José F. Grave de Peralta
SAN GIMIGNANO: The Medieval city of ... Bankers, Pilgrims, and Knights Templar
Foreword
The word in Italian sounds pretty nasty: fannullona, translating to something like “good for nothing.” Imagine, to come across this derogatory description for the famous Saint Mary Magdalene in a 13th century text known as The Golden Legend, and to learn that her sister Martha would often call her that. These two siblings and a brother named Lazarus were first cousins of Jesus.
​ Jacob Voragine, the Genovese bishop and friend of Thomas Aquinas who collected the countless stories contained in this compendium, also suggests to us in his story of “the good for nothing,” that when Lazarus dies and Jesus rushes to meet the two girls several days later, Mary Magdalene’s tears move him to weep and to utter in one word the command that makes Lazarus come back to life and walk out of the tomb.
So much for the image we get of saints in written accounts from yesteryear. How about in the visual arts?
Countless Italian painters have depicted Mary Magdalene and Martha throughout the ages in various episodes of their lives, their depictions being based on oral or written narrative traditions; one of these painters, named Lippo Memmi, as well as various members of his workshop, must have read and reread Voragine’s text in the early 1300s to come up with the scene of The raising of Lazarus that I saw with a small group of tourists from Miami when we paid a visit to the Duomo, or Collegiate Church, of San Gimignano a few days ago.
The story of this excursion and the painting of the miracle begin in a bookshop of Rome.
Part One
The Libreria Cesaretti, on Via di Pié di Marmo -- the street of the marble foot -- could easily be one of those rare book shops described by Charles Dickens at the beginning of a novel. But the huge, sandaled foot that gives the street its name, located in the end of the alley that corners adjacent to the Libreria in Rome belonged to a colossal statue of Isis, the Egyptian goddess of wisdom, which stood with her two strong legs astride right here in the days of Cleopatra. According to archaeologists, this neighborhood was the sacred precinct of Egyptian, not Roman, priests, deities, and their attendants. In fact, I have heard the Cesarettis, father and son owners of the store, discreetly inform customers who show interest in such matters, that their bookshelves stand on underlying structures of altars and ancient lecture rooms filled with hieroglyphics and sphinxes, used for rituals way before the Middle Ages of Bishop Voragine.
My artist's studio is in this neighborhood, not far from the marble foot. Not long ago, on a visit to the shop in search of biographical material on a Medieval saint painted by the notorious Caravaggio for a Genovese collector right before his death in 1610, Mr. Cesaretti the Elder proudly presented me from his stacks the complete edition of the 13th-century Golden Legend. I knew of the existence of this “Who Is Who” of saints and miraculous occurences, and asked the bookseller the pricetag of this out-of-print tome of 1995. For a tour guide like me, wishing to understand better so many masterpieces in Italy's churches, palaces, or museums, this was a godsend. Let me explain: in the case of a saint or sinner in a canvas or fresco painting, it is not the same to view “cold” an artist's representation in form and color without background biographical information.
Without the Voragine narration, I never would have known that, Mary of Magdala, the same female convert to the teachings of Jesus who dared to wash his feet with her tears and anoint them with very expensive perfume was a "good for nothing" in her sister Saint Martha's eyes: and so the epithet of fannullona. In another entry in his calendar of saints, pertaining to the finding of the "true" cross of the Crucifixion by the mother of Roman Emperor Constantine almost 300 years after his death – Voragine writes that this woman had not been born in a palace. The writer, in fact, cites sources that claim she was an innkeeper, a horse-groomer – or stalliera -- when Constantine's father met and fell in love with her in his travels. A very passionate and astute woman, Helena eventually knew that bringing back from the Holy Land relics like those of the Cross or of the "Crown of Thorns" would support her son Constantine's program to Christianize the empire. (They would also begin to delineate the paths that devout pilgrims would follow henceforth to physically view or touch these sacred objects in shrines and churches!) In short, and these are only two examples, even the historical Edict of Milan proclamation by Constantine in 312, granting freedom of religion protection to Christians at the time of intense persecutions, becomes even more formidable if regarded as part of a larger family pedigree of rather lowly origins. By the way, and with all respect to Caravaggistas, the canvas of The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula by Attila the Hun, recently exhibited in a major Rome gallery’s tribute to the absolute master of bold chiaroscuro scenes and themes -- the very canvas that directed my feet to the Rome bookstore, looked shallow when I confronted the Milanese painter's minimalistic, black-box composition of Ursula's martyrdom with what one "sees" of her life in The Golden Legend. The wedding of Saint Ursula and her “thousand and one virgins” as narrated in Vorragine’s text is a feast for the imagination. . . and makes very questionable the Milanese artist's version, so cut and dry that it “reads” like a hell and brimstone sermon of 1610.
