, Mr. Marcel Proust will secure a preface from Mr. Alphonse Daudet, the unyielding Mr. Alphonse Daudet himself, who will be unable to refuse it, not to Madame Lemaire nor to his son Lucien.

Lorrain's insinuation was cutting and precise.

Madeleine Lemaire was a celebrated salon hostess and watercolor painter who had illustrated Proust's book, while Lucien Daudet was the eighteen-year-old son of the famous novelist and Proust's close friend.

The subtext was clear: it was not merit, but connections, that explained certain literary endorsements.

In 1897, those words still demanded a response with weapons. The bourgeois code of honor was rigid: an insulted gentleman had to seek satisfaction, or else lose his social reputation. Proust knew this, and he also knew that backing down meant admitting to the accusations.

At the time, dueling was formally illegal in France but socially tolerated, especially in literary circles where a printed polemic could easily become a matter of honor.

It was not about seeking the adversary's death, but about staging one's courage: a codified theater where the objective was to prove one could uphold one's words even in the face of danger.

The choice of witnesses reveals much about the world in which the young writer moved. For Proust: Gustave de Borda (a fencing master) and Jean Béraud, the celebrated painter of Parisian life. For Lorrain: Octave Uzanne, a refined bibliophile, and Paul Adam, a novelist in vogue.

This was no street affair: it was business between people who mattered, in the literary and artistic microcosm of the capital.

The details of the encounter are recounted by Le Figaro with the bureaucratic precision of the era: two shots fired, no one wounded. Honor restored according to the rules.

Youthful rashness or perfect adherence to the code? Perhaps Proust, on February 6^th, 1897, had simply done what every gentleman was expected to do.

It tells the story of a love correspondence from 1899: ten messages published in a local newspaper addressed to “Amor Bianco.”
This is the second chapter: an attempt to understand who the man behind the words might have been.

The lengthy message for Amor Bianco on June 21, 1899, tells us something important about its author.

The ads published by Haasenstein and Vogler cost 5 cents per word, and this specific ad consists of 397 words. That makes 19.85 lire of the time.

With the help of technology, I discovered that, in 1899, in Italy, 20 lire corresponded to almost a laborer's weekly wages!

Not a message, then, but an emotional investment.

Who was this man who could spend so much money to say "I love you" through a German advertising agency?

His messages reveal neither name nor profession.

Starting from this intriguing detail, I tried to gather as many clues as possible about him from his messages. Again with the help of technology, I set out to reconstruct a potential profile of this impetuous, clandestine lover.

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Who he was NOT

He was not young.

The careful syntax, the measured self-reflection, the way he analyzes his own emotions belong to a man with experience. When he writes:

I am remorseful for not having been more energetic, then

he speaks like someone who has lived long enough to understand his own patterns.

He was not poor.

Beyond the obvious expense of the ads, there are other signs: he travels to Bologna by train (and buys tickets for her), and he speaks of Rome as a destination he could reach "without fail" if he chose to. Money is a tool for him, not an aspiration.

He was not a seducer.

His messages don't seek to impress: they want to communicate. He doesn't promise, doesn't flatter. When he writes:

I don't want to demand impossible things

he reveals someone who respects boundaries even when he desires to cross them.

He was not reckless.

Even in the outpouring of June 21, he stops himself:

How much more I would say and write, if it were not for the instinctive repugnance of making public what constitutes the most intense and beautiful elevation of our souls!

The geography of a heart

His messages chart an exact emotional geography.

She is in Rome, while he seems to be in Florence. They meet in Bologna, a midpoint reached by train, planned with care.

Venice is just the neutral printing point, perhaps chosen for its distance from their real lives. The Gazzetta di Venezia becomes their secret post office, where neither of them lives, but both can be found.

This geographical precision reveals a methodical mind. He is someone who thinks in terms of logistics and understands that a secret love requires infrastructure.

The body as barometer

Perhaps the most revealing trait of his character is how he transforms love into physical symptoms.

I cannot hide from you that my health leaves much to be desired

he writes on June 28.

My mood then is unfortunately terrible. Your distance greatly affects me.

This is not rhetoric: distance from his beloved is a medical matter for him. The body reacts to absence like an illness. Waiting wears him down, and separation weakens him.

Your punctuality means health to me

he writes in another message. Love, for him, is measured in terms of physical well-being.

