The Gherardini blazed out of the mists of myth and history. In a time before time, the Trojan prince Aeneas, son of the goddess Venus, fled his besieged city with his aged father on his back and his young son by his side. His band of loyal followers wandered for years before arriving at the kingdom of Latium on the Italian peninsula. After marrying its monarch’s daughter and succeeding to the throne, Aeneas divided the kingdom among his descendants. “Etruria,” the land we know as Tuscany, went to “Gherardo,” who passed it along to his sons and the sons of his sons—the “little Gherardos,” or Gherardini.
So one legend goes.
Is it true? Perhaps we shouldn’t even try to pry genealogical fact from fantasy. Historians have long accused Italy’s earliest chroniclers of creating “a golden legend” to enhance the glories of the past and embellish the achievements of the present.
“If they were great enough to create these myths,” the German poet Goethe observed, “we should be great enough to believe them.” The romantic in me wants to believe. The journalist craves something more.
This much is certain: In Italy lineage matters. In the homes of Italian friends I behold great, multibranched, thick-trunked family trees—veritable genealogical redwoods—that often date back a millennium or more. Ancestry tells Italians not only where a person came from but also the type of character the generations have forged.
In search of Lisa Gherardini’s forebears, I head to the Archivio di Stato di Firenze (Archive of the State of Florence), a bleak, utterly unromantic bunker that squats in busy Piazza Beccaria near the market of Sant’Ambrogio. Within its thick concrete walls lies the patrimony of Tuscany—its memoria storica (historical memory), a staggering forty-six miles of decrees, manuscripts, registries, charters, drawings, maps, tax records, and other artifacts, some dating back to the 700s. In addition to official documents, the Archive houses letters, diaries, and hundreds of ricordanze or ricordi (family record books) of a populace of obsessive takers of notes and makers of lists.
Guiding me through this labyrinth is Lisa Kaborycha, author of A Short History of Renaissance Italy. In the reverential hush of the dim reading room, dozens of heads bend over documents propped on wooden holders. You can take notes, cautions Kaborycha, a Berkeley-educated historian with the California sun still in her smile, but only in pencil. Laptops are allowed, but there is no Internet access. Transgressions such as dangling a pencil too close to a manuscript provoke a sharp rebuke. Don’t even think of smuggling in a snack.
In a whisper, Kaborycha identifies scholars, famed in their fields, who have spent entire careers deciphering the intricate calligraphy of anonymous scribes. These unsung heroes of academia have pulled off a myth-worthy accomplishment: bringing the dead back to life. Thanks to their painstaking research, we know intimate details about the lives of the fanatically self-documenting Florentines: how they earned and lost fortunes, how they arranged marriages and bore children, how they celebrated in victory and plotted vengeance in defeat.
Powerful personalities emerge from the sea of statistics. “Men who wish to show their superiority over other animals,” reads the inscription in one memory book, “should make every effort not to pass through this life silently, as do sheep.”
The Gherardini, I quickly discover, were no sheep.
I begin my quest by exchanging my passport for the oldest book I have ever touched: a history of the Gherardini written by a family member, Don (Reverend) Niccolò Gherardini, in 1586. The oversize volume, 30 inches high and 20 inches wide, feels both heavy and fragile.
“Is this parchment?” I ask.
Kaborycha rubs a page between her fingers.
“No, it’s paper,” she says, explaining that parchment was made from animal skin, so one surface is smooth and the reverse (verso) slightly rougher and dotted with hair follicles. (The finest-quality “uterine” vellum came from the tender skin of a fetal calf or lamb.) Paper was cheaper, concocted from a pulpy mulch of used undergarments, animal parts, and hemp, boiled in a huge cauldron and then dried. As I turn the brittle pages, the ink, blotched in places, still sparkles in the light.
We focus on the author’s feathery penmanship, particularly his way of writing s’s and f’s horizontally rather than vertically. With practice I begin to make out familiar Italian words. When a recognizable name, Naldo Gherardini, leaps out at me, I squeal—and immediately apologize for the unseemly outburst in such a hallowed chamber.
