Tag: Tuscany Gossip

Tuscany, Matilde of Canossa

Matilde di Canossa

Matilde of Canossa,Countess of Tuscany, also called “the Church -builder”, was the most influential woman of her time(1046-1115), and probably of any time. She was the sole survivor of a powerful Longobard family.

At the age of 8 she inherited from her father Maurquis Bonifacio 3 vast amounts of Lombardy and Emilia. Her mother was Beatricie of Lorraine ,daughter  of Frideryk II Duke uof  Upper Lorraine and granddaughter of Herman 2 of Swabia.

Matilde  may have been born in  Mantua ,but since her father had castle and country home at  Vivinaja (now Montecarlo ),this is also considered a likely birthplace for Her. Her fathers home at Vivinaja  was a gathering place for the popes and emperors, in this period when Lucca was the Tuscan capital. Matilde had a aristocratic education; she spoke German, Latin and French. She learned to ride horses and use weapons.

Matildes first  marriage was to a pious man with the uninspiring name of Godfrey the Hunchback, who allegedly died  in the Crusades. Later (in 1090 ,when she was 54), she got married for political motives to a younger man, Welf Guelfo of Bavaria.

It is uncertain whether Matildes one child from her first marriage, Beatricie, survived past childhood. Matilde may have been the last for her line. However, Michelangelo claimed to be her Descendent…..This is hearsay. Matildes most potent legancy was spirityal and political.
Matilde wanted to become a nun to celebrate the mass.

This latter is a radical idea even today! According to legend Pope Gregory told her to build 100 churches and then he would consider her request. (For the of her story ,see Andy*rindls  book A Compation to Lucca.) Instead he gave her authority over all of Tuscany.

She become a military heroine,deeply loyal to the Pope during the Guelply-Ghibelline conflict, when the Holy Roman Emperor wanted to assume spiritual  us  well as earthly authority. He  ally in Lucca was Bishop Anselmo. Togheter they gave enormous wealth to the Roman church.

They tried to push back the churchs enemies, but Bishop Anselmo was forced to retreat to canossa ,near near Reggioin Emilia. In Lucca she commissioned the spectacular Ponte della Maddalena, now more  commonalty known as the Devils  Bridge, acros the Serchio. Anselmo become to Canossa a Benedictine monk  and come  to Canossa as Matilde s spiritual advisor.

He died in 1086 ,ten years after one of historys key events, an event whith sealed Matildes name in history.

In 1077,excommunicated Holy Roman Emperor Henry 4 was advancing agains Pope Gregory,who then staying at matildes castle. But Henry had sufferen huge losses. At the  bottom of the hill leading up to the castle, henry knelt in the snow as a barefoot penintent and begged for-giveness, recognizing Papal authority.

Since  then, the expression “going  to Canossa” has come  to mean eating humble pie. Pirandellos play  Enrico 4, inspired by this historical moment, empha-sizes Henrys madnes, re-interpreting the story in a modern context, with Matilde in the role of Henrys wife.

Dantes Paradiso, on the other hand,finds Matilde singing, gathering flowers and moving like a dancer in the lower circle of Paradise. She helps him undergo the penitential cleansing required after loss of innocence by having him taste  the rivers Lethe and Eunoe (meaning “good memory”in Greek) which flow in opposite direcions from the  Earthly Paradise and represent forgetting and remembering.

After this phase  of death and regeneration ,he can then meet his final Guide and Patron, Beatricie.

Dante leaves behind all the bleak characters from his pass, immortalized and entrapped in Inferno  and  Purgatorio.

Dantes vision of Matilde might  have  influenced Shakespeare in Hamlet. OPhelia  tries to lead Hamlet out of his  madness  with her  innocence and love ,but he remains  fixated on avenging  his fathers ghost. Hamlets words recall historical Matildes wish: “Get thee to a nunnery” — though he adds “why wouldest  thou be a breeder of sinners.?” Later  Queen Gertrude rapport’s Ophelia, enveloped in Hamlets madness, dies as a young virgin. Matilde, one of Italys most powerful and evocative woman lives on the legend and literature. She died  at the age of 69 years, after a long and  fascinating  life.

Tuscan Bakery for Sale in Vorno

Woooow! Are you thinking to change your life style? Great idea for you!
Successful long running bakery situated in Vorno (Ok… Lucca, Tuscany). Currently trading 5 1/2 days a week, the business hours could be extended to increase turnover. The business retails a delicious selection of bakery products: bread, rolls, cakes & buns and is known for its famous pies & pastries. The business sells wholesale products to families, schools, clubs and the local shire council and with only limited competition in the area. This presents as an excellent opportunity for a new owner to change his life style and to take this business to the next level enjoying this little village called Vorno. So think about and let me know…and be in touch!