Although the text of The Golden Legend that I acquired at the Cesarettis' corner bookshop was pricey, not all of the great finds I have purchased in this learned shop have put a strain on my wallet. And so it was that a few months ago as I passed the store to run an errand, I noticed in their discount book bin, placed humbly by them on the sidewalk every day, a "SAN GIMIGNANO" guidebook for a mere 5 euros.
It was not at the top of my list of touring destinations. But there it was: SAN GIMIGNANO. The town's name was writ large across the top border of the sidewalk item. For some reason, the moment I held in my hand the second-hand text pulled out of the 5 € container and leafed through its color-illustrated pages, I felt mysteriously obliged to go inside the shop and buy it. Either Cesaretti Father, or his Son, took courteously from my hand the travelogue and flipped it so I could see the back cover. "Look at this portrait of their patron saint: he is giving you a blessing, maestro! This is Bishop Gimignano himself." To be called a maestro in Italy by these two book connoisseurs when they greet me has always made me feel embarrassed, but so it happens, and I move on and listen to their masterful knowledge or advice on books. It turned out that this other good bishop in my present story, in the glossy back cover of a humble travel reference guide, was indeed blessing with his left hand, but with his left, balancing on his lap a circular tray with a sort of miniature city crowded with red-rook-tiled houses and tall, tall skyscrapers!
"That looks like ... Manhattan,” I remarked to Signor Cesaretti, and we both laughed. And, as I left, I had the gumption to suggest: "Dottore, you have told me you have never been there, but could this little city in what I presume is a Renaissance altarpiece be Miami?"
Two of the numerous towers belonging to the Salvucci family of the Guelf faction
San Gimignano
The Rognosa Tower of the Guelph faction family dates from 1200
San Gimignano
SANDALED Foot of Egyptian Goddess ISIS
Via del Pie di Marmo
ROMA
SAN GIMIGNANO blessing, as he holds the town of San Gimignano on his lap
Back cover
Edizioni Il Furetto, 2000
Part Two
​
Well, the underground realms of Via del Pie di Marmo were not finished with me. Once inside my studio, I flip at random the pages of the visitor’s guide to the picture of a building that looked familiar. In fact, author Gianna Coppini, identifying the photo in the travel book, explains that the small arched façade in white travertine and black stone masonry is a church or house – magione -- of San Francesco, belonging to the Knights Templar. My tour-guiding life flashed before me, and I remembered having visited San Gimignano around ten years before with a husband and wife pair of travelers from St. Augustine, Florida. The wife was keenly interested in the topic of the knightly order of monks in charge of protecting pilgrims militarily on their way to the Holy Land of the St. Helena legends and so forth in Jerusalem. I had first met Kathy and Jim through a tour agency that assigned me to guide these clients inside the Vatican Museums. That morning Rome’s summer thermometer was a scorching 85 degrees Fahrenheit. I noticed straightaway that the lady was perspiring and struggling to manipulate her walking cane as the three of us made our way up the sidewalk towards the Papal city's museum entrance. Both of my tourists, despite her cane, were walkers, they assured me. Both were in their early fifties and looked to be in general good health. The wife, however, informed me that some health condition made her mobility difficult. As I recall, not long into the tour she avowed to be a firm believer in miracles. We may have been in the PINACOTECA at that point, admiring Melozzo da Forlì’s musical angels. "Of course, Jim and I love Italian art, José," she continued as we got to know each other as we admired the late 1400s fresco paintings, "Really, though,” she went on, “you could say this particular visit is a pilgrimage.” I asked her to explain. “I know you’ve just met us, but let me simply say that with the help of my angels, you will see me get rid of this cane!"
In short, at the conclusion of our tour that day my Floridian clients told me they had enjoyed our time together and looked forward to more tour experiences with me.
Sure enough, not too many days after, she, Jim, and I met for a Prosecco in a piazza near their hotel, at which time she informed me that they were planning to tour Malta in the near future. "We loved, José,” said Jim, “seeing with you the map of the Battle of Lepanto and the galley ships of Malta in the Hall of the Maps in the Vatican. Maybe you can arrange a visit for us to the Priorate here in Rome!" "
Happily, that visit took place, leading to discussions about the Order of the Knights Templar and other related topics. Naples, Venice, and even Cinque Terre followed as destinations over the next couple of years. I hold good memories of those trips. Then came Florence: which is the excursion that came back to me vividly, thanks to the San Gimignano tour manual that came across my path in Rome years later. Cut to the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence: I see Kathy on another of those sultry summer days carrying in hand a copy of Dan Brown's Inferno, and Jim and I trying to assist her -- not altogether successfully -- as she checks off the bestseller’s clues in the Room of the 500. “Cerca Trova, Cerca Trova…” – yes, the hidden hide and you will find clue: so true to form for the kind of magic she saw in travel. She was very excited by the overlapping of this American bestselling author's fiction, Dante's Comedy, and real historical time events. But where this very impassioned lady's zest for history truly took force was in our side trip visit to the City of the Hundred Towers.