Soon I am caught up in a sweeping saga of dastardly deeds and deadly vendettas. One Gherardini, betrayed by a coconspirator in a daring plot to overthrow the government of Florence, is imprisoned, tortured, convicted, and sentenced to death. The entry ends with the chilling word “decapitato.”
“Beheaded?” I ask. Kaborycha shrugs. The bloody history of the Gherardini strikes her as fairly typical in a city with violence encoded in its civic DNA.
As I learn from the oldest chronicles of Florence, Roman legions, attacking rebel forces holed up in the hillside town of Fiesole around 59 B.C., were pushed back to the banks of the Arno. There they made their stand, fighting in the river into the night and refusing to yield another inch.
The following morning, led by their captain, Fiorino, the Romans crushed the Fiesoleans. After the imperial forces returned home in triumph, a small group of soldiers remained with their commander at the outpost. One night a band from Fiesole crept into the camp and murdered Fiorino, his wife, and their children.
Julius Caesar himself swore revenge. After sacking Fiesole, his troops returned to the bend in the Arno to create a new city, first known as “piccola Roma” (little Rome), with a forum, aqueducts, public baths, fine villas, and marble temples, including one dedicated to its patron, the war god, Mars. In its first two centuries, Fiorenza (Firenze in modern Italian)—a name that evoked Fiorino and the Latin for “blossom,” translated in the vernacular of the time as “flowery sword”—grew to about 10,000 inhabitants.
In the third century, blood still stained its stones. A Christian preacher named Minias, arrested for propagating the forbidden new religion, was thrown into the Florentine amphitheater with a panther. When the beast refused to attack him, Minias was decapitated before a cheering crowd. With true Tuscan stoicism, the martyr picked up his truncated head, replaced it on his shoulders, and marched across the Arno and up the hill to his cave, the site where the Basilica of San Miniato now stands.
So this legend goes.
Through the calamitous Dark Ages, waves of invaders—from Byzantines to Ostrogoths—destroyed the once thriving settlement. The population of Fiorenza dwindled to just a thousand residents. In the early ninth century, according to another mythic tale, Charlemagne restored the primitive church of San Miniato and underwrote the city’s rebirth.
By the Middle Ages, as a historian simplified the social hierarchy for me, Tuscans fell into three broad categories: men who prayed, men who worked, and men who fought. Women, all but invisible in the scant historical records, bore children.
The Gherardini, among the most ancient, wealthy, and bellicose of feudal warlords, were fighters. Their gold-spurred cavalieri (knights) seized possession of a vast swath of the rugged Greve and Elsa valleys in the Chianti countryside and lorded over hamlets, villages, turreted watchtowers, parishes, mills, and acres of fields, vineyards, olive groves, and forests.
In the twelfth century three adventurous Gherardini brothers wielded their swords in the service of Britain’s King Henry II in his conquest of the island of Hibernia. Richly rewarded, they settled in the country we know as Ireland and established the dynasties of the Geraldines and the Fitzgeralds (from “son of Gerald”), which claim President John Fitzgerald Kennedy as their most illustrious American son.
Tuscany in the Middle Ages was no Camelot and its cavalieri no gallant Galahads. Scarcely able to write their own names (as deeds signed with an X attest), the Gherardini charge across the pages of even the driest historical tomes like semisavage brigands. Sweeping down from their fortress castle at Montagliari, they warred against rivals, ransacked the countryside, and plundered abbeys and convents. If merchant caravans on the market road between Siena and Florence refused to pay hefty tolls for safe passage, the Gherardini would slash the heel tendons of the donkeys and confiscate the merchandise they carried.
Such brazen daylight robberies, widespread in the region, outraged the young Commune of Florence, run by guilds of tradesmen determined to safeguard their supply routes. In 1135, Florentine troops marched into Chianti to wrangle the rural robber barons into submission.
