Author Archives: Blue Guides

Oranges, lemons and relic cults: an escape from the queues in Florence

Posted on by

Charles Freeman, ancient history consultant to the Blue Guides and author of Sites of Antiquity and Holy Bones, Holy Dust, takes a tour group to Volterra and Prato, to get away from it all.

One of the enduring pleasures of having written extensively about relic cults is recognizing obscure scenes in medieval frescoes. So who, in the frescoes depicting the Legend of the True Cross in the side chapel of San Francesco in Volterra (by Cenni di Francesco, 1410), is the figure standing before a gate in his underclothes? Well, the Byzantine emperor Heraclius (emperor 610–41), of course. Returning a fragment of the True Cross recaptured from the Persians to Jerusalem, Heraclius arrived at the city in his full imperial regalia as he assumed the occasion demanded. However, the city gate shut against him until he had showed appropriate humility by stripping off his finery. So this is why we had such a good example of medieval underwear in a fifteenth-century chapel in one of the more attractive towns of Tuscany.

Then there is the Chapel of the Girdle in Prato. This is not just any old girdle, but specifically the one that the Virgin Mary threw down to St Thomas as she was assumed into heaven. It was brought to Prato by a merchant after the crusades and in 1141 was placed in the chancel what is now the city’s cathedral. In the early fourteenth century it was wrested from the control of the clergy and placed in a new chapel in the people’s end of the church, where it still is. On its feast days it is displayed from an external pulpit built into the corner of the church overlooking the piazza.

It is the artwork connected with the Girdle that delights. The chapel has fine frescos of the Life of the Virgin (Agnolo Gaddi) and an intricately cast bronze gate (Maso di Bartolomeo). My favourite is the pulpit itself, which is the work of Donatello, with a frieze of  happy dancing putti. The original is now under cover in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo and can be explored from close-up. It is a joy to come across because the putti are so exuberant in their celebration of the relic and, as one of Donatello’s lesser known works, it comes as such a surprise. The museum also has an exquisite fifteenth-century reliquary box for the Girdle, again with dancing putti on the sides. And this is all before one has explored the wonderful frescoes of Filippo Lippi in the main chancel of the cathedral.

Prato has another sacred space, Guiliano da Sangallo’s church of Santa Maria della Carcere, built in Greek style in the late fifteenth century to celebrate an image of the Virgin Mary that a small boy had seen come alive. He claimed to have seen the Virgin climb out of the painting, put the baby Jesus on the ground, then descend into the local prison (carcere) to give it a good scrubbing. On her return she collected her baby and popped back into the picture.

On our way back to Florence, we stopped at the Villa di Castello, which was bought by the Medici at the end of the fifteenth century and once housed several of Botticelli’s greatest works, including The Birth of Venus. It is now the meeting place of the venerable Accademia della Crusca founded in 1582.Crusca means bran, and the Accademia is dedicated to winnowing out infelicities from the Italian language. In 2012 it is celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of Europe’s first dictionary that it compiled.

The villa interior is closed to the public but the garden is open and, amazingly, is free of charge. This is one of the great gardens of Europe, an inspiration for later Italian gardens but also known for its extraordinary collection of citrus fruits, over ninety different varieties. They are set out in great terracotta tubs in rows around a central sixteenth-century fountain. Here the gardeners devotedly tend the most obscure permutations of oranges and lemons, and even crosses between the two, all carefully nurtured from century to century. It is an entrancing place—and what is more extraordinary still, until a French group arrived as we were leaving, we were the only visitors.

There could be no better reasons for planning a day away from the queues of Florence.

Volterra and Prato and the Villa di Castello are covered in detail in Blue Guide Tuscany. For Florence itself, see here.

The tragedy of Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico

Posted on by

Among the fragrant pines of the Adriatic island of Lokrum, a short boat ride away from the old town of Dubrovnik, stands a complex of buildings that began life as a votive chapel, founded by Richard the Lionheart in thanksgiving for his survival when he was shipwrecked here on his way home from the Crusades. That chapel expanded into a Benedictine monastery, which was dissolved by Napoleon and later transformed into a residence by Archduke Maximilian of Austria, younger brother of the emperor Franz Joseph. Maximilian used the building—and indeed the entire island—as a summer retreat, laying out ornamental gardens with glades of cypress and oleander. He came here with his beautiful young bride, Charlotte of Belgium. Entranced by the sea breeze and the scent of jasmine, he is said to have carved a love heart pierced with his own and his wife’s initials into the bark of one of Lokrum’s ilex trees. Local people were less enchanted. Their tongues wagged disapprovingly, calling what Maximilian had done to the old monastery an act of sacrilege and predicting dire consequences. Little did they know it, but their words were to turn prophetic…