When he feels unwell, he says so with clinical precision. He is not a romantic who plays with suffering: he is a man who records the concrete effects of passion on his own organism.

Writing to be remembered

Something is interesting about his relationship with censorship. On June 17, Haasenstein & Vogler refuses to publish his message:

Be a little calmer in expressing yourselves and then we will publish.

His reaction?

This little fact put me in a good mood Saturday because I thought that if it were known... and we understand each other, don't we?

He is amused like a boy caught in the act who finds the idea of risk exciting.

This reveals a key aspect of his character: he doesn't write to get something, he writes to be remembered. His June correspondence has no practical objectives - its purpose is existential: to remain alive in the other's mind when the body is distant.

That's why he spends without calculating and transforms the newspaper into an intimate space. That's why he even accepts the impersonal mediation of a German agency: as long as his words reach their destination.

The arithmetic of longing

Perhaps the most revealing detail is his relationship with numbers. He keeps track of everything: the cost of ads, the dates of letters, the exact times of train departures.

Today is the 20th; do you remember where we were returning from months ago?

Even Haasenstein and Vogler becomes part of his emotional accounting: love, mediated by German efficiency and Italian currency.

When the agency censors him on June 17 he responds not angrily, but with analysis. He understands that even passion must operate within systems.

The last message we have from him is dated August 24

Usual time.

By then, the newspaper has served its purpose. It has brought him and Amor Bianco together enough that words are no longer necessary.

The economy of appointment-setting has replaced the expensive declarations of June.

Perhaps this is how love succeeds: when you no longer need to buy space in newspapers to prove it exists.

The man behind "Amor Bianco" remains nameless, but his portrait comes through clearly in the arithmetic of longing: exact, expensive, and completely human.

Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, better known by her stage name Mata Hari, of Dutch origin, moved to Paris in 1903 after an unfortunate marriage. There, she quickly became known as an exotic dancer.

Wearing very few clothes (and making those few disappear during the performance) raised no eyebrows, as she claimed to be performing ancient sacred oriental dances.

As was common at the time, Margaretha combined her artistic career with that of a courtesan. She associated with many men, mostly wealthy and influential.

Her extravagant lifestyle and extensive social network didn’t go unnoticed during the Great War: she was recruited first by Germany and then by France.

Her duplicity was soon discovered and she was arrested in February 1917, tried in July, and ultimately sentenced to death in September.

In Malay, Mata Hari means “eye of the day,” or “sun”: she faced the firing squad at sunrise on October 15, 1917. She was 41 years old.

Margaretha reserved one last performance for her executioners: she refused the blindfold and, it is said, blew them a kiss.

Modern interpretations suggest that, despite Mata Hari's minor role in international espionage, the French authorities decided to turn her trial into an exemplary case to boost the nation’s morale. Margaretha was the perfect scapegoat: a femme fatale without scruples, accused of selling information to the enemy, indifferent to sending thousands of soldiers to their deaths.

Until the end, she declared herself not guilty.

Her head was embalmed and kept at the Museum of Anatomy in Paris until 2000, when it was discovered to have mysteriously disappeared.

This is what the American journalist Janet Flanner wrote about her after WW1:

At another (…) intimate feminine fete, she engaged herself – at a high price, for she never forgot she was a mercenary – to dance entirely nude before ladies only. In the midst of her number, which was a Javanese warrior’s dance, done with weapons, she rightly suspected, because of the large shoes, that one of the assembled ladies was a lady’s husband, disguised. She nearly ran him through with her spear, right in the parlor. She was always courageous.

From about 1890 (…) there was a steady decline in the birth rate in industrialized Europe, the consequence not only of the spread of contraception but also of a higher standard of living and in some degree, perhaps, of the long economic depression.

What might seem like an obvious correlation today (the link between contraceptive availability and birth rates) was, in the late 19th century, still a reality in the making, a silent but revolutionary transformation of Victorian society.

The issue of demographic decline, which still ignites debates and concerns today, had already begun to emerge as a social phenomenon worthy of attention. Intrigued by this historical continuity, I began gathering information to better understand the roots of this epochal change.

Contraception and Social Change

The adoption of contraceptive methods in the late Victorian era signaled a profound transformation in human agency. People were beginning to assert control not only over moral questions but over their bodies and natural functions themselves.