Razing castles and torching lands, they forced the landed gentry, including the Gherardini, to move to Florence. The vassals of the feudal lords joined the migration and became popolani (common people, or citizens) in a boomtown in dire need of bakers, barbers, bricklayers, butchers, carpenters, cobblers, saddlemakers, tailors, and, above all, carders, washers, combers, trimmers, spinners, dyers, and weavers for its immense wool industry.
“And thus,” the fourteenth-century historian Giovanni Villani reports, “the Commune of Florence began to expand, either by force or by argument, increasing its territory and bringing under its jurisdiction all the country nobility and destroying the castles.”
Not quite. “Citified” did not translate into “civilized.” Forced out of their mountain lairs, the magnati (magnates, as they were designated), still lusting for dominion, marked their new territory by building armed towers linked by spindly bridges to the houses of allied families. Florence sprouted a forest of 150 such spikes, some higher than 225 feet, all hated symbols of the arrogance and insolence of the glorified gang leaders who smugly towered over the city.
In a history of Florence, I come upon a sketch of the main Gherardini tower, a tall, skinny, stark, almost windowless slab of stone in the White Lion quartiere (district) of Santa Maria Novella. Barricaded in this stronghold, kinsmen from as many as eighteen Gherardini households would have fired giant crossbows and heaved rocks or red-hot pitch from the ramparts onto assailants.
I think of them when I read a passage from the poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), who lived at the height of the magnates’ mayhem and belonged to the same political faction as the Gherardini: “Pride, envy, avarice—these are the sparks that have set on fire the hearts of all men.”
The Gherardini flamed with all three. No grudge could be forgotten, no insult unavenged, no adversary untoppled. Their honor—as descendants of Roman warriors, as conquerors of Chianti, as golden-spurred knights, as natural-born masters of all they surveyed—demanded no less.
Florence’s pugnacious magnates found new reason to brawl in the early thirteenth century, when conflict between the Holy Roman Emperors and the supremely powerful popes convulsed all of Italy. Most of the Gherardini sided with the pro-papal forces known as the Guelphs, drawing swords against the Ghibellines, who supported the emperor. Almost daily street battles erupted, often trapping residents in crossfires of arrows and reducing entire neighborhoods to rubble and ashes.
The magnates “fought together by day and by night, and many people perished,” Villani records, adding a heartfelt lament: “May its citizens weep for themselves and for their children since by their pride and ill will . . . they have undone so noble a city.”
“How did Florence survive?” I ask historian Lisa Kaborycha.
The way all civil societies do, she explains: by rule of law.
Despite the unending urban unrest, the Commune managed to weave a fragile overlay of governing committees such as the Twelve Good Men (Dodici Buonuomini) and the Sixteen Gonfaloniere (Standard Bearers). In theory, a lottery selected officeholders from all debt-free, taxpaying members of the guilds. In practice, various magnate coalitions made sure the official leather borse (large bags) contained only supporters’ names.
Although the incorrigible street fighters didn’t sheath their swords, the Florentine magnates took up the mantle of church protectors and civic leaders. In addition to swashbuckling warriors, the Gherardini family history duly records upstanding vicars, governors, ambassadors, and patrons of churches and charities. Gherardini men regularly ascended to the highest political posts, including terms (limited to two months to prevent power grabs) as priors and gonfaloniere of the Signoria, Florence’s chief executive and deliberative body. In religious processions Gherardini gallants proudly marched “armati di tutto punto” (armed to the teeth) behind the Bishop of Florence.
By the middle of the thirteenth century, the magnates’ hold on the city began to weaken. With trade expanding, money exchange emerged as a lucrative industry of its own. Florence’s family-owned banks, which pioneered the use of checks, letters of credit, and treasury notes, financed (at high interest rates) the extravagant ventures of Europe’s kings.