Tuscany, Ugolino – a Gruesome Tale

In Lucca it’s a common joke that the mountains between Lucca and pisa keep the people from having to see each other. A tunnel now leads to the Pisa side but the ideological separation is still felt by football fans, graffiti artists and ordinary citizens. In Lucca e read Dante’s story about Count Ugolino della Gherardesca as the potrait of a power-hungry Pisan at his worst. Dante froze Ugolino within the deepest circle of Inferno because he betrayed his homeland and his political party.
In Italy, where peope identify with their hometown very strongly, this story’s theme is not at all archaic.
According to popular legend, Ugolino cannibalized his children.
Archbishop Ruggieri locked the father and sons in the Torre della Muda ( forever after known as Famine Tower ), leaving them to starve to death.
Part of the tower still stands on the northen side of Piazza dei Cavalieri. This is one of Pisa’s most beautiful piazzas and site of Pisa University’s Scuola Normale, where the brightest students are admitted to study.
A corner of the original tower is within Palazzo dell’ Orologio and a plaque on the wall refers to Ugolino. However, scientific literalism demolished the legend in 2002.
A Pisan paleoanthropologist excavated Ugolino’s body and examined some DNA from his ribs which showed he had not eaten meat ( let alone human flesh ) before dying. However, ” truth ” should never get in the way of a good story from history…
Ugolino belonged to an important Ghibelline family. The Ghibellines supported Papal authority, unlike the Guelph city-states Florence and Genoa which favored more local control.
Ugolino was both Podestà ( supreme civil authority ) and Ghibelline leader. During Pisa’s battles with Genoa and other Guelph states, Ugolino aligned with Giovanni Visconti, a Guelph.
The alliance was discovered, Ugolino imprisoned and Visconti exiled.
With the help of Florence and Lucca, however, Ugolino escaped and become a Guelph, again betraying the Ghibellines! In 1284, he returned as head of a Pisan fleet. He again betrayed his countrymen when they were at war with Genoa, feigning surrender and causing their defeat.
When Ugolino returned to power, he gave away Pisan castles to Lucca and Florence as a political expedient. Ghibelline fortunes improved, and Ugolino, then a Guelph, allied with the Ghibelline Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini. Ugolino exiled his Guelph grandson in 1288 and consolidated his relationship with Ruggieri. Soon Ruggieri betrayed Ugolino by inciting the public against him and then ordering the imprisonment of Ugolino, his two sons and two grandsons.
Finally the Archbishop threw away the key and left him and his children to starve to death.
In Canto XXXIII, Dante has Ugolino gnawing on the Archbishop’s head for all eternity. ” You are to know I was Count Ugolino, and this one here, Archbidshop Ruggieri; and now I’ll tell you why I am his neighbor.” For Dante, the concept of neighbor becomes an unholy alliance in the depth of Inferno!
With ambiguous words, Dante ha Ugolino say, ” After they were dead, I called them for two days; then fasting had more force than grief.”
This line may be interpreted in two ways: either Ugolino devoured his offspring’s corpses after being driven mad with hunger, or starvation killed him before he died of grief.
The more ghastly interpretation is more popular and Ugolino was sometimes known as the ” Cannibal Count “. The corpses were buried in Pisa at in the Church of San Francesco.
For Dante, however, eating one’s children may have served an anagogical ( religiously – significant ) purpose.
All the happenings in the Inferno are reverse-images of happenings in Paradiso. The Eucharist ( celebration of the Mass ) thus becomes a horrific reverse Eucharist in the Ugolino scene.
Soon we will visit also Dante’s Paradiso to present a more positive character – Matilde the Church-Builder, Contessa of Tuscany, famous in Lucca for having built the Ponte della Maddalena ( also know as the Devil’s Bridge ) during the Middle Ages.

Tusscany, The “Modi” Practical Joke of Livorno

My friends, to let you understand and feel the spirit of Livorno and people who lives in this incredible city, I thought about an old, very old story that for sure you cannot miss. Too funny!

This is the story of a huge practical joke involving one of Livorno’s most famous personalities, Amedeo Modigliani, and four ordinary young men, which took place 20 years ago in one of the nicest areas of the city, the Medici canal which flows in front of the indoor market.

The joke took place back in 1984, however to fully understand how it came about we must first go back to 1909 and discover a bit about the events which led up to it. It was in 1909 that Amedeo Modigliani, a young artist and sculptor who had just turned 25 years old, was hugely disappointed by the negative reviews that he had received from critics about his work and as a result decided to leave his hometown forever. His sculptures, which were completed in a figurative style of the beginning of the 20th century, that he had seen in Paris, and which were inspired by African art, were not to the taste of the local art critics and one critic even told the young artist that he would be better off just throwing them all away.