This was an age when industrialization was reshaping not only city skylines but the very fabric of family life. Urban living and its economic pressures had fundamentally altered the value of large families. While numerous children had once been a blessing in rural communities, where every pair of hands could work the land, the realities of city life - with its rising costs and cramped quarters - pushed many families to limit their size.

Added to these dynamics was the emergence of neo-Malthusianism, armed with compelling arguments about population control as a path to prosperity. Their ideas found fertile ground particularly among the educated urban classes, who increasingly saw family planning as a practical response to the social and economic pressures of their time.

France during the Belle Époque offers a fascinating case study. The country experienced one of the most dramatic demographic declines in Europe from the mid-19th century onward, a phenomenon that generated intense political debate and social anxiety.

This preoccupation with falling birth rates even found its way into literature - most notably in Émile Zola's novel “Fécondité” (1899), which described the collective unease about a future with fewer French children.

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Contraceptive Methods in the Late 19th Century

In the closing decades of the Victorian era, couples seeking to control their fertility had limited options. Traditional practices like coitus interruptus and periodic abstinence remained common, yet technological advances were about to revolutionize reproductive control.

The crucial moment came with Charles Goodyear's discovery of vulcanized rubber in 1839, patented in 1844. This innovation allowed natural rubber to be treated with sulfur and heat, creating a material both durable and flexible - qualities that would prove transformative for contraception.

Before vulcanization, condoms were crafted from impractical materials: animal intestines or linen, making them expensive and unreliable. The new rubber condoms, though initially marketed for disease prevention rather than birth control, offered unprecedented accessibility and reusability.

Vulcanized rubber also enabled the production of diaphragms, which emerged in the latter part of the century. These devices, alongside traditional methods like spermicide-soaked sponges, gave women autonomous control over their fertility for the first time.

The availability of female-controlled contraceptive methods became inextricably linked with the rising feminist movement, representing a tangible step toward women's emancipation.

anonymous, Spermicidal Pessaries, ‘Prorace’ brand, London, England, 192 Wellcome L0065399, CC BY 4.0

Birth Control and the Feminist Movement

The 1877 Knowlton Trial in Britain illuminated the growing tensions around reproductive rights. When activists Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant stood trial for distributing a pamphlet on contraceptive methods written by American doctor Charles Knowlton, they transformed a courtroom into a platform for neo-Malthusian ideas. Their defense articulated a radical notion: working-class families deserved access to contraceptive information to align their family size with their economic means.

Neo-Malthusian philosophy, with its warning that unchecked population growth bred poverty and suffering, found natural allies in the emerging feminist movement. For feminist thinkers, birth control represented a powerful tool for women's agency over their bodies and family responsibilities.

Yet in the United States, the 1873 Comstock Act cast a long shadow. By criminalizing the distribution of contraceptive information and devices, along with any content addressing sexuality or family planning, it revealed deep-seated social resistance. Religious and moral opposition feared contraception would unravel traditional family structures and encourage sexual promiscuity.

The concept of 'voluntary motherhood' emerged as one of the era's most radical expressions of women's rights. While carefully avoiding explicit promotion of contraception, it boldly recognized female sexuality and asserted women's right to choose when to bear children. In a society where wives were expected to submit to their husbands' desires, advocates of voluntary motherhood proposed periodic abstinence, effectively claiming women's right to refuse sexual relations.

Feminist Dora Forster seized upon demographic anxieties in 1905 to advance women's autonomy. She declared:

I hope the scarcity of children will go on till maternity is honored at least as much as the trials and hardships of soldiers campaigning in wartime. It will then be worth while to supply the nation with a sufficiency of children. [...] It is certain that women is mistress of the situation now that she can choose whether or not to exercise the maternal function; and that every civilized nation, having lost the power to enslave woman as mother, will be compelled to recognize her voluntary exercise of that function as by far the most important service of any class of citizens.

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Interconnected causes

The Victorian era witnessed a fundamental shift in how society approached reproduction. Social transformation through industrialization and urbanization reshaped family attitudes, while technological innovations like vulcanized rubber created new possibilities for reproductive control.

Ideological movements amplified these changes. Feminism and neo-Malthusianism advocated for birth control from different perspectives: one seeking women's emancipation, the other pursuing population management to improve working-class conditions. Together, they created a powerful argument for reproductive choice.

