“Can we veer by Massa Marittima? It doesn’t look far out of the way.”
“We have time. Remember that church up on an angled stone platform, how the piazza goes wonky because of that?” Ed pulls over to recalculate our route. For three days, we’ve been wandering around the Tuscan coast and small inland towns and now are headed home to Cortona.
“Remember when I called it Massa Mari-TTI-ma?”
“Yes. You were corrected and admonished. Ma-RI-ttima. A trill with the r. She did it to me, too. I’ll never forget the mocking ‘Not G-Ovanni. Say Joevanni, all together.’ Then there was geometra.” A geometra is a quasi-architect who has to approve building projects. “I put the accent on -met. She let me know it was on the –om. I was humiliated.”
She refers to our great friend the writer Ann Cornelisen, who preceded us in Italy by a couple of decades and spoke excellent, if a bit stiff, Italian. It was her mission to minimize what fools we made of ourselves those early years. She was always right. Would that she’d remained to correct other mistakes.
MASSA MARITTIMA—QUIRKY TOWN. Piazza Garibaldi, usually called Piazza del Duomo, is ringed by medieval buildings—the town hall, the wheat granary, Palazzo del Podestà (now the archeological museum)—and by cafés well placed for viewing the imposing church. The placement is pleasing and disorienting, as though the piazza tilted to its side and stuck.
Did I say quirky? On via Ximenes at the entrance to the centro, we find the covered thirteenth-century public water fountain, Fonte dell’Abbondanza, which has a tree-of-life fresco on one wall. On second glance, I see that the branches are decorated not only with leaves but with testicles and erect penises! How bizarre, this Albero della Fecondità. And next door, a reminder of fascist Italy, Casa del Fascio, built in 1935 in the prevailing rationalist architectural style, with the requisite balcony for speeches, and the carved, flat eagle over the door. This architecture, which used to scream Mussolini, now takes on a period patina. The rigid, some say brutal, architecture of the era always had, in Italy, a foot in classicism. Travertine of the area links this building with a longer past. Here, the primitive phallic tree and the stylized eagle coexist.
WE SIT DOWN on the church steps overlooking the lively piazza full of older residents. “The cocktail party,” Ed calls our intensely social mornings in the piazza in Cortona. Of course, instead of cocktails, people are sipping cappuccino. Parties going on all over Italy every morning of the world. Growing old in Italy seems a kinder thing than in America. The old aren’t isolated and don’t get the not-so-subtle message that they should be. Four women, two with canes, hold court at a table under the arcade. They’re having fun on this chilly October morning.
“Here’s the brief,” I say to Ed, as I check the Blue Guide. “Under dominion of Pisa. Then a free city in 1225, the period when all these buildings were accomplished. 1335, conquered by Siena. Downward spiral, plus malaria and bubonic plague. 1555, town goes under the control of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and old mining (active in Etruscan times) of silver, lead, iron, copper recommenced and prosperity returned. Nutshell. ‘Massa’ is from Latin, meaning a group of properties. And ‘Marittima’ doesn’t mean it was once near the sea; it refers to the area, Maremma.”
“Okay. And ‘Maremma’ means sea-swamp, doesn’t it? Mar, sea, and –emma, marshland.”
How nice to sit in the mild autumn sun, the Duomo looming magnificently. Blind arches run along one side and on either side of the entrance. The campanile is a joy; the zigzag of steps so unusual, a rose window with stained glass (not very Tuscan), the octagonal cupola instead of a dome, and the bas-relief over the big door, portraying the life of San Cerbonius, whose works seem kind of goofy. They involved a gaggle of geese he met en route to see the pope, bears who were supposed to devour him but licked his feet instead, deer who allowed themselves to be milked to slake the thirst of guards accompanying Cerbonius to Rome. And he heard angels sing. How childlike, these narratives for the populace, and strange how tonally different these stories are from the tree-of-fecundity phalluses.
EVEN IF YOU’VE seen a hundred archeological museums, you haven’t seen the belt buckle, storage jars, safety pins, and weapons from this particular area. And I always appreciate the shock of obvious aesthetic pleasure taken in fashioning a pitcher or necklace. After photographing the dignified façade covered with coats of arms, we go inside to see the small collection, which ranges from the Etruscans (sites still being excavated in this area) to the Romans. And, yes, there is a cunningly wrought belt buckle. And to contemplate: a prehistoric sandstone figure, about sixty centimeters high, in the shape of a triangle. Mysterious: Barely etched in are crossed arms and slits for eyes that looked at we know not what.
WE WALK ALONG via Moncini, the main street spiking off the piazza. Knife shop, bookstore, wine bar, house concept shop, and toward the end, La Padellaccia del Viggia, a small café where we sit outside for a quick lunch of mushroom bruschette and salad. Up from here, Piazza Matteotti and Sant’Agostino, also from the boom-time thirteenth century. There’s a 1228 clock tower to climb for a view over the countryside, but we don’t. Instead, we take a few side streets, quiet and mostly residential, where Ed stops to pick up bread and I buy some pretty paper. What for? Lining drawers, wrapping gifts? I just have a weakness for paper.
LAST STOP, THE interior of the Duomo. What a beauty. Seen from inside, that odd octagonal cupola on top stuns me with eight wedges of alternating black and white bricks. A deep, receding illusion. I wonder if it was meant to have been stuccoed and frescoed. But the effect could not be more dramatic. Dazzling, too, the magnificent Madonna delle Grazie almost certainly by the great Sienese painter Duccio. Raffaello Vanni’s Annunciation shows Mary, with a what-am-I-to-do expression on her face. Uncharacteristically, she’s wearing a bright red dress. Behind the altar, generations of crass visitors have scratched their names and initials on the marble. A relic preserved here—a finger of San Cerbonius.
NOTE:
Thirty-two kilometers away: the evocative ruins of Abbazia di San Galgano. Not to be missed.