The profits from banking and commerce, accumulating quietly year after year, transformed Florence into the greatest commercial market in Europe and its “lords of the looms” into medieval Midases. Without king or court, Florentines bowed to only one ruler: “Messer Fiorino,” the gold florin, first minted in 1252, with the city’s patron saint John the Baptist on one side and its symbolic lily on the other.
Yet even prosperity didn’t bring peace. The newly rich popolo grasso (literally, the fat people) and the popolo minuto (the little people) united to bring down—literally—the nobles they assailed in judicial proceedings as “wolves and rapacious men.” A decree in 1250 ordered the magnates’ fortress towers reduced by more than half to a maximum height of about 98 feet.
In a deafening citywide demolition, parapets and bricks cascaded into the streets. The stones were used to construct a new set of protective city walls extending south across the Arno. Symbolically the mighty also were falling, but the Gherardini unyielding spirit not only endured, but became the stuff of new local legends.
I uncover some of these sagas in a thoroughly modern medium: digitized Google e-books such as Miscellanea Storica della Valdelsa (Historic Miscellany of the Elsa Valley). In their scanned pages, I meet a thirteenth-century family hero whose bravado Lisa Gherardini’s relatives would have extolled when they swapped stories around a winter hearth: Cece da’ Gherardini, the valiant military captain of one of Florence’s quartieri.
In 1260, after a rare decade of peace, the Commune’s Guelph leaders set their sights on their longtime nemesis Siena, a Ghibelline stronghold. Gathering in the Piazza della Signoria as they traditionally did to debate war plans, citizens voiced unbridled support for an attack. Then Cece da’ Gherardini spoke out against what he saw as a rash and foolhardy offensive.
The presiding consuls ordered him to be silent. When Cece kept talking, they slapped him with a hefty fine. Cece paid the fee and resumed his diatribe. The magistrates doubled the sum; Cece again paid up and continued arguing. Once more they doubled the amount.
“Speak again,” the consuls declared when he threw them more coins and resumed his tirade, “and we will cut off your head.” The outspoken commander held his tongue, although he muttered that if he had two heads, he would gladly have sacrificed one to stop the rush to war.
For thirty days a huge bell called the Martinella rang from the great arch of Por Santa Maria, warning enemies that the Florentines were preparing for battle. On the appointed day, Cece da’ Gherardini dutifully led his men south toward Siena. Accompanying them was the ornate Florentine carroccio, or war chariot.
Drawn by four pairs of stately white oxen draped with red cloth, with the Commune’s emblematic lily on a splendid standard waving from two tall masts, the wagon carried the Martinella in a wooden tower. Its peals led a force of 3,000 knights and 30,000 foot soldiers, at least one man from every household, toward Siena. In battle, the tolling of the bell would help wounded soldiers find the priest accompanying the army so they could receive last rites before dying.
The Florentines weren’t anticipating many casualties. Two friars had agreed to unlock one of Siena’s gates to allow easy entrance. Instead, in a stunning double cross, as the great doors creaked open on September 4, the Sienese, reinforced by imperial troops, roared forward. At the same time, pro-Ghibelline Florentines, who had marched into battle with the Guelphs, suddenly switched sides and attacked their countrymen. One cut off the hand of the Florentine standard bearer, adding to the confusion.
Some 2,500 Florentines, Cece da’ Gherardini among them, died in the ill-fated Battle of Montaperti. No family—magnate or merchant—was spared. The Gherardini and their vanquished allies, exiled from Florence, packed their possessions and headed tearfully to Lucca, a Guelph stronghold, to bide their time until the political pendulum swung back in their favor.
For decades power surged back and forth in violent bursts between the factions. Finally, in 1289, the Gherardini and other Guelphs decisively routed the Ghibellines. But victory on the battlefield didn’t stop the carnage in the streets. The Guelph magnates split almost immediately, with the Gherardini joining the “Whites” against the more adamantly propapal “Blacks.” When they weren’t attacking other magnates, the Gherardini—singled out by historians as “troublemakers” with a reputation for being “warlike and uncivilized”—terrorized the popolani, beating and robbing working-class Florentines with impunity.