This transformation in Victorian society went beyond questions of family size. It represented a profound shift in how individuals viewed their relationship with their bodies and their future.

The spread of contraception became emblematic of a larger social revolution: the right to self-determination.

By claiming control over reproduction, Victorian women and men laid the groundwork for personal freedoms that would shape generations to come.

Sources

G. Barraclough, An Introduction To Contemporary History (1964)

L. Gordon, The Moral Property Of Women: A History Of Birth Control Politics In America (chapter 4 on “Voluntary Motherhood”).

D. Forster, Sex Radicalism as Seen by an Emancipated Woman of the New Time (1905)

That white veil is here with me, and I think it still holds the faint perfume of your beloved little person.

The author has no doubt: he can still smell his lover's scent on the white veil he holds.

These words appear on the fourth page of a Venetian local newspaper on June 21, 1899, among the classified ads.

Under the heading "Amor Bianco" (White Love, the likely recipient's code name) unfolds a sequence of ten coded messages published between May and August of that year.

It is a one-way correspondence: she writes letters, while he can only respond through the newspaper.

Two distant lovers, and almost certainly secret ones.

This is the story of their love, played out in the summer of one hundred and twenty-six years ago.

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May: how to write you without being discovered

The first ad date back to May, 1899.

He seeks an alternative way to communicate: he asks for instructions and wonders if he can send a letter in a friend's name, because — he writes — "It disgusts me to write here everything I would like to say and that you guess."

But there seems to be no other way: "I laugh and tremble thinking that I have to write on the fourth page of a newspaper."

Ad after ad, the geography of their love also emerges: she is in Rome, and he is in Florence. When they can, they meet in Bologna, which they reach by train.

The chosen newspaper, however, is published in Venice. A choice perhaps dictated by the need for discretion.

Meanwhile, the first coded phrases appear:

"Colomba when?"

"A thousand of those two verbs of yours from the end."

"Write me at the usual address and abandon the new address. I will explain why."

The writer knows the other will understand.

A third party will also appear in May: Haasenstein & Vogler, the advertising space concession company. Its messages, addressed to advertisers, mainly serve to settle accounting matters:

P.S. You remain our creditor for L. 0.60. Haasenstein and Vogler.

In Amor Bianco's case, however, Haasenstein and Vogler will appear several times, not only to talk about money. It will become, despite itself, a character in the story.

June: “Verrà l’amor nervoso?”

In June, his tone changes. The messages become longer, more heated, and at times overflowing. When she is silent, he insists. He writes every few days, sometimes twice in the same week.

The initial embarrassment about using the newspaper vanishes: he tells, remembers, gets agitated, confesses. Writing becomes a way to hold onto desire and not stop feeling.

I rewarded you by sending the Bologna train. You'll have half a day! (June 3)

Love, what are you doing? I warn you I received Friday morning note and then nothing more. (...) Could we ever forget? Write me, tell me no. (June 14)

On June 3 Haasenstein & Vogler reappears:

P.S. Your credit L. 1.45; in future please calculate the remainders yourselves. Haasenstein and Vogler.

The ads are purchased by correspondence, paying in advance (5 cents per word), and he has miscalculated for the second time.

On June 17, Haasenstein & Vogler goes further: it decides not to publish the message, writing only

Be a little calmer in expressing yourselves, and then we will publish. Haasenstein and Vogler.

Not just accounting, then, but censorship.

It's possible he went too far: the italicized words that appear in many messages (Colomba, Ricompensa, Manifestazione…) suggest intimate formulas, perhaps sexual ones. Possibly, on June 17, he lost all modesty and wrote too much.

Then comes the message of June 21, the longest: almost four hundred words.

It is a tense text full of omissions and withheld objects, like the white veil that "still bears the faint perfume of your beloved little person."

I report it here in full:

I used terms too vivid in railing against the slavery of this kind of correspondence in this newspaper. Result: suppression of the correspondence and an invitation to calm... anonymous.

This little fact put me in a good mood Saturday because I thought that if it were known... and we understand each other, don't we? This morning I received your letter, a love of a letter like its author; sweet, affectionate, dear, as I understand you.

I have finally found all of yourself again and more than ever I have thought of our torture, of this common martyrdom that has lasted so long, and that lasts because we have not wanted to defy the prejudices and comments of our society. I am remorseful for not having been more energetic, then, and perhaps, for other reasons, it could not have been done differently. Fatality!

