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 s
ee 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.
“Pretty, is it not?” Eva Maria continued, nodding at the fresco. “A city at peace with itself?”
“I suppose,” I said, “although I have to say people don’t look particularly happy. Look”—I pointed at a young woman who appeared to be trapped in a cluster of dancing girls—“this one seems—I don’t know. Lost in thought.”
“Perhaps she saw the wedding procession passing by?” suggested Eva Maria, nodding at a train of people following what looked like a bride on a horse. “And perhaps it made her think of a lost love?”
“She is looking at the drum,” I said, pointing again, “or, the tambourine. And the other dancers look … evil. Look at the way they have her trapped in the dance. And one of them is staring at her stomach.” I cast a glance at Eva Maria, but it was hard to interpret her expression. “Or maybe I’m just imagining things.”
“No,” she said, quietly, “Maestro Ambrogio clearly wants us to notice her. He made this group of dancing women bigger than anybody else in the picture. And if you take another look, she is the only one with a tiara in her hair.”
I squinted and saw that she was right. “So, who was she? Do we know?”
Eva Maria shrugged. “Officially, we don’t know. But between you and me”—she leaned towards me and lowered her voice—“I think she is your ancestor. Her name was Giulietta Tolomei.”
I was so shocked to hear her speak the name—my name—and articulate the exact same thought I had aired to Umberto over the telephone that it took me a moment to come up with the only natural question: “How on earth do you know? … That she is my ancestor, I mean?”
Eva Maria almost laughed. “Isn’t it obvious? Why else would your mother name you after her? In fact, she told me so herself—your bloodline comes straight from Giulietta and Giannozza Tolomei.”
Although I was thrilled to hear this—spoken with such certainty—it was almost more information than I could handle at once. “I didn’t realize you knew my mother,” I said, wondering why she had not told me this before.
“She came to visit once. With your father. It was before they were married.” Eva Maria paused. “She was very young. Younger than you. It was a party with a hundred guests, but we spent the whole evening talking about Maestro Ambrogio. They were the ones who told me everything I am telling you now. They were very knowledgeable, very interested in our families. It was sad the way things went.”
We stood for a moment in silence. Eva Maria was looking at me with a wry smile, as if she knew there was a question that was burning a hole in my tongue, but which I could not bring myself to ask, namely: What was her relationship—if any—with the evil Luciano Salimbeni, and how much did she know about my parents’ deaths?
“Your father believed,” Eva Maria went on, not leaving me room for inquiry, “that Maestro Ambrogio was hiding a story in this picture. A tragedy that happened in his own time, and which could not be discussed openly. Look”—she pointed at the fresco—“do you see that little birdcage in the window up there? What if I told you that the building is Palazzo Salimbeni, and that the man you see inside is Salimbeni himself, enthroned like a king, while people crouch at his feet to borrow money?”
Sensing that the story somehow gave her pain, I smiled at Eva Maria, determined not to let the past come between us. “You don’t sound very proud of him.”
She grimaced. “Oh, he was a great man. But Maestro Ambrogio didn’t like him. Don’t you see? Look … there was a marriage … a sad girl dancing … and now, a bird in a cage. What do you make of that?” When I did not reply right away, Eva Maria looked out the window. “I was twenty-two, you know. When I married him. Salimbeni. He was sixty-four. Do you think that is old?” She looked straight at me, trying to read my thoughts.
“Not necessarily,” I said. “As you know, my mother—”
“Well, I did,” Eva Maria cut me off. “I thought he was very old and that he would die soon. But he was rich. I have a beautiful house. You must come and visit me.”
I was so baffled by her straightforward confession—and subsequent invitation—that I just said, “Sure, I would love to.”
“Good!” She put a possessive hand on my shoulder. “And now you must find the hero in the fresco!”
I nearly laughed. Eva Maria Salimbeni was a true virtuoso in the art of changing subjects.
“Come now,” she said, like a teacher to a class full of lazy kids, “where is the hero? There is always a hero. Look at the fresco.”
I looked up dutifully. “That could be anyone.”