Tougher laws, the town fathers reckoned, were needed to corral its toughest citizens. From 1290 to 1295 the Signoria clamped down with a series of draconian restrictions called the Ordinances of Justice (“the Ordinances of Iniquity,” sniped the magnates). Their undisguised goal: “to make life as miserable as possible” for 150 hated magnate families, identified not just on the basis of ancestry and wealth, but also for their dangerous propensity for violence. The Gherardini qualified on all counts.
Nobility became as much a curse as a blessing. No longer could the Gherardini and other despised magnates receive honors or hold the high offices that had allowed them to manipulate the system for their benefit. Each male had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Commune and put up a sort of security bond as a pledge of peace. Boxes called tamburi (drums)—nicknamed buchi della verità (holes of truth)—were set up outside civic buildings to collect denunciations from anonymous informers.
Unlike other Florentine citizens, magnates could be arrested solely on the basis of accusations by two witnesses, without any corroborating evidence. Once convicted, they faced steeper penalties than popolani, including confiscation of their property, exile, and execution. And not only the transgressors but all of their kinsmen were compelled to pay exorbitant fines for every offense.
As another tangible assertion of its dominance over its unruly citizens, the Commune erected a fortress tower of its own, the formidable Palazzo dei Priori, now known as the Palazzo Vecchio. Its raised fist of a tower, the highest in town at more than 300 feet, incorporated an old magnate stronghold known as La Vacca (the cow) that gave its name to the Republic’s official bell. Its low mooing tones summoned all males over the age of fourteen to the Piazza della Signoria, the civic soul of Florence, in times of crisis.
One crisis hit Florence like a tsunami, shattering the lives of the Gherardini and also of Italy’s greatest poet. In 1302, when Dante Alighieri, a thirty-six-year-old White Guelph, was serving a two-month term as prior, civil war erupted. The Black Guelphs raged through Florence, slaughtering Whites and burning their homes. Dante, in Rome on a papal mission, escaped the bloodbath, but the Blacks sentenced him and 350 other Whites to lifetime exile.
These fuorusciti (refugees) would face immediate execution if they were to return. Dante, who never went back to his hometown, would compose his literary masterwork, The Divine Comedy, while wandering “like a boat without sail or rudder” for two decades around the Italian peninsula.
The exiled Gherardini retreated to their rural estates, but they couldn’t escape the wrath of their enemies. Naldo Gherardini, a clan leader with a reputation as an aggressive “hothead,” and his banished relatives barricaded themselves within the family castle at Montagliari in Chianti. The Black Guelphs pursued them, and the two sides raged against each other with unrelenting ferocity for months. Ultimately, the Blacks razed the Gherardini stronghold and declared the site a place of perpetua inedificabilità (perpetual “unbuildability”).
Some of the defeated Gherardini migrated to Verona and Venice. Others continued to defend their properties in Chianti’s Val d’Elsa. Their leader, Cavaliere Gherarduccio Gherardini, who died in 1331, is buried in the oldest knight’s tomb in Tuscany, within the simple stone parish church of Sant’Appiano in Barberino Val d’Elsa.
One branch of the family was granted permission to build a new villa a few miles away on the other side of the Greve River—with the stipulation that it never be fortified. The Gherardini named this unarmed oasis Vignamaggio (May Vineyard).
On a crisp fall day, my husband and I drive through a patchwork of tall cypresses, terraced vines, and gnarled olive trees to the 400-acre Vignamaggio estate near Greve in Chianti. The Gherardini sold the property, which once included a mill and olive press, to another, more prosperous Florentine family, the Gherardi (no relation), in 1422. After that the property changed hands several times before Gianni Nunziante, an international corporate attorney based in Rome, took possession in 1988.