I have had the blackest days; I wanted without fail to make the trip to Rome to see how things stood, I even thought of writing everything and clarifying a position that is increasingly difficult for me. But then... the thought of your consequences held me back now, as then.

Today is the 20th; do you remember where we were returning from months ago? That white veil I have here with me and it seems to me it still has the faint perfume of your beloved little person. How much more I would say and write, if it were not for the instinctive repugnance of making public what constitutes the most intense and beautiful elevation of our souls! I would write you little mad words, I would repeat to you that you are all my life, that I see nothing, feel nothing, breathe nothing but you, that I think of you in all the minutes, the moments of my day..........

And at least let letters continue to arrive in which I guess that you are well and that you do not let yourself be overcome by sadness. The other letter had so saddened me! (By the way, as you imagined, I did not receive that intimate letter!)

Perhaps more easily now you will be able to have occasion to make some trip to Bologna. Your punctuality means health to me, but I don't want to demand impossible things, in any case I try to do the impossible to make this time seem less horribly long and gloomy to the one who is you, to the one who responds with all the tenderness and ardor to that double... manifestation (the word is ugly but you understand equally) of love that will live mythical and strong, eternally.

One last word. I want it to be in everything like you. Only then will it be a great love. Do we understand each other?

On June 24, at the end of another ad, Haasenstein & Vogler reappears:

P.S. Now your account is balanced.

An administrative detail that sounds almost like a promise: he has paid enough, and the wait is about to end. From the correspondence emerges the possibility that they might see each other again soon.

My love write me and if you love me so much, try to hurry. (June 28)

July and August: the epilogue

After June 24 the messages get shorter and the rhythm changes.

A sentence, a date, an hour.

In July, no ads. I checked several times through the pages of the old newspaper: it really is so.

Perhaps he and Amor Bianco finally met, and words on printed paper were no longer needed?

This seems to be confirmed by a very brief message from August 4:

Usual time.

Nothing else.

The newspaper now only serves to fix the appointment.

The rest happens elsewhere.

Who was this man who spent considerable money to say "I love you" through a German company? The ads reveal neither his name nor his profession, but the way of writing betrays something: the culture, the class, and the time in which he lived.

In 1899 Italy was changing fast and so was the way of loving.

I will speak of this in my next article.

It was June 1899, and a parallel world of coded messages, poetic pseudonyms, and amorous pleas was hidden among the commercial listings.

Intrigued, I decided to go through all the ads published that month to see what emerged.

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What I found surprised me: 121 messages forming an involuntary fresco of fin de siècle courtship. Intimacy was transformed into a public spectacle and passion submitted to the rules (and the cost) of typography.

Mysterious recipients like "231," "Amor Bianco," or "Frine" received declarations charged with emotional intensity - often expressed in a D'Annunzian language - but also with frustration and waiting.

With what cruel eloquence you respond to my enthusiasm! Do you feel no sympathy for me? Then why do you flatter me into hoping for it? Do you feel it? And why don't you make me happy by sharing it with me? I always hope. Most affectionate greetings.

someone writes to "Idalgo," in a crescendo of rhetorical questions that reveals how silence was interpreted as a refined form of communication.

The messages follow precise rituals: the art of supplication, the obsessive management of appointment times, the subterfuges to elude society's judging gazes.

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Men write to women at a ratio of 7 to 1, transforming the section into a theater of male vulnerability, where insistence becomes virtue and rejection becomes a space for fantasy projection.

The advertising agency managing the ads emerges as the silent arbiter of this communication, censoring overly heated tones and reminding that even love has a price per word.

This corpus opens an unusual window into the mechanisms of bourgeois seduction in the Italian Belle Époque.

Over the next two Sundays, I will explore the most significant stories: Amor Bianco and his exuberant censored passion, G.55 who becomes "Vinto" to avoid inconveniences, the temporal codes of amorous logistics, and the system that turns sentiment into commodity.

A brief archaeology of intimacy, from a time when to love was also to write.

Hope you’ll enjoy it.

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Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman and former Louvre employee, entered the museum on Monday morning wearing a plain white worker's smock. The building was closed to the public, but that hardly mattered, he looked like he belonged. With confident steps, he headed to the Salon Carré, unhooked the painting, and disappeared into a service stairway. There, he carefully removed the Mona Lisa from its frame and hid it under his coat.

