Robert P. Cachia
I remember a Discovery Channel programme (Grand Designs) I saw a couple of weeks ago about this typical English, upper-class couple who had bought a ruin in the whereabouts of San Gimignano and had fought and lost a battle with their local architect and the local planning authorities over what they could and could not do with it. I recall how patronising and condescending they had been all along because of the Tuscans’ mule-headedness in allowing only such reconstruction methods that are deemed in the tradition of their ancestors instead of being allowed to be individualistic and do whatever they wanted, the English way.
So now I am here, driving on the silken road that leads me to San Gimignano: all around me is the word perfection written over every detail of this magnificent landscape. And I say to myself: thank goodness that the Tuscans are mule headed about their landscape because, when you come to think of it, beauty is indeed about being humble, about falling in line with your surroundings, about being in harmony with the rest of the tune. And the Tuscans know exactly what tune they want to play: Tuscany, for them and for the rest of the world, is and will remain the place where time has stood still, where one can still enjoy time-hallowed sense of perceptions that have been lost in our globalised world. They want us to share effortlessly all those varied historical facets that had made Tuscany the shining light of the European Renaissance, to share the same gastronomic, literary, folkloric traditions of their forbears, live the same great landscapes that one sees in the paintings of the Tuscan masters. It is a brave, even anachronistic vision but there it is: hard and fast and uncompromising. It has the stamp of conviction and one has to admire a people that are convinced about something.
When one analyses what sort of architecture makes places such as Portofino or Positano world famous for their beauty, one discovers that their architectural grammar is simple to the point of banality. And it is the harmonious whole that wins it in the end, not a single building standing out in isolation. It is a lesson few peoples, not least us Maltese, have learnt.
The Twin Towers?
By the way, who ever said the twin towers are no more? Well, just coming out of the Duomo of San Gimignano, on my left are scaled-down 800-year-old look-alikes of the New York twin towers, not built of steel and glass but of white stone. You see them from most streets, standing there white against the dark-ochred town and I have heard tourists admit they had the uncanny feeling they would see some airline crash into them any moment!!
The Black Beast
If anyone of you ever finds the time to visit Florence, you should make it a point to go into the building in front of Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo). Besides the glorious Doors of Paradise by Ghiberti and the sprawling, fantastic Last Judgement on the ceiling, there is one small detail you should notice: on one of the walls there is a marble tomb between two granite columns with the effigy of a dead pope on the top: the Latin inscription says that the remains are those of Pope John XXIII.
When this sarcophagus caught my eye, I was dumbfounded: the Pope John XXIII I knew had been Angelo Roncalli and he had been Pope in the early sixties, the time of the Beatles and JFK. This guy had lived between the 14th and 15th centuries and had died in 1419!! Something was amiss.
Well, it turns out that Baldassare Cossa, alias John XXIII, was one of the shadier characters strutting among the shady characters in an Italy torn apart by civil wars of all sorts. I will not even try to sort out for you the tangled web of political intrigue that the papacy of those troubled times had enmeshed itself in. The essence of it was that the popes then were little better than temporal princes, had their same ambitions, behaved pretty much like them and fought for temporal things much the same way as their secular peers. They were also caught in the middle of a titanic cold war between the fledgling French monarchy and the German Emperors, between their respective supporters on Italian soil, Guelphs and Ghibellines, between reformers for a more Conciliar Church and traditionalist advocates for the supremacy of the Roman Pontiffs.
There were few good men to choose a Pope from back then but Cossa was the worst of the batch: in his private life he had been a thief, a thug and a womaniser. In the name of his clerical superiors in Rome he had fought battles and sold clerical patrimony and favours to the highest bidders. when he was elected Pope he was not even a priest!
As a Pope the only good thing he did was convene the Council of Constance at the instigation of the Emperor Sigismund, which Council then went about dethroning him and the two other papal antagonists that had been in the field for the best part of two decades, a conundrum called The Great Schism. Cossa even had the nerve to dispute the Council’s decision to dethrone him and ran away only to be caught and brought back in chains to suffer the humiliation of deposition.
There had been other bad Popes before but this time Cossa was made an example of for the future: he would be struck off from the list of Pontiffs for good. Although the Florentines, who had been his greatest friends and beneficiaries, built him a monument and had him buried in it, Cossa for all his swagger and temporal success, remains unmourned and unremembered, his name usurped by one infinitely humbler but infinitely greater than he.
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