In the years since, he has lavishly restored the villa’s eighty-plus rooms and Renaissance gardens. A cozy inn offers guest accommodations. A large cantina processes Vignamaggio’s grapes and stores wood barrels of its prize-winning wines. In 1993, Kenneth Branagh set his film Much Ado About Nothing in these magical surroundings.
Part of Vignamaggio’s lore is the fanciful notion that Lisa Gherardini was born there, although a land deed confirms its sale almost sixty years before her birth. Some even claim that Leonardo painted Lisa against the backdrop of the sun-dappled terrace, where we eat lunch with the genial owner. Just across the river and through the trees, we can make out the castle ruins and a family chapel, rebuilt in the seventeenth century and still decorated with the Gherardini coat of arms.
As we linger in the idyllic setting, I imagine Lisa’s ancestors on this same spot, gazing across the valley at the silent testimony to all that they had lost. As the magnates’ power and prestige ebbed, income from lucrative church patronages called “benefices” and stipends from honorary offices dried up. Some dynasties had to sell off lands to pay creditors. More than a few descended into the ranks of what a historian calls “the shame-faced poor.”
Florence offered one alternative to nobles willing to change with the times: a sort of familial divorce. A magnate could renounce his title, denounce his “grandi e possenti” (great and powerful) relatives, change his name and coat of arms, and become an ordinary popolano, entitled to a citizen’s protections and privileges, including the right to join a guild and hold political office. The rich Tornaquinci, who owed their wealth to exclusive building and fishing rights on a stretch of the Arno, became the even richer Tornabuoni. The proud Cavalcanti disavowed their illustrious past and christened themselves the Cavallereschi. More than a hundred noble clans did the same.
The Gherardini, singled out by historians as among “the most intransigent and reactionary” of magnates, refused even to consider such an affront to their family honor. The diehard aristocrats, clinging to the trappings of past glory, comforted themselves with pride in never falling “so low that they had to pursue a base occupation or a trade” and never marrying beneath them to a bride or groom whose family “had no claim to antiquity or nobility.”
These consolations wore thin as the Gherardini plunged into bitter infighting. As I labored through a scholarly history of the Florentine magnates in Italian, a single sentence stopped me in mid-page: “I Gherardini si odiavano di cuore.” The Gherardini hated each other with all their hearts—with each of the three principal branches despising the others in egual misura (in equal measure). While many families harbor grudges, the sparring Gherardini had elevated what we would call “dysfunction” to a level worthy of historical record. I soon understood why.
By the mid-fourteenth century, one disgruntled Gherardini, Cece di Bindo di Sasso, had had enough. In a petition to disown his unruly tribe, he presented himself and his brother Cione, known as Il Pelliccia (the Furry One), as upright and loyal citizens and protested the heavy fines levied against them for the misdeeds of their errant relatives.
In a single five-year period, Cece told the court, ten Gherardini had been condemned under the Ordinances. One stole a mule; others engaged in armed brawls or beat up local popolani. The most villainous killed two men, including a prior, in a single day. The government was demanding a fortune in fines, while Cece’s relatives were threatening the lives of the turncoat, his wife, and his son.
The court allowed Cece and his brother to declare their independence and to add “da Vignamaggio,” for their Chianti homestead, to the Gherardini name. Yet even these alleged model citizens could not stay out of trouble. Cece’s son Bindo—no “stinco di santo” (shin of a saint), as a chronicler puts it—caroused through the countryside with his friends vandalizing the property of hardworking peasants. Yet his transgressions paled compared to the disgrace that his uncle Pelliccia Gherardini would bring to the family name.
In 1360 a coalition of six magnate families and several disgruntled popolani—“men of aggressive spirits and passions,” Villani writes—banded together to overthrow the Commune’s leaders. The conspirators recruited an inside man, a friar who would unlock a door while spending a night within the palace of the Signoria so the rebels could seize control.
