Juliet (14 page)

“She will not come out just yet,” replied Maestro Ambrogio, bending over to pat the dog. “She is in no mood for serenades. Perhaps she never will be.”

“Then why,” exclaimed Romeo, all but knocking over the easel and portrait in his frustration, “are you telling me this?”

“Because,” said Maestro Ambrogio, amused by the other’s exasperation, “it pains an artist’s eyes to see a snowy dove dally with crows.”

   [   III.I   ]

…

T
HE VIEW FROM THE OLD MEDICI FORTRESS
, the Fortezza, was spectacular. Not only could I see the terra-cotta roofs of Siena broiling in the afternoon sun, but at least twenty miles of rolling hills were heaving around me like an ocean in shades of green and distant blues. Again and again I looked up from my reading, taking in the sweeping landscape in the hope that it would force all stale air from my lungs and fill my soul with summer. And yet every time I looked down and resumed Maestro Ambrogio’s journal, I plunged right back into the dark events of 1340.

I had spent the morning at Malèna’s espresso bar in Piazza Postierla, leafing through the official early versions of
Romeo and Juliet
written by Masuccio Salernitano and Luigi da Porto in 1476 and 1530 respectively. It was interesting to see how the plot had developed, and how da Porto had put a literary spin to a story that—Salernitano claimed—was based on real events.

In Salernitano’s version, Romeo and Juliet—or rather, Mariotto and Giannozza—lived in Siena, but their parents were not at war. They did get married in secret, after bribing a friar, but the drama only really began when Mariotto killed a prominent citizen and had to go into exile. Meanwhile, Giannozza’s parents—unaware that their daughter was already married—demanded that she marry someone else. In desperation, Giannozza had the friar cook up a powerful sleeping potion, and the effect was so great that her imbecilic parents believed she was dead and went ahead
and buried her right away. Fortunately, the good old friar was able to deliver her from the sepulchre, whereupon Giannozza traveled secretly by boat to Alexandria, where Mariotto was living the sweet life. However, the messenger who was supposed to inform Mariotto of the sleeping-potion scheme had been captured by pirates, and upon receiving the news of Giannozza’s death, Mariotto came blasting back into Siena to die by her side. Here, he was captured by soldiers, and beheaded. Chop. And Giannozza had spent the rest of her life pulling Kleenex in a convent.

As far as I could see, the key elements in this original version were: the secret marriage, Romeo’s banishment, the harebrained scheme of the sleeping potion, the messenger gone astray, and Romeo’s deliberate suicide mission based on his erroneous belief in Juliet’s death.

The big curveball, of course, was that the whole thing supposedly happened in Siena, and if Malèna had been around, I would have asked her if this was common knowledge. I highly suspected it was not.

Interestingly enough, when da Porto took over the story half a century later, he, too, was eager to anchor it in reality, going so far as to call Romeo and Giulietta by their real first names. He chickened out on the location, however, and moved the whole thing to Verona, changing all family names—very possibly to avoid retribution from the powerful clans involved in the scandal.

But never mind the logistics; in my interpretation—aided by several cups of cappuccino—da Porto wrote a far more entertaining story. He was the one who introduced the masked ball and the balcony scene, and his was the genius that first devised the double suicide. The only thing that did not immediately fly with me was that he had Juliet die by holding her breath. But perhaps da Porto had felt that his audience would not appreciate a bloody scene … scruples that Shakespeare, fortunately, did not have.

After da Porto, someone called Bandello had felt compelled to write a third version and add a lot of melodramatic dialogue without—as far as I could see—altering the essentials of the plot. But from then on the Italians were done with the story, and it traveled first to France, then England, to eventually end up on Shakespeare’s desk, ready for immortalization.

The biggest difference, as far as I could see, between all these poetic versions and Maestro Ambrogio’s journal, was that in reality there had been
three
families involved, not just two. The Tolomeis and the Salimbenis
had been the feuding households—the Capulets and the Montagues, so to speak—while Romeo, in fact, had been a Marescotti and thus an outsider. In that respect, Salernitano’s very early rendition of the story was the one that came closest to the truth; it was set in Siena, and there had been no mention of a family feud.

Later, walking back from the Fortezza with Maestro Ambrogio’s journal clutched to my chest, I looked at all the happy people around me and once again felt the presence of an invisible wall between me and them. There they were, walking, jogging, and eating ice cream, not pausing to question the past, nor burdened—as I was—with a feeling that they did not fully belong in this world.

That same morning, I had stood in front of the bathroom mirror trying on the necklace with the silver crucifix that had been in my mother’s box, and decided I would start wearing it. After all, it was something she had owned, and by leaving it in the box she had clearly intended it for me. Perhaps, I thought, it would somehow protect me against the curse that had marked her for an early death.

Was I insane? Maybe. But then, there are many different kinds of insanity. Aunt Rose had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples. Some have more, some have less, but only truly abnormal people have none at all. This commonsense philosophy had consoled me many times before, and it did now, too.

When I returned to the hotel, Direttor Rossini came towards me like the messenger from Marathon, dying to tell me the news. “Miss Tolomei! Where have you been? You must go! Right away! Contessa Salimbeni is waiting for you in Palazzo Pubblico! Go, go”—he shooed me the way one shoos a dog hanging around for scraps—“you must not leave her waiting!”

“Wait!” I pointed at two objects that sat conspicuously in the middle of the floor. “Those are my suitcases!”

“Yes-yes-yes, they were delivered a moment ago.”

“Well, I’d like to go to my room and—”

“No!” Direttor Rossini ripped open the front door and waved at me to run through it. “You must go right away!”

“I don’t even know where I’m going!”