The island of Lokrum with a view of the monastery-turned-summer-retreat

The Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, born at Schönbrunn in 1832, was good-hearted and idealistic. After a career as Commander-in-Chief of the Austrian navy, he was given the title of Governor General of Lombardy, part of a strategy of Franz Joseph’s to make Austrian rule more popular in northern Italy. It didn’t work. Nationalist fever was running high and despite the fact that Maximilian was a just and benevolent overlord, Lombardy didn’t want him. Instead they looked to Napoleon III of France to liberate them. Austria went to war with France and lost Lombardy at the Battle of Solferino in 1859. Maximilian retreated to his castle on the bay of Trieste, and there he remained, until in 1863 he elected to accept an offer that had been made to him by a clerical minority faction in Mexico: to become their emperor. Maximilian was encouraged in this by Napoleon III. Franz Joseph was greatly troubled. He knew that this was pure political gerrymandering by France, whose ambitions in the New World were considerable. But Maximilian wanted to go. He was ambitious and he also had grand ideas, ideas that were very different from those of his reactionary brother. While Franz Joseph’s main concern was to preserve the status quo, Maximilian, equally fatally, wanted to ‘make a difference’.

Maximilian did his best in Mexico, but he had as many enemies there as he had had in Italy. The country was in a state of guerilla war between the monarchist faction and the troops of Benito Juárez, whom the liberals supported and wanted as their president. Although Maximilian enjoyed the support of the conservatives at first, he alienated them by decreeing freedom of religion and by his instinctive personal sympathy for some of Juárez’s ideas. Pope Pius IX withdrew his support, and when the United States gave diplomatic recognition to Juárez, France withdrew likewise, being also under pressure at home from a rising Prussia. Maximilian was left friendless and unprotected. His wife Charlotte began to exhibit signs of paranoia. She returned to Europe to plead with both the pope and Napoleon, but after a series of hysterical and embarrassing scenes in the Vatican, she was sent to Trieste (Miramare castle)  and kept there under house arrest by Maximilian’s family. Maximilian was captured by the republicans and sentenced to death. Despite many pleas for clemency, including one from Garibaldi, Juárez refused to relent. On the morning of 19th June 1867, Maximilian faced the firing squad.

The emperor Maximilian in his coffin

Glimmering pearly white on the foreshore, just outside the city of Trieste and clearly visible from its waterfront and docks, stands the castle of Miramare. It was completed for Maximilian in 1860, and it is here, in 1866, that Charlotte took up residence when she returned from Mexico in her attempt to rally support for her beleaguered husband. Charlotte suffered a severe nervous breakdown after Maximilian’s death, from which she never fully recovered. She returned to Belgium, where she died in 1927. Miramare is now open to the public a museum.

Castello di Miramare viewed from Trieste docks

Hitherto unknown language discovered in east Anatolia

Posted on by

A Cambridge archaeologist has unearthed evidence for a previously unknown ancient language. The find was made during excavations at the palace of the Assyrian imperial governor at ancient Tushhan (modern Ziyaret Tepe, close to the Syrian border). See the report in Britain’s Independent newspaper and for a picture of part of the cuneiform tablet that provides the vital clues here»

City Picks: Verona

Posted on by

Verona is a lovely city. It is just the right size for exploration on foot, and there lots to see. Many of its restaurants are justly famous. It is amply stocked with comfortable places to stay. Its Roman theatre, whose tiers of seats rise high above the river Adige, must have commanded one of the finest views of any ancient theatre in Italy. Its churches are magnificent. And then there is the Museo del Castelvecchio.

This fortress of art displays an astonishingly rich collection of sculpture and painting in the rooms of the old brick-built, Ghibelline-battlemented stronghold of the Scaligeri, or della Scala, who were overlords of Verona in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, until overthrown by the Visconti of Milan. At dead of night, the last of the Scaligeri fled this castle, across the bridge over the boiling river, and melted away, fading out of history.

Castelvecchio has one of the finest collections of paintings in Italy. Architecturally the building is interesting too, because its museum space was remodelled by Carlo Scarpa in 1959–73. Concrete now vies with brick. Once so cutting-edge, Scarpa’s arrangements now seem a bit quaint. The equestrian statue of Cangrande I (ruled from 1311) stands on an elevated concrete platform which has all the stateliness of a lift-shaft in a multi-storey carpark. But this means the paintings really have to speak for themselves–and many of them eloquently do. The Pisanello and Stefano da Zevio are of course outstanding. There are some interesting paintings by Francesco Morone. Giovanni Francesco Caroto, the teacher of Veronese, is well represented. His Boy with a Drawing (c. 1515) is wonderfully modern: a grinning, red-headed lad holding up a scribble of a stick man. Any parent who has been called upon to admire a proud child’s not terribly brilliant masterpiece will warm to it.

And what about where to eat? Well, it was pouring with rain when I was last in Verona, so I didn’t spend a long time searching. Sometimes the tried and tested are just what one needs. An Aperol in one of the Listòn cafés overlooking the Arena and then lunch in Antica Bottega del Vino. The lamb with rosemary was excellent. The Amarone even better.

Find Verona in Blue Guide Venice & The Veneto and Blue Guide Concise Italy.