Before they could act, one of the plotters—Bartolomeo de’ Medici, of the dynasty that was just beginning its political ascent—confided in his brother Salvestro. Immediately recognizing the peril to the entire family, Salvestro de’ Medici rushed to the priors, who agreed to pardon his brother if he identified the ringleaders.
The traitors included the “upstanding” citizen Pelliccia Gherardini da Vignamaggio and his son-in-law Domenico Bandini. Most of the accused fled, but the police arrested Bandini and a popolano implicated in the plot. Under torture, the two men confessed. All twelve conspirators were sentenced in absentia to death for planning to topple the government and “disregarding the peaceful and serene state of the city, which thrives on tranquility, prosperity, and justice.” The common citizen was hung. As a noble entitled to a more dignified execution, Domenico Bandini was beheaded.
His father-in-law, Pelliccia Gherardini da Vignamaggio, was punished in effigy with a pittura infamante. As was the custom with dastardly criminals, the Commune ordered a sort of glorified mug shot painted on the exterior wall of the hall of justice (now known as the Bargello) for all the town to see and mock. The dishonored exile, wandering through Europe for years, bombarded Florentine leaders with protests of innocence and petitions for a pardon. In 1378, long after his portrait had faded, Pelliccia’s death sentence was commuted.
The reversal came too late to change the fate of Pelliccia’s daughter, Dianora Gherardini. The widow of the decapitated traitor Domenico Bandini gave birth to their seventh child, a girl named Margherita, in 1360, the same year that her husband was executed. With her spouse slain, her father disgraced, and their property seized, Dianora fled senza una lira in tasca (without a penny in her pocket), as a family history records. She eventually joined her two sisters, who, along with many other Florentine political refugees, had settled in Avignon, the prosperous French commercial center that served as home to the exiled papacy through much of the fourteenth century.
Dianora was the first female Gherardini—and the most sympathetic soul—whom I encountered in months of trolling through family and municipal annals. Yet I might never have known of her existence if not for a clue I spied during our visit to Vignamaggio. On the wall of its cantina (which sells a full-bodied Chianti called Castello di Monna Lisa) hangs a copy of a letter written by the manor’s last Gherardini owner, Amidio.
In the warm, informal note, dated October 26, 1404, he sends greetings to Francesco di Marco Datini, the entrepreneurial tycoon famed in Italian history as “the merchant of Prato.” Complaining about how busy he has been, Amidio urges Francesco to drink the wine inbotato (placed in barrels) at Vignamaggio that he has sent.
“What is mine is yours,” he writes, ending with a greeting for Datini’s wife, Margherita.
Struck by the warm, familiar tone, I wonder if there might have been more than a business relationship between the Gherardini and the medieval mogul Datini. In the digital archives of Chianti’s Val d’Elsa, I come across local histories that help me connect the dots. Amidio, it turns out, was a son of the notorious traitor Pelliccia Gherardini—and an older brother of Dianora. Her youngest daughter, Margherita, Amidio’s niece, married the rich Tuscan merchant Francesco Datini in 1376.
Little “Bita,” as her family called her, should have faded into obscurity. Instead, we know more about this Gherardini daughter than any other woman of her time, thanks to her husband’s compulsive preservation of almost every piece of paper that crossed his hands. During his long life, Datini copied the letters that he wrote and saved those that he received, including the one from Amidio Gherardini da Vignamaggio and those exchanged with his “rebellious and singularly outspoken young wife,” as the historian Barbara Tuchman describes her.
“I can feel the Gherardini in my blood,” Margherita declares in one of more than two hundred candid notes she sent to her husband. In their pages, I come to know this Tuscan donna vera—vivacious, intelligent, practical, energetic, devout, iron-willed. Her words reveal both what it was like to be a woman and a wife in fifteenth-century Tuscany and how it felt to have the Gherardini fires of the heart—their Gherardiname—raging within her. Perhaps learning more about Margherita, I speculated, would lead to a fuller understanding of her kinswoman Lisa Gherardini.
There was only one way to find out.