Some days before our expedition, Jim and I had told her how the city was on a venerable old pilgrim route to Rome that stretched back to the year 1000 in Canterbury, England, precisely when the Knights Templar spread their network of hospitals, banks, and military protection squads for travelers at the time of the first crusades. Kathy, of course, took the cue and ran with it, visiting various mega bookstores of Rome equipped with English-language books sections and coming back to show us several about Templar Italy that she had bought and already earmarked. Ah yes, and then there was in her panoply of finds a copy of Dr. Brian Weiss' Many Lives; Many Masters, which, from the worn look of its pages was evidently not new but just as exciting to her as the other texts. “Okay. This is more interesting than Dan Brown to me, gentlemen," she told us on the eve of the trip. "As Jim knows, my family name is Rhodes, so I have ancestors who were probably knights of that island and may have come on their own missions to this part of the pilgrimage world." ​
San Gimignano was overflowing with summer tourists when we visited the town, and it was quite difficult to navigate on foot from one quadrant to another of its several piazzas. I vaguely recall Jim and I climbing the hundred some steps of one of the towers. At some point, though, what was really a kind of miraculous occurrence in the tour, we saw Kathy to all effects throw out her walking cane. She took the guiding torch and ran, her excitement was so powerful. I will never forget the sight of her inspecting from up close buildings like the Templar church of San Francesco or peering into patio entrances, one of her own books in hand, in search of the signs of the Knights Templar -- and of her own ancestors.
Totila sacking Florence:
SAN GIMIGNANO led the first inhabitants of the town to victory over his hordes
from a Medieval codex about
the invasion of the Goths in
the VI century A.D.
Knights Templar church
or house façade
12th-century
San Gimignano
Part Three
Sometime in October of last year – I write this memoir one day after the feast of the Epiphany in 2026 -- I received a letter from a lady in Miami inquiring about my touring availability in December. "My husband and I are very good friends of a couple you know very well." Her voice sounds very familiar to me, though we had never met in person while I lived in Miami. The friends we had in common were Gachi and Raul -- who, years ago, had commissioned me to paint a large mother and daughter portrait in pastel. The daughter, 5 or 6 years old at the time, made me laugh so much in the various sittings that we set up in their cozy, colorful family room in Coral Gables. “My mother’s mother was my grandmother, but she died…” Dori sighed on one occasion.
“Oh! Really?” I asked her non-chalantly. “So you remember her?”
“Yes,” was her answer. “But each day I remember her less!”
For their setting in the pastel painting, I showed them sitting on Havana’s seawall, or Malecón, in an imaginary no-Castro world.
Ina’s voice now, so many years later, pulls me back to the present from my reverie as she tells me that she and her doctor husband this past year had lived through some rather serious health scares, "and after our tours of Rome we’d like to make a side trip to the shrine of Padre Pío. You know, to give thanks for our recovery--.” I almost didn’t hear what she said next, since my mind immediately went back to Kathy with her walking cane in 2012. “Where is that area, José?” Gargano, I tell her, is worth visiting, plus we could go to Monte Sant Angelo where the archangel appeared. “We’d also love to go to Tuscany, though, if that would be closer,” Ina adds when she hears me say that the area of Padre Pio would be some 5 or more hours by car.
After our conversation that day and some emails back and forth, we spoke again on the phone. "Look, José,” -- her voice sounded very familiar still --"Let’s simplify. Since you have lived in Italy for years now, we trust your sense of the key places. Sure, the thought of going to the Padre Pío site would be amazing. But, hey, let's think this will not be the last time we go to Italy. My daughter Jacqueline says, and you will meet her, that this being Jubilee Year, after the Vatican and the Holy Door, we will be churched out. Let’s make the day trip be to Tuscany!”
Souvenir of Jim and Kathy from the "mercatino" of SAN GIMIGNANO
ceramics
circa 2012
Part Four
It was high time to be reacquainted with the Siena area of Tuscany. This was why the Cesaretti's bargain book had popped up in my Rome life! Among other forces, Kathy and her Many Lives: Many Masters were decidedly prompting me to return there. A sort of golden legend in its own right.
The historical fact that in 2025 Roma was celebrating Jubilee Year had also made me think many times about a favorite novel of mine, finished in 1616 by Miguel de Cervantes, landscaped not in La Mancha or Seville, but in places as distant as Scandinavia, Lisbon, and finally Rome. Published in 1617, one year after his death, The Travels of Persiles and Sigismunda -- the novel's title -- at first glance would not seem to have anything to do with Italy or with tours to Tuscany, for that matter. But if indeed one of the knightly ancestors of Kathy had needed to deliver a message from the Eternal City to Lisbon and Europe of the north – we are in the times of the Templar Order, the Gallic wars of Julius Caesar, or Cervantes – he would have had to walk or gallop on the so-called Via Francigena, or French Road, and cross the Alps to France and the English Channel to arrive.