The general story goes that it was these criticisms which forced Modigliani to leave his town, dumping all of his failed works of art in a ditch in the process. His failed work actually consisted of sculptures of human heads, which were harsh and elongated in style and sculpted into the stone in a style for which his work was to become famous following his death. The ditch in which he dumped his sculptures (the name of which indicates the canals of Livorno which cross through the historical centre) would have been Fosso Reale, a ditch of the Medici Canal which goes from Piazza della Reppublica to Piazza Cavour, where you can see one of the city’s most well-known monuments: the 18th century Chiesa degli Olandesi, with its spectacular Neo-Gothic, yellow, stone facade and the impressive General Food Market with its tall, big windows which feature greek style colomns.

Now, in 1984, it is 100 years after the birth of Modigliani and Vera Durbé, the manager of Livorno’s Progressive Museum of Contemporary Art, decides to organise an exhibition of Modigliani’s sculptures, to celebrate his 100th year. Her idea, however, prompted an interesting challenge: The search for the legendary heads since they had been previously thrown into the canal by a young Modi. The quest was supported by the administrative council, who approved the dredging of the works from the ditch.

The excavation work took place in the sunny month of July, under the watchful eyes of many who stood waiting excitedly for any news of the recovery of these long-awaited works of art. Their wait lasted a week and on the eighth day three stone sculptures, scultped in the harsh, elongated style for which Modigliani was by now famous for, were successfully excavated, one after the other. They were presented to the many art critics of Livorno, who claimed that the heads were the original work carved by the hands of Modigliani immediatly after examining them closely.

At first, it seems that the story has a happy ending: Durbé’s dream was realised and art lovers from all over the world flocked to Livorno… but they were forgetting that Livorno is a city famous for its pranks and practical jokes and here it is always possible that things are not always as they seem. Therefore, after a month of much talk and awards regarding the three newly-recovered sculptures, three Livornese students: Pietro Luridana, Pierfrancesco Ferrucci and Michele Guarducci, came forward claiming to have sculpted one of the three heads, in the garden of one of their houses, using drills and other tools bought from a local hardware store. They presented photos of themselves in action and the splinters of stone pertaining to the sculpture in question. Then, on national television they re-enacted the creation of the masterpiece.

Not long after, a sculptor named Angelo Froglia laid claim to the other two heads. Angelo Froglia was, in fact, just an ordinary dockworker who was passionate about art and was a talented sculptor. He claimed that he came up with the idea to pretend to have sculpted these pieces as a way of showing how art critics are led more by market trends rather than their own perceptions and the true worth of each individual piece of work. Both the three students and Froglia achieved their goals as in the end the joke was on the art critics who had previously slammed the work of Modigliani.

Talk of these events lasted a while. Mainly due to the fact that too many acclaimed art critics had already declared the authenticity of the three heads. However, although it was, in fact, the three students and Froglia who had, separately, sculpted the heads which had been excavated from the canal, there were still those who thought that they were liars who had conspired together to pretend to be the true sculptors of the heads, and so continued to believe that the sculptures were the original work of Modigliani. The reality is that only in Livorno could two completely different, unrelated groups of people have come up with exactly the same successful practical joke.

Berlusconi VS Obama

Milan president Silvio Berlusconi is probably the only political leader in the world who also owns a football club. The media mogul and current Italian Prime Minister is certainly one of the most colourful figures in the world of politics, but sometimes his comments go a bit too far.

Back in 2003, he sparked great controversy by telling a German politician, Martin Schulz, that he thought he would be a good choice for the role of a “German kapo”, a Nazi official, in a movie being produced in Italy.

This time, it’s new American president-elect Barack Obama who is the subject of Berlusconi’s bizarre sense of humour. When asked if he thought relations between the USA and Russia would change after Obama’s election, he said (through a translator): “I think Obama will get along very well with the Russian president, because they are both young, handsome, and… tanned!”

Berlusconi referred to the fact that Russian president Dmitry Medvedev is four years younger than Obama, who will become one of the youngest US Presidents ever at 47 years of age.

Predictably, this has already raised a lot of debate in Italy, but Berlusconi is refusing to apologise, and defended his joke to Italian news agencies.

“Why are they taking it as something negative? If they have no sense of humour, worse for them,” he said. Later, he told Sky TV-24 Ore that his comments were meant to be “cute” and bashed those who disagreed, saying they are “imbeciles, of which there are too many.”

Other notorious comments made by Berlusconi include a claim that Western civilization was superior to the Islamic culture, which he said not long after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and more recently, that the current Spanish government has too many women.