“Santa Caterina!” Though I knew he was secretly delighted with yet
another opportunity to educate me about Siena, Direttor Rossini rolled his eyes and let go of the door. “Come, I will draw directions!”

ENTERING THE CAMPO
was like stepping into a gigantic seashell. All around the edge were restaurants and cafés, and right where the pearl would have been, at the bottom of the sloping piazza, sat Palazzo Pubblico, the building that had served as Siena’s city hall since the Middle Ages.

I paused for a moment, taking in the hum of many voices under the dome of a blue sky, the pigeons flapping around, and the white marble fountain with the turquoise water—until a wave of tourists came up behind me and swept me along with them, rushing forward in excited wonder at the magnificence of the giant square.

While drawing his directions, Direttor Rossini had assured me that the Campo was considered the most beautiful piazza in all of Italy, and not only by the Sienese themselves. In fact, he could hardly recount the numerous occasions on which hotel guests from all corners of the world—even from Florence—had come to him and extolled the graces of the Campo. He, of course, had protested and pointed out the many splendors of other places—surely, they were out there somewhere—but people had been unwilling to listen. They had stubbornly maintained that Siena was the loveliest, most unspoiled city on the globe, and in the face of such conviction, what could Direttor Rossini do but allow that, indeed, it might be so?

I stuffed the directions into my handbag and began walking down towards Palazzo Pubblico. The building was hard to miss with the tall bell tower, Torre del Mangia, the construction of which Direttor Rossini had described in such detail that it had taken me several minutes to realize that it had not, in fact, been erected before his very eyes, but sometime in the late Middle Ages. A lily, he had called it, a proud monument to female purity with its white stone flower held aloft by a tall red stem. And curiously, it had been built with no foundation. The Mangia Tower, he claimed, had stood for over six centuries, held up by the grace of God and faith alone.

I blocked the sun with my hand and looked at the tower as it stretched against the infinite blue. In no other place had I ever seen female purity celebrated by a 355-foot phallic object. But maybe that was me.

There was a quite literal gravity to the whole building—Palazzo Pubblico and its tower—as if the Campo itself was caving in under its weight. Direttor Rossini had told me that if I was in doubt, I was to imagine that I had a ball and put it on the ground. No matter where I stood on the Campo, the ball would roll right down to Palazzo Pubblico. There was something about the image that appealed to me. Maybe it was the thought of a ball bouncing over the ancient brick pavement. Or maybe it was simply the way he had pronounced the words, with whispering drama, like a magician talking to four-year-olds.

PALAZZO PUBBLICO HAD
, like all government, grown with age. From its origins as little more than a meeting room for nine administrators, it was now a formidable structure, and I entered the inner courtyard with a feeling of being watched. Not so much by people, I suppose, as by the lingering shadows of generations past, generations devoted to the life of this city, this small plot of land as cities go, this universe unto itself.

Eva Maria Salimbeni was waiting for me in the Hall of Peace. She sat on a bench in the middle of the room, looking up into the air, as if she was having a silent conversation with God. But as soon as I walked through the door, she snapped to, and a smile of delight spread over her face.

“So, you came after all!” she exclaimed, rising from the bench to kiss me on both cheeks. “I was beginning to worry.”

“Sorry to keep you waiting. I didn’t even realize—”

Her smile dismissed everything I could possibly say. “You are here now. That is all that matters. Look”—she made a sweeping gesture at the giant frescoes covering the walls of the room—“have you ever seen anything so magnificent? Our great Maestro, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, made them in the late 1330s. He probably finished this one, over the doors, in 1340. It is called
Good Government.”

I turned to look at the fresco in question. It covered the entire length of the wall, and to make it would have required a complex machinery of ladders and scaffolding, perhaps even platforms suspended from the ceiling. The left half depicted a peaceful city scene with ordinary citizens going about their business; the right half was a wide view of the countryside beyond the city wall. Then something occurred to me, and I said, baffled, “You mean …
Maestro Ambrogio?”

“Oh, yes,” nodded Eva Maria, not the least bit surprised that I was familiar with the name. “One of the greatest masters. He painted these scenes to celebrate the end of a long feud between our two families, the Tolomeis and the Salimbenis. Finally, in 1339, there was peace.”

“Really?” I thought of Giulietta and Friar Lorenzo escaping from the Salimbeni bandits on the high road outside Siena. “I get the impression that in 1340 our ancestors were still very much at war. Certainly out in the countryside.”

Eva Maria smiled cryptically; either she was delighted that I had bothered to read up on family lore, or she was miffed that I dared to contradict her. If the latter, she was graceful enough to acknowledge my point, and said, “You are right. The peace had unintended consequences. It happens whenever the bureaucrats try to help us.” She threw up her arms. “If people want to fight, you can’t stop them. If you prevent them inside the city, they will fight in the country, and out there, they will get away with it. At least inside Siena, the riots were always stopped before things got completely out of hand. Why?”

She looked at me to see if I could guess, but of course, I couldn’t.

“Because,” she went on, wagging a didactic finger in front of my nose, “in Siena we have always had a militia. And in order to keep the Salimbenis and the Tolomeis in check, the citizens of Siena had to be able to mobilize and have all their companies out in the city streets within minutes.” She nodded firmly, agreeing with herself. “I believe this is why the contrada tradition is so strong here even today; the devotion of the old neighborhood militia was essentially what made the Sienese republic possible. If you want to keep the bad guys in check, make sure the good guys are armed.”

I smiled at her conclusion, doing my best to look as if I had no horse in the race. Now was not the time to tell Eva Maria that I did not believe in weapons, and that, in my experience, the so-called good guys were no better than the bad ones.