Basically, Cervantes' tale of many tales of PERSILES and his pilgrims is a long "on the road" novel about two young Scandinavians from royal families who elope from Norway and make a pilgrimage to Rome under false identities, to convert to Catholicism and get married. The girl, being incredibly beautiful, gets kidnaped soon after they embark and is sold several times to various bands of pirates, one of them hell-bent on using the perfect looks of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty to create a new race and world order. Very few, if any, modern book lovers these days know that this 17th century novel decries eugenicist Nazi ideology inside what seems to but a very simplistic boy-meets girl, plot. In one of the many crazy episodes of the story, the couple, after they are reunited after two years, run into the sad story of a young woman strapped by her uncle to a bed in the city of Lucca, very near San Gimignano, on the grounds that she is stark-raving possessed by demons. Of course the protagonists of Cervantes' novel are somehow able to rescue her from the evil uncle's hands, and help her to meet up with her true love not far away from Lucca. This town being on the age-old pilgrim route or Via Francigena, on which, wouldn't you know it, Gimignano also grew to be important in the beginning of the second millennium, this pulled me into the web of this hikers and spiritual seekers path when the novel crossed my path in the Eternal City in 2017.
In the Lucca episode, along with many others, Cervantes sings the beauty and romanticism of the Via Francigena to Rome. But also its dangers, its often times banality, and, most alarmingly, its frequent misuse by white slave traders. When Pope Francis inaugurated Jubilee Year 2025 in contemporary Rome, I smiled to think that I was the only artist who had read and illustrated several scenes in the novel of poor Isabella Castrucho roped and gagged to a bed in Lucca by someone in her family. Perhaps a documentary or podcast is still in order to shed new/old light on Rome.
Or on San Gimignano – where I diligently checked into a b&b named "La Donna Nobile" (The Noble Lady), located on an old side street a block or two east of the Via Francigena, and named, probably for reasons now mostly unknown, "La Via delle Eremite," or the Road of the Hermits or Hermitages. The weekend I stayed at the inn on Via delle Eremite -- imagining the sorts of human beings whose life path would have given the street its name – fresher in my mind was Jacob Voragine’s The Golden Legend. ​
​ FLIGHT FROM THE WORLD” or FUGA MUNDI – thus titled, the Italian Touring Club guidebook which I also put into my bag of document material for the Gimignano weekend of study, explains in one of its most compelling chapters, that, around the time of the Second Crusade, in the early 1100's the Knights Templar had organized themselves as a militia to protect and provide the spiritual, physical and financial safety of pilgrims to Rome (and/or eventually Jerusalem). There are names of Popes like Innocent III and preachers like St. Bernard de Clairvaux, not to forget the myriad architects and military engineers, who further deepen one’s understanding of the Medieval period of the Via Francigena that stretched ultimately to Jerusalem. And then there is the owner of “La Donna Nobile” guesthouse -- who told me when he was photocopying my identification documents upon arrival that he was born in another Tuscan town. "My wife is from here, but I grew up in Poggibonsi, where you changed buses when you came now from Florence." Massimo went on: "Poggibonsi is not a walled city, like Gimignano, José. And I can tell you from experience that because of its double rings of walls, Gimignano is secretive and impenetrable in a way that my paese is not. There are so many stories and intrigues here that they make Dante's Purgatorio read like a children's book!" The PERSILES came to my mind as well.
"By the way, Dante did spend time here, and he speaks highly of vernaccia of San Gimignano, the wine that I make in my vineyard," Massimo added. Sure enough -- as I later found out on this b&b owner's vineyard's web site! -- one of the flesh and blood, historical figures with whom Dante meets up with in a terrace of Purgatory, on his way to be united with Beatrice in paradise, is a Pope who loved vernaccia too much. Pontiff Martin IV, who sat in St. Peter's Chair in Rome in the 1200s, sings Dante, had to purify his soul from the capital sin of gluttony, for his excessive love of Bolsena eels and the so-called "white queen" of Tuscan wines. How is that pedigree for advertising one's vineyard? Vernaccia, claim linguists, derives from the word "vernacular" -- meaning the dialect, even the inferior language spoken by non-educated people.
Julius Caesar and his Legions made the first roads from Britain to Rome in 50 A.D.
Via Francigena PILGRIMAGE ROAD from Canterbury, England, to Rome
990 A.D. when SIGERIC, the bishop of Canterbury made the pilgrimage to ROME
Part Five
My two days of study in Gimignano certainly confirmed what Massimo alluded to regarding the town and its many layered stories. There was not enough time in that weekend to look, think, and enter notes in my journal that would eventually form an itinerary for my upcoming December tour. Of course I became familiar with the location and very general history of the main piazzas and towers, but because I am a painter and historian, the frescoes I saw in the House of the Mayor or Podestá, purportedly illustrating the love story of Paolo and Francesca in the Inferno, plus the echoes of Dante’s historical speech to the town council at the time of the warring Ghibelline and Guelf factions, took my breath away. Definitely, with Jim and Kathy ten years before, given the impassioned trail she was following, I doubt we explored this civic space or that we admired in person the altarpiece portrait of the bishop patron saint on the back cover that I found at the Cesaretti’s bookstore. The same is true for the huge, frescoed walls of the town’s Duomo, whose image in my memory is little more than a blur of many – joyful -- colors. But when I checked out of “La Donna Nobile” to return to 2025 Jubilee Rome, I couldn’t wait to contact Ina and family let them know that they were in for a treat, given this second reading I had made of the City of the Hundred Towers our first option.
