PUBBLICO & PRIVATO
by Tomaso Montanari
During the days of confinement, which I hope I won’t have to relive again soon, I found myself walking every day – with Anita, my beloved little dog – in the neighbourhood where I live in Florence, the so-called Oltrarno. For the first time, without risking being run over by a car or tourists, I was able to read the gravestones. They remind us that our dear ones are not only the relatives we should pay a visit to, but also those who shared the space in which we live today. Here, around my house, those dear ones are Filippo Neri and Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, Francesco Ferrucci and Galileo, Elizabeth Barret Browning and Alphonse de La Martine, Giuseppe Bonaparte and Francesco Guicciardini and Dostoevsky, Ugo Foscolo and Tarkovskij: women and men of all times who lived among these stones. One of the inhabitants of the Oltrarno, Carlo Levi, once explained that perhaps “this is precisely the main peculiarity that chracterises Italy: that of being the country where the contemporaneity of times is more typical and permanent than elsewhere. Everything has happened and everything is in the present: every tree, every rock, every fountain contains the most ancient gods […] the asphalt echoes the echo of countless footsteps”. What somehow helped us in those days was the incessant dialogue with the magnificent spirits who rejoiced and suffered on the corners of our streets: what Catholic theology calls the communion of the living and the dead, and the Constitution of the Republic calls historical and artistic heritage.
Let’s take it as a new tourism approach. Let’s take the place closest to where we live.
For me it is Piazza del Carmine. A large fourteenth-century square, the square of a mendicant order that needs outdoor space to preach. In the great church that those Carmelites built, Masaccio changed the course of art history, bringing the space of the city, the living and trembling bodies, the real world, to the altar: as only Caravaggio could do after him. The city of the living has become the living, credible perspective scene in which to set the sacred story: if on the one hand we still have the Brancacci Chapel, the other Masaccio’s masterpiece has unfortunately been lost: the great fresco with the Sacra del Carmine, which showed the square and the procession of the consecration of the church, in a play of mirrors that in the end reflected the identity of a community.
Next to Masaccio, endless stories live and are intertwined in this square: in the building where I live, part of the old convent, on April 29th 1868 the armourers were invented. They had to escort the king, with their strange Napoleonic armour, in the years when Florence was the capital of Italy. And still in this house, a few years later, the workers’ identity that the square had in the Middle Ages took over again: in 1902, a huge workers’ assembly was held here. Fifteen thousand people overflowed into the square and reacted to a mass dismissal in the Pignone foundry, thus proclaiming the first general strike. A working-class Florence that is so different from the image of the Renaissance. Right in front of the door of the barracks, there is a 14th century tabernacle: the square is full of tabernacles, for the very prosaic reasons mentioned by Giacomo Leopardi in the Zibaldone: “In Florence there is no building and street that is public and frequented where you can’t see long rows of crosses painted in the low wall, like hedges. This is very reasonable in that very dirty and fetid city. For its lovable citizens every place, hidden or licensed, is convenient and appropriate for their needs, and above all every beginning or entrance of a lane or street (two things not very different in Florence): so that no place is safe from such profanation without such shelters and antemural, and it is better to multiply them endlessly”.
The palace on which that tabernacle stands has a long history. In the sixteenth century, it housed some of the most beautiful gardens of the Oltrarno. In 1827, Georgina Craufurd was born here, “from English parents she was born with an Italian soul […] A distinguished Italian woman among those who supported the national Risorgimento” (recalls a headstone). The wall of that palace, which Ottone Rosai obsessively painted in the 1920s, hides a terrible story that nobody wanted to remember with a plaque. In November 1943, Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa asked the nuns, who still live in the palace, to hide a group of Jewish women and their children. A night raid by Nazi soldiers and Florentine fascists condemned almost all of them to death, deporting them to extermination camps. I cannot walk in front of that wall without hearing the screams of those women, which the Mother Superior describes to the Cardinal in a letter.
To know our cities, to listen to the stones means to become human again. It took a pandemic to understand this. Let us never forget it again.