He didn’t leave right away. He waited for hours, possibly even until the next day, taking advantage of the museum’s closure to slip away unnoticed. When he finally walked out with the painting under his arm, no one stopped him. No one even noticed.

Chaos erupted the next day. The Louvre shut its doors, and Paris police questioned everyone—guards, restorers, even avant-garde artists. Guillaume Apollinaire and Pablo Picasso were dragged in for questioning, victims of an investigation more imaginative than effective.

Meanwhile, Peruggia kept the painting hidden in a trunk, just a short walk from the Louvre. For two years, while newspapers speculated and detectives chased false leads, the Mona Lisa sat quietly in a modest apartment on rue de l'Hôpital Saint-Louis. Peruggia claimed he acted out of patriotism, convinced the painting belonged in Italy. Sincere belief or last-minute excuse?

In December 1913, Peruggia contacted a Florentine art dealer, Alfredo Geri, offering to "return" the Mona Lisa to Italy. Geri, suspicious, brought in the director of the Uffizi Gallery. They authenticated the painting and called the police. On December 12, 1913, Peruggia was arrested in a Florence hotel.

His sentence was light. The judges found his patriotic reasoning more charming than criminal. In the end, he accomplished what centuries of critics had not: turning the Mona Lisa from a masterpiece into a pop phenomenon.

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Today, the crowds pressing forward to snap photos of the Mona Lisa owe as much to Leonardo as to an Italian handyman with a clumsy plan.

I can’t help but imagine Leonardo having a good laugh at this.

Sergey Meniailenko from Cupertino, USA, Visitors of Louvre in front of Mona Lisa, CC BY 2.0

Stealing a Leonardo is no small feat, yet history records more than one attempt. The 1911 disappearance of the Mona Lisa is the most famous, but another case (this time involving a portrait of Isabella d’Este) raised questions of its own.

Initially suspected to be a theft, its story turned out to be far more complex.

Read more here:

It is easy to be captivated by the luxury and opulence that often emanate from images of that golden age. Still, it is equally intriguing to delve into the simmering mix of contradictions and dark undercurrents lurking beneath the surface, ready to erupt violently in the cataclysm of the First World War.

Recently, I came across an artwork, Mondanità or Uscita dal veglione by Aroldo Bonzagni (1910), which perfectly captures the carefree side of the Belle Époque. The subjects of Milan’s high society are depicted as they leave a party and strut confidently down a red carpet, brimming with euphoria and trust in a bright future. Yet, knowing Bonzagni, it is impossible not to detect a subtle note of sarcasm: an implicit critique that reveals how fleeting this ostentatious luxury is, and how oblivious this bourgeois class is in its arrogance, standing on the brink of decay.

This work immediately made me think, by contrast, about another iconic image from that time: Il Quarto Stato (The Fourth Estate) by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (1901). In it, we see another march—a solemn procession of the working class, a compact group of men and women advancing with a determined step towards a future of social redemption.

Indeed, during the Belle Époque, workers' struggles marked a decisive moment in European social history. Trade unions and socialist parties emerged, born in response to the brutality of the industrial system, aiming to secure better living and working conditions for the proletarian masses. Strikes and protests spread rapidly, and despite often violent repression by the authorities, they led to the approval of the first labor laws and the creation of organizations to defend workers' rights.

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo conceived Il Quarto Stato as a symbolic and artistic response to these repressions, particularly inspired by the so-called 'Bava Beccaris massacre' of 1898, when, in Milan, during protests ignited by rising bread prices and extreme poverty, General Bava Beccaris ordered troops to fire on the crowd, causing numerous civilian casualties.

In an almost symmetrical pose, the protagonist of Pellizza da Volpedo's work and the female figure in Bonzagni's painting, separated by a decade, embody the two opposing sides of the Belle Époque: on one side, the solidity and pride of the worker advancing firmly towards a future of vindication; on the other, the frivolity and elegance of an elite that proceeds confidently, immersed in luxury and seemingly unaware of the profound changes stirring within society.

Just a few more years, and images would tell of yet another march—just as resolute, but with a far darker fate: that of soldiers departing for the front, stepping forward with the same determined pace, yet heading towards the unimaginable horror of World War I.

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