***** ***** *****
The two months flew by quite quickly, and before I knew it, the Miami family arrived and phoned from their hotel in Rome to tell me that they were excited to meet me on the following day -- at the Pantheon.
After much handshaking and cordiality by the five of us in the venerable Piazza della Rotonda, we formed a circular huddle to discuss the day ahead before proceeding into the monument, and, just as I started to tell the group some preliminary facts about Hadrian as a world traveler and also about the first Pantheon that had stood there, built under Caesar Augustus’ time – after he defeated Mark Anthony and Cleopatra at sea – Ina interrupted my speech to alert us that Manuel, our pater familiae, had dropped out of view. "Oh no!" we gasped, but before we could ask of his whereabouts, there showed up out of nowhere an elegant Italian doctor and a gendarme -- I could swear, arm in arm – and in a sort of slow motion flash, we had our lost tour member back the circle. The uniformed policeman and the doctor, though, before they themselves vanished, checked and double-checked that Ina’s husband did not have any part broken, made a princely bow and vanished the way they had come. Dr. Manuel, meanwhile, quite good humoredly, wiped the cobblestone dust from his coat, and reassured his wife that he was fine. Something in his voice and Cuban accent reminded me of a cousin on my mother's side. “Did you ever meet Erasmo Don Zabala in Miami, Doctor ?” (I pronounced the word in Spanish).
Erasmo, ever present in my paths in Rome, purchased several years ago -- no small gesture of support and affection -- a canvas that I painted shortly after arriving in Rome, showing Havana's "DAMAS DE BLANCO," (click here), a group of women who have been denouncing the atrocities and imprisonment of their husbands and spouses by the Castro regime.
“Chico, you can call me Manuel”, he replied. “No, I never met him.”
For many of us guides, the resemblance of a client to someone we knew or who meant very much to us, quite often strikes us and in some way affects the way we connect with the traveler. The dejá vu similarity with Erasmo was not physical, but it was strong and uncanny -- in some way, too, as though made of a starry materiality like that of the two gentlemen who had just appeared to help Ina’s husband and then vanished.
At any rate, we proceeded to begin the tour in earnest and enter Hadrian’s Pantheon –literally a Temple of All the Gods – although it was also converted to a Christian basilica in the early 600’s A.D. Of course, I silently prayed to our lucky stars the fall that Manuel took lightly was just a scare and that our tours would proceed smoothly thereafter. Thankfully, Ina’s son Luis helped me steer the group’s spirit in a pleasant direction by mentioning how his son, who is a student at the University of Virginia, had shown him the rotunda of Monticello during a recent parents' weekend visit to Thomas Jefferson’s campus, and they had both discussed how this founding father of the American Republic had Roman architecture in mind as a hallmark of a truly ennobling education. The monument's interior always elicits wonder and, of course, questions, the oculus, in my experience, being the most astounding element of all. I recall Manuel praising the design for its regularity and its order, and humorously lamenting that the “san pietrini” cobblestones that caused his fall some minutes before did not do justice to the aesthetic of the grand temple.
The first chapter of our day, then, was pleasant -- what a relief -- and when we came out to the open air the group agreed that it would be pleasant to grab an espresso in the Caffé Tazza d’Oro. We were in for another surprise, this time less unsettling than the scare of the fall!
Who would have thought, however, that another unexpected jolt was a few Roman feet away when, as we neared the caffé, we would bump into a close physician friend of mine as well as Rome enthusiast from Miami, chatting ever so casually with two young women, the three of them intermittently glancing at the Pantheon! “Victor Hugo, what on earth are you doing here?” I exclaimed. And just as I was going to explain to Ina and her family who this doctor was, Manuel was next to me, waiting his turn to also hug Victor Hugo, and saying: “Yes, what on earth are you doing here? I saw you in the operating room two days ago!" The two doctors embraced in admiration that they would run into each other in Italy – and thatother would know "Pepe!" The other young lady with Victor and his travel companion, it turned out, was a Rome guide named Azurro – Blue, like the unmistakably Italian scarf wrapped seductively around her neck – whom, in fact, I knew, and her own assessment of the scene was that All roads did not only lead to Rome, but to a sort of Cuban Miami.
Niccolo Machiavelli
Santi di Tito
Palazzo Vecchio
FLORENCE
1500s
Part Six
​ The morning of our excursion to San Gimignano arrived. Our Rome outings had gone well, but this is not the place to write about them.
