Singular life
Wolves at the door
Petronella Wyatt
When I was child I used to be taken to Florence to see a mummy. Before you start writing in, nope, I am not referring here to some disgusting, necrophiliac rite. Our preferred destination was a restaurant near the Arno called the Leone D'Oro or something, but my mother always lost our way from the family house in Pisa, getting no further than a church that contained the remains of Saint Zita, which were displayed in a glass case. Zita had died in the Middle Ages. Her dried-up face grinned through toothless lips that had long since ceased to utter their pieties.
A lot of people don't like Florence. Of late some self-appointed aesthetes — and members of the non-cognoscenti — have almost decided to despise the place. They say it is small and dirty and in every way inferior to cities such as Siena and Rome. The Duomo, in any case, looks like a Vic- torian public lavatory. How they laugh at that one.
During a brief and mercilessly mummy- less visit there last weekend, however, it struck me that Florence is infinitely more appealing than some of its more trumpeted neighbours. Part of the lure of the city is that it is so soothing, so redolent of a lovely perfume, a splendid, lolling female of a city, whereas Rome is a punchy, aggressive man. Florence is still a town of artisans. Paper is a speciality; writing paper with slippery-shiny hand-painted illuminations and smooth calf-leather sketch books. The second-hand bookshops aren't bad either. I managed to pick up a 19th-century study of something called lycanthropy. This is the ancient superstition that cursed or evil men turned into wolves and were driven to com- mit bestial acts. In the Middle Ages, the book said, there were numerous trials in Italy dealing with cases of this nature. Most judges concluded the defendants were mad and had them locked away.
The most extraordinary example, howev- er, was that of a 15th-century Marshal of France, the Marechal de Retz. A man of extreme piety and intelligence, a confi- dante of the king and nephew to the Duke of Bordeaux, he travelled between a series of fortified castles. After villagers began to complain that their children had mysteri- ously disappeared, suspicion finally fell on this great noble. It emerged at his trial that Retz had burned, dismembered and defiled more than 50 children and in many instances had drunk or bathed in their blood. The guilty man remained quite calm throughout. He explained that ten years before, he had happened to come across a volume of Suetonius. Reading how some of the Roman emperors allegedly enjoyed tor- turing children, the compulsion had come on him to outdo them. Retz claimed to have repented, however, and fully expected to go to heaven. His judges were unim- pressed and he was hanged and burned in the public square.
The Church worried that some of the local women, whose children had not been snatched and had formed a sort of Retz fan club, would disrupt the execution. It is extraordinary how some of us females go for unreconstructed monsters. Men seem better at sniffing out the miscreants of their own sex.
About eight years ago I found my late father hunched in his library, his face quite ashen with fear. It was as if destiny were moving him, like an automaton, to a terri- ble end. I asked him what the matter was. A trembling hand pointed towards a chair. On the seat lay the unlikely instrument of all this terror — a large bouquet of red roses. 'But that's nice,' I said, 'someone has sent you flowers."No, it isn't nice,' gasped my dad, 'they're from Reggie Kray.' Reggie Kray? The more I laughed the more miser- able he became. 'It's not a joke. It's true.' I examined the little card that had come with the flowers. Inscribed on it were the baf- fling words, 'Thank you, Reggie Kray.' My father began to croak. 'It means he's going to kill me. He obviously expects me to get him released from jail and as I can't he is going to assassinate me.' All the men I have known have loathed anyone associat- ed with violence and would never go near them. I wish I could say that of women.
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`Well ... the guidebook did warn that all the backpacking tourism had caused a lot of erosion.'
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