“The heroine is inside the city,” she said, pointing, “looking very sad. So, the hero must be—? Look! On the left you have life within the city walls. Then you have Porta Romana, the city gate to the south, which cuts the fresco in half. And on the right-hand side—”
“Okay, I see him now,” I said, being a good sport. “It’s the guy on the horse, leaving town.”
Eva Maria smiled, not at me, but at the fresco. “He is handsome, is he not?”
“Drop-dead. What’s with the elf hat?”
“He is a hunter. Look at him. He has a hunting bird and is just about to release it, but something holds him back. That other man, the darker man walking on foot, carrying the painter’s box, is trying to tell him something, and our young hero is leaning back in the saddle to hear it.”
“Perhaps the walking man wants him to stay in town?” I suggested.
“Perhaps. But what might happen to him if he does? Look at what Maestro Ambrogio has put above his head. The gallows. Not a pleasant alternative, is it?” Eva Maria smiled. “Who do you think he is?”
I did not answer right away. If the Maestro Ambrogio who had painted this fresco was, in fact, the same Maestro Ambrogio whose journal I was in the process of reading, and if the unhappily dancing woman with the tiara was indeed my ancestor, Giulietta Tolomei, then the man on the horse could only be Romeo Marescotti. But I was not comfortable with Eva Maria knowing the extent of my recent discoveries, nor the source of my knowledge. She was, after all, a Salimbeni. So, I merely shrugged and said, “I have no idea.”
“Suppose I told you,” said Eva Maria, “that it is Romeo from Romeo and Juliet? … And that your ancestor, Giulietta, is Shakespeare’s Juliet?”
I managed to laugh. “Wasn’t that set in Verona? And didn’t Shakespeare invent them? In Shakespeare in Love—”
“Shakespeare in Love!” Eva Maria looked at me as if she had rarely heard anything so revolting. “Giulietta”—she put a hand on my cheek—“trust me when I say that it happened right here in Siena. Long, long before Shakespeare. And here they are, up there, on this wall. Romeo going into exile and Juliet preparing for marriage to a man she cannot love.” She smiled at my expression and finally let go of me. “Don’t worry. When you visit me, we will have more talk of these sad things. What are you doing tonight?”
I took a step back, hoping to conceal my shock at her intimacy with my family history. “Cleaning my balcony.”
Eva Maria didn’t miss a beat. “When you are finished with that, I want you to come with me to a very nice concert. Here—” She dug into her handbag and took out an admission ticket. ?
??It is a wonderful program. I chose it myself. You will like it. Seven o’clock. Afterwards we will have dinner, and I will tell you more about our ancestors.”
AS I WALKED TO the concert hall later that day, I could feel something nagging me. It was a beautiful evening, and the town was buzzing with happy people, but I was still unable to share in the fun. Striding down the street with eyes for nothing but the pavement ahead, I gradually caught up with myself and was able to identify the cause of my grumpiness.
I was being manipulated.
Ever since my arrival in Siena, people had been on tiptoes to tell me what to do and what to think. Eva Maria most of all. She seemed to find it only natural that her own bizarre wishes and plans should dictate my movements—dress code included—and now she was trying to draw my line of thought as well. Suppose I did not want to discuss the events of 1340 with her? Well, too bad, because I didn’t have a choice. And yet, in some strange way I still liked her. Why was that? Was it because she was the very antithesis of Aunt Rose, who had always been so afraid of doing something wrong that she never did anything right either? Or did I like Eva Maria because I was not supposed to? That would have been Umberto’s take on it; the surest way of making me hang with the Salimbenis would be to tell me to stay the hell away from them. I guess it was a Juliet thing.
Well, maybe it was time for Juliet to put on her rational hat. According to Presidente Maconi, the Salimbenis would always be the Salimbenis, and according to my cousin Peppo that meant woe unto any Tolomei standing in their way. This had not only held true for the stormy Middle Ages; even now, in present-day Siena, the ghost of maybe-murderer Luciano Salimbeni had not yet left the stage.
On the other hand, maybe it was this kind of prejudice that had kept the old family feud alive for generations. What if the elusive Luciano Salimbeni had never laid a hand on my parents, but had been a suspect solely because of his name? No wonder he had made himself scarce. In a place where you are found guilty by association, your executioner is not likely to sit patiently through a trial.