It was a sunny, chilly morning, and I left my apartment with my various touring notebooks and sketching materials in a small leather bag so its smaller dimensions would limit what I could show and feel that I had to exhibit to Ina and family. While I waited for our driver, I wondered how I would introduce that day’s narrative. Neither Niccolo Machiavelli or Dante lived in San Gimignano for very long . . ., but they were important world figures who had left footprints there. Maybe I should leave well-enough, I went on and on with myself. Just then the minivan arrived, and we proceeded to pick up our guests in their Rome lodging.
Everyone seemed to be fairly awake in the car despite the early hour, and as we exited Rome by way of the Verano Cemetery, my lamp lit up. "At this moment," I pretended to quip matter-of-factly, "with all these cars, don't tell me this couldn’t be Miami?"
“Of course, we are in Rome,” our young Rumanian driver, named Emilia, put in, in somewhat hesitant English: "This expressway is our beltway, which we call the Grande Raccordo Anullare.” (Oh good, I thought, and thanked Emilia silently for the cue.)
"Romans call it the GRA: right, Emilia? The Grande Raccordo Anullare.” All were quiet. “The Great Ring---” I paused, “the letters G-R-A-. Italians pronounce the acronym as one sound, and it means something else.
“But listen to this," I continued. "You’ll think I’m making it up. A few years ago, a documentary came out in Italy about the construction of all this. I mean, the beltway that we are crossing. And, because in Italian the word GRAH means grail, like the gra or chalice of Arthurian legends, people joke that this dull grey beltway is a Holy Grail." My travelers were still just listening, and as I do in cases like this, of unexpected nuances, I let things be.
The remainder of the trip flowed on then, with conversation ranging from farming topics to sunflower fields to sheep grazing, to name a few.
When the van finally arrived at our destination and climbed the town's promontory to the Medieval gate's southern gate, Emilia asked us to disembark in the outdoor parking area, so we would know where she would be waiting for us at day's end. This was the wall Massimo mentioned in the b&b-- the walls that made his wife’s city protective in ways other than architectural! But let’s see now, I pondered briefly, how could I frame our introduction without weighing down my voyagers with names? “Ah, look over there at that sign. Let’s see San Gimignano’s location so we can understand the lay of the land,” I proposed.
“LA VIA FRANCIGENA:” I heard Ina and her daughter say in unison, trying to “Italianize” the sound. On my part, I cleared my throat to explain how this figure of a hiker with backpack and crosier was the logo for the actual French Road. Dr. Manuel, however, had another idea.
Oh please, José…," he asked me, and I could hear my cousin Erasmo's voice, "Let's see if we can first find a restroom?” His request sounded casually urgent; understandably, since we had driven nonstop from Rome for four hours!
This was actually a good call. It would spare the travelers of any of my grandiloquent statements about pilgrims, past or present. There would be ample occasion later to bring up Machiavelli’s The Prince, “the end justifies the means,” of how he had come to the Town Council to stir the Gimignanian youth to take arms against the Medici and defend the Republic.
The group, thanks to Manuel’s pleasure, enjoyed some restroom time and cappuccinos in the first caffé we found, and when we had refueled sufficiently and stepped out to continue on main street, son Luis asked me if this was the actual old pilgrim route. I joked, in answer, to tease him, that the leather shops, ATM’s, and ceramics places were there so that Miamians would feel at home in the old “Romers Way.” My fellow Miamians did in fact request soon enough that I tell a little bit of history, as they phrased it, and just then Kathy’s Templar church of San Francesco signaled us to stop and take first pictures, saying a word or two about its mysterious time. Next came the first grand town square and the arch of the Cistern, where three or four men in fatigues were setting up speakers and floodlights probably for a chilly, open air show that night. At that point two or three of the famous Ghibelline and Guelf towers made their appearance even as the town “Dante,” decked in the red Tuscan cloak and hat, recited with histrionic bravado the cantos that he, of course, knew by heart.
Via Francigena PILGRIM
21st century LOGO for a road that dates to the year 990 A.D.
when the bishop of Canterbury made the pilgrimage to ROME
Part Seven
The Medieval Duomo – or Collegiata of Santa Maria Assunta – stood in all its provincial majesty not far from the Town Hall.
I did not want to belabor too much the art history depths of our visit, but as we stopped for a minute to admire the Florentine fresco of the Annunciation that was all light and tranquility in color and composition, right before entering the church by the side door, I could not resist telling my romeros that this masterpiece was by Ghirlandaio, who taught Michelangelo the difficult painting technique, drilling him, too, on the elements of one-point perspective, rationality, and space, which in the Florence part of Tuscany were all the rage in their time. “But get ready for what you are going to see inside. It’s the Italy of relics and St. Helena’s journey, plus miracles like there is no tomorrow. . .
