On the way to Sansepolcro, we stop at Busatti, maker of traditional Tuscan fabrics. Anghiari, the striking hill town, is Busatti headquarters, where you might be taken downstairs to the industrial-age-looking looms, or see Giuseppe Busatti himself, stirring a large pot of onion skins on the back porch—for dyeing wools and cottons.
While I’m looking at tablecloths, Ed strikes up a conversation. He often finds someone to talk to while he waits for me to finish shopping. He claims he’s practicing his conversation skills. But really, he just likes talking to Italians. After some exchange about Anghiari restaurants, he says to the woman, “How did Sansepolcro get its name?” She isn’t entirely sure but another local chimes in—some pilgrims brought relics from the Holy Land, pieces of the sepulcher where Jesus was buried and arose; built themselves a monastery; and called it Holy Sepulcher—Sansepolcro.
Not by coincidence, then, that Piero della Francesca’s most famous painting, The Resurrection, was created in the city of his birth, Sansepolcro. I select a muted orange cloth woven with a renaissance design.
WE’VE TAKEN THE famous Piero della Francesca trail many times—the Basilica di San Francesco in Arezzo, with frescoes of the Legend of the True Cross; the Duomo for his small portrait of Mary Magdalene with her hair wet after drying the feet of Jesus; nearby Monterchi, birthplace of Piero’s mother, for his stately Madonna del Parto, the pregnant Virgin Mary, and, of course, the Museo Civico in Sansepolcro, featuring The Resurrection. Aldous Huxley proclaimed this to be “the greatest painting in the world.” Christ rises from the tomb; four guards sleep beneath. The one in brown on the left is said to be a self-portrait of Piero.
I like the story, and I hope it’s true, of an American pilot in World War Two who had orders to bomb Sansepolcro. As he flew, he had a memory of an art professor lecturing about the great painting hanging in a museum in Sansepolcro. He dropped his bombs elsewhere. Be thankful for a good liberal arts education.
Also at the civic museum, we find Piero’s San Ludovico (Saint Louis) and San Giuliano (Saint Julian), the blond youth with an other-worldly look in his eyes. I love the riveting Polyptych of the Misericordia. A larger-than-life Virgin Mary shelters eight people under her cloak. The panels of saints are equally brilliant and moving. Although Piero magnetizes us always, there is more to see. I’m especially fond of the work by local artist Santi di Tito, most of all the lovely Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the Raffaellino del Colle paintings, and the Mannerist Pontormo’s San Quintino.
I CAN IMAGINE living here. Though the setting lacks the drama of hill towns, the flat streets and spacious Piazza Torre di Berta invite lingering, bicycling, window-shopping. Droves of well-dressed young people throng streets lined with fashionable shops and bars. Cortona friends come here to find distinctive clothes at Ballerini. Busatti has a branch. La Nuova Libreria is an excellent bookstore. Look up! Several medieval towers spike the façades of handsome palazzi. One sidewalk menu offers pasta with goose sauce, roast duck, osso bucco, rabbit. Just your ordinary old fare.
We’ve brought guests here many times, as the town is a bit out of the way and many do not know of it. We always take them to Ristorante Locanda da Ventura. We have to have completed our sight-seeing prior because you stand up from the table in a food coma. We order from the antipasti cart, as was the custom for many decades in Tuscany. Grilled eggplant and breaded peppers, slices of frittata and salumi. For primo, the ribollita or the ravioli with truffles, then the roasted pork with crackly skin, or the savory brasata, braised beef.
Today we visit the gorgeous and appealing displays of medicinal plants and herbs in Museo Aboca, a few meters down from the Museo Civico. Antique ceramic pitchers and jugs, blown glass distillers, bottles and storage jars painted with names of what they held: opium, roses, arsenic. All the tools for making cures. Old monasteries had their garden of simples; and much of the lore, of course, is now known to have scientific basis.
While I’m looking at books in the gift shop, Ed talks to the women at the desk. He is told that Osteria Il Giardino di Piero, the restaurant across the street, is associated with the museum—which he finds out is associated with the farm Aboca, 2,000 acres of vegetables and organic medicinal herbs. We have to try it. This means no lunch at Da Ventura. Will this be a rival for our affections?
The garden room of the osteria faces the Piero park, which Aboca has planted with healing plants in beds all around the statue of Piero della Francesca. Since we’re at the end of October, we sit inside. As we walk in, we see glass flasks (fiaschi) filled to the top with beans in the fireplace coals. We have to taste that ancient Tuscan specialty. First, we split the bringoli pasta (similar to the pici of our area) with a pesto of kale, saffron, walnuts, and almonds. Then the smoky white beans with a plate of fried artichokes. A slender slice of almond and ricotta tart with a hint of lemon. We love this—everything top quality, organic, curated, and served on Richard Ginori china painted with a scene of the park across the street. We’ll have to come back to Sansepolcro twice as often now.
Walking out, we find the Cattedrale di San Giovanni Evangelista open—not always the case in the afternoon. The first church was revised to Romanesque in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Because it faces via Matteotti, a side street, not the piazza, it’s easy to miss and that would be a pity, because inside is a resurrection painting, earlier than Piero’s and almost certainly an influence on his. Niccolò di Segna’s composition is similar, with Jesus resting one foot on the edge of the sepulcher with toes curled over, same powdery-pink garment. I feel a little shiver, thinking of Piero standing in front of this painting while contemplating starting his own.
I always visit the Ascensione di Gesù by Perugino, with Christ ascending in an oval of cherub heads surrounded by musicians, angels, and dangling ribbons. Mary and the crowd below look up in wonder. The colors and shading are harmonious, and always with Perugino there will be a glimpse of sublime landscape in the background. Quite magnificent but after spending time with Piero, Perugino looks static.
In an inconspicuous spot, I see a Piero look-alike. Baptism of Christ by Christiana Jane Herringham (1852–1929). How curious. This copy, painted in 1909, of one of Piero’s famous works is excellent. Herringham would have seen the original in London’s National Gallery. When I look up the copyist, she is one of those formidable, fascinating Edwardian women who carved their way in a society that expected little of them. Lady Herringham translated a fifteenth-century book on tempera and fresco, reviving interest in those methods. She started funding organizations, still active today, to protect British works of art. She traveled to India to copy Buddhist paintings in the Ajanta Caves, leaving an important record of their condition at that time. Her last years were, sadly, spent in mental institutions. I wonder how her painting found a home on a side wall of the cathedral in Sansepolcro.
“Piero’s town,” Ed says. We’re walking along the substantial town walls toward the car.
“Why do we always call him by his first name?”
“We want to feel on intimate terms with the local boy.”
NOTE:
There is a biography of Christiana Jane Herringham: Christiana Herringham and the Edwardian Art Scene by Mary Lago.