“And there isn’t!” I joked once inside, making the group laugh out loud about there not being a tomorrow and the so-called dolce vita, which made the stern-faced female guard we had just greeted by the entrance leap toward us with a hand gesture of disapproval. A second time, soon after, that the sound level of our exclamations rose too high, the same uniformed lady came toward us in exasperation that this was a church interior and that we could not make noise inside. As I recall, we were practically the only visitors there that morning. Time seemed to have stood still, too. We could have been in the year 1348, the year of the Black Plague when historians tell us that the town’s population and Rome- or home-bound visitors practically came to a devastating stop. With a little imagination as we looked around, I suggested, the five of us could have just arrived in the city from far away, much like at the time of COVID, to pray before the relics kept in this basilica. The nave of the great 12th-century church was empty.
During our visit, as I remember, we spent the first minutes strolling through the sacred space, commenting on how much the multicolored juxtaposition of the frescoes that cover the side and back walls from floor to ceiling, made the group feel at home. Many of the scenes, of course, were familiar: episodes of the Passion, the Nativity, or of the Garden of Eden and Creation, everywhere, with a sense of chronology and sequence, besides. Little by little, our attention focused on the wall frescoes almost stitched together by frames as whimsical as the animals and sorrows of the various Biblical scenes inside them. Moreover, in wall areas where we realized we were looking at not very placid scenes sinners or choirs of angels in heaven with figures of the Spirit, the Father and the Son, we sensed that Dante's Divine Comedy was introduced in the wall repertoire too, but wondered how many of the townspeople or pilgrims in San Gimignano in those years would have been familiar with such a scholarly text. All this being said, Son Luis remarked how much he liked the wooden trusses of the basilica ceiling with their discreet ornamentation, and Ina praised the enormity of the columns, which one would not guess from the piazza outside. The white and black arches of the colonnade, she also remarked, looked Moorish like the ones in Cordoba.
The very last half hour or so of our visit to the Duomo we decided to dedicate to the left and right side wall frescoes, which stretched from back to front of the interior, and I will end this tour memoir with a brief closing narrative of what took place there – just a little short of miraculous in a down-to-earth form.
The story of Santa Fina, however, is in order: this maiden, along with Bishop San Gimignano are the protectors or patron saints of the town. Fina’s – Serafina’s -- chapel moved the group very much that day almost for contrary reasons. On the one hand the chapel in all the clarity of its architecture and frescoes, these again being the design of the very “rational” Ghirlandaio, would seem to be at discord with the world of miracles and supposed force of bodily relics that stirred the hearts of the Medieval pilgrims. But the corner chapel of the Collegiata’s nave, near the main altar, where her saintly memory is revered, is as impressive for its very proportional Renaissance-style decoration as for its . . . aura. The supernatural legends and the visual framing inside Roman arches of her life story obviously inspired the romers and moneyed benefactors who commissioned the fresco of The Funeral rites of Santa Fina, by Domenico Ghirlandaio or who came here to pray. The numerous elements that make the space powerful – from “golden section” proportion, classical building backdrops and moldings, and, especially, crisp and clear one-point perspective, are as fine as Florentine art gets. But side-by-side with these poetic geometries, Fina’s supernatural persona is just as spectacular in all the dimensions of her paradoxically humble life – she died in 1253 of a rare form of paralysis that confined her to a wooden platform as bed for the last five years of her life. By the way, Ghirlandaio painted the famous towers of San Gimignano with the same artistry and realistic concreteness as he does Santa Fina herself, center stage on her funeral bier, along with the clergymen, friends, and family members – one of them is the painter himself -- who are bidding the girl farewell. . .
"Well,” Jacqueline sighed as we walked down the various steps to the main floor level of the great church to take a look at the large side walls. “Maybe your simpler pilgrim folk visiting this spectacular church might not have understood the Divine Comedy type scenes of Paradise and Punishments on the back wall over there, but they certainly would have recognized The Kiss of Judas on this side wall with all the New Testament scenes!”.
“Or The crossing of the Red Sea,” I interjected, pointing across the huge central space of the church and trying to inflect a tone of first-time wonder into my voice. “What makes this scene of the destruction of the Pharaoh’s army so different than the one we saw in Rome in the Sistine Chapel?” I was afraid it was getting to be lunch time and that the parents were thinking of vernaccia and saffron dishes, this last spice long being a culinary attraction to the Gimignano region. We joked about lunch and art being two powerful forces, and I took a leap and asked the family if they remembered the same episode in one of the tours earlier in the week.
“Okay, this question will not be on the test,” I kidded. "These are topics for a second trip to San Gimignano, the City of the Hundred Towers, even if only a small number is left . . !”
We strolled here and there in silence now, pointing out casually other Biblical episodes, and concluded that enough was enough and that it was time for our Tuscan lunch. Ina asked me where we would be eating, and Dr. Manuel, true to form, suddenly livened the party by calling out point-bank, “Hey everybody, here is The Raising of Lazarus!” One would have thought the physician again had run into an old friend, like Victor Hugo near the Pantheon: in the semi dark Duomo, it was as if a floodlight had beamed down on him from one of the column arches to where he stood by the right interior wall. He did not, as I recall, say that he wanted to tell us a joke.
The physician now became an actor, and in his best Cuban cadence of Spanish, he took the floor.
There we were in this Medieval cathedral, standing at eye level with the 14th-century fresco by a renowned Sienese artist, of the miraculous resurrection of Lazarus. Jesus, of course, has ordered the tombstone to be removed so we can see the young man inside, his eyes wide open and his body wrapped in a white shroud. The time sequences are not in order, nor, for the artists of this period before the plague, do they need to be. This is the world of Jacob di Voragine, and Mary Magdalene, la fannullona, where comedy and sadness, reason and doubt are fused together seamlessly to tell us what life is about.
Oops, how can I forget to mention solemnity and irreverence. . .
Suffice it to say that Dr. Manuel told us the story of how once there was a preacher who was telling his parishioners the story of how Jesus resurrected Lazarus, but because he used “incorrect Spanish” to indicate that Lazarus “walked,” and a member of the congregation corrects him with the correct verb ending – this goes on three times! -- the preacher in a gosh-darnit tone of voice stubbornly solves the problem by using both verb forms to say that two things happened:
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“Lazarus walked, -- [Lázaro andó].” The verb ending is wrong.
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“ And . . . Lazarus's life was a waste! [Lazaro después anduvo comiendo mierda]." The correct past tense!
The punishment of Gluttony
by Taddeo Bartolo
1300s
fresco of the Inferno in the Duomo
San Gimignano
The obsequies of Santa Fina
fresco by Domenico Ghirlandaio
1470s
Duomo
San Gimignano
Afterword
​“Brevity is the soul of wit,” says William Shakespeare in Hamlet. Certainly there is an art to telling a good joke, and doing so succinctly is of the essence. But so is judgment or good taste as to when and where a funny story is told.
A visitor to the Medieval cathedral of The Assumption in San Gimignano may still see the 14th-century fresco of The Raising of Lazarus by Lippo Memmi, where the rather large figure of Mary, sister of Lazarus, prays at the feet of Jesus to raise her brother back to life. When my family of tourists arrived at this final moment of their visit, Dr. Manuel did not, as I recall, say anything about the young woman’s large figure in the composition or about how Laz's eyes were open, a detail that can easily go unnoticed. In some way, however, Manuel artfully brought to life the story of the raising of Lazarus in a way that a typical guided tour might not capture or, worse, than a more serious liturgical recounting of the episode from a church pulpit might not reveal. So that when we, who were his audience, roared with laughter at the story, causing the lady guard to rush over to us once more for disobeying the rules and making a ruckus, our reaction was not unlike our finding humorous that Martha would have nicknamed her sister a lazy bum or do-nothing (“fa + nulla”= do nothing). In that sense Manuel’s story and delivery in the empty Duomo of our San Gimignano that morning was in line with the dialect and raw sincerity of the Middle Ages text of The Golden Legend. On the other hand, of course, the joke could be deemed objectionable because of the choice of words (‘anduvo comiendo mierda “ is an idiomatic phrase,” particularly in Cuban Spanish, for someone who is a good for nothing, or a waste as a human being) which particularly a devout listener could criticize as not proper language to use when narrating the lives of the saints. Even worse, though, the punchline of the two verb forms could simply be lost in translation because I myself, as author of this memoir, cannot translate well.
All this being said, I propose that there was something timeless about the story of Lazarus that December morning in the Duomo of San Gimignano – and that the double reading of the last days of Lazarus is perfectly in line with the Mary we textually read described in The Golden Legend. As many tourists from Miami say with a sigh, “Of course, in Italy they are always finding things!” Who is to say that some unsuspecting repairman with a pick and shovel won’t unearth one day from under the pulpit of La Collegiata, a copy of Jacopus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, buried there long ago? The manuscript will have the fresco paint fingerprints, too, of the artists who consulted it for both inspiration and amusement. These two forces are not as separate from each other as the more serious art historians, philosophers, or preachers insist.
The Golden Legend, interestingly, narrates that La Magdalena, sister of Lazarus and Martha, was miraculously rid of seven demons by her Savior: What does this mean? To me, it means that she was able to cry her heart out, in the best of senses. Bishop Voragine affirms, in fact, that her great tendency to cry, and even her voluptuousness, were transformed into a boundless capacity to love and to raise not a few good people from the dead. La Magdalena became a sort of hermit and performed these cures in Marseilles, France, where she went to live and preach the gospel. Not by chance, she, and not one of the male disciples, somehow earned the gift of being the first living person to see the resurrected Christ near the tomb on Easter Sunday after he had lain in his tomb for several days.
God creates the universe
(detail)
"La Collegiata" or DUOMO
San Gimignano
Taddeo di Fredi
fresco, 1300s
The Resurrection of Lazarus, with Mary Magdalene at the feet of Jesus
Lippo Memmi
New Testament frescoes, c. 1325
DUOMO of San Gimignano
