Chapter One
Campanilismo
Above the party a beautiful young man rises into a cloud. As
he looks to the sky, a girl with black hair curled at her ears
reaches toward him, as if to pull him back. He is naked,
exquisite, revealing the entirety of what is being lost to
her. His right hand, enveloped by the faint tracings of a claw
(perhaps an eagle’s but this is debatable), disappears into
the cloud, and only the girl is aware-her upturned face lit by
sun. She wears a beige silk gown with a dark brown velvet
princess bodice bordered with small pearls, which hugs her
full breasts; a pillbox cap snugly rests on the crown of her
head. The full gown flutters slightly with her movement, her
desperate step toward the sky. Rose tints flush her cheeks and
a solemnity haunts her eyes. At the edge of a hill thick with
flowering rhododendrons and azaleas, the party carries on
around her. Girls in long velvet gowns cluster together like
bouquets, coquettish turns to their pretty lips, awaiting the
adoration of all the various men, men in velvet pants and
elaborate vests brocaded and beaded with pearls and gems. With
long curling hair flowing like the capes that drape their
backs, they are as handsome and gay as the girls. The colors
are rich and deep, burnt sienna and royal peacock blue and
gold and golden greens and whites the color of the sky.
Couples whisper sweet gossip, though no one yet knows that she
is in love with him, except for him. And what is to become of
her, of that love, overwhelming and futile? If you look
closely, you can see her love fairly palpitating, throbbing
under the swell of her breast, all fury and tenderness. The
party unfolds at the edge of a town over which looms the bell
tower of an imposing church, perched high above one of those
cool northern Italian lakes. The party celebrates the
flowering rhododendrons and azaleas and the completion of
Fiori, the Cellini country house to which these flowering
bushes belong. “May they flower for at least a thousand
years,” Signor Cellini might have said. He is there somewhere
among the guests, the father of the lovelorn girl. Time is
expansive like that. Fifteen hundred years have elapsed since
Augustus ruled the world. A lute player plucks the strings of
his instrument, perhaps the bells of the bell tower toll. The
beautiful young man touches the cloud in all his glory. A wide
ribbon runs diagonally across the girl’s chest and on the
ribbon in a swirling playful script of gold is the name of the
artist who painted this fresco-Benvenuto Cellini.
He was nineteen years old, born in 1500, the age of the year,
and had recently been banished from Florence for a second time
for one of his many quarrels, the result of his proud and
cocky temper. He had never painted a painting before, much
less a fresco, and he never would again. He had sketched, he
had practiced with paint and tempera, but his interest was in
sculpture, working with bronze and on occasion gold. He
thought painting an inferior art. A sculpture, unlike a
painting, could be looked at from eight different angles and
thus had to be perfect from eight different perspectives. But
he had fun with this fresco. He made it for the girl, Valeria
Cellini, his cousin and his love, too. It was Cellini family
lore (you know the way that families have their myths, the
stories that lend them importance and carve their place in
history) that she would not have followed him even had he let
her. She would not have left behind her family and her
town-brave girl, she was the symbol of family loyalty and
resilience. Of all the Cellini daughters, twenty generations
of them, she was the first and she alone remained untouched by
time and change: five hundred years old, perpetually beautiful
and young, captured as if in amber while the other daughters
of the Cellini line (the nineteen who followed her) had
married and vanished into the myths of other families. The
action Valeria would have taken, could have taken, didn’t
take, remains frozen in that one instant of after and before,
frozen the way art can freeze something, after love and
before all the potential of life. Valeria was fifteen years
old.
Benvenuto danced into town, escaping Florence, to stay with
his uncle Cesare Cellini in the town of Città in the foothills
of the Alps. He stayed the summer of 1519. He stayed until he
became well acquainted with the town and his uncle’s friends
and family. He stayed until he fell in love, until the shy
half smile igniting Valeria’s pale rose-tinted face flowered
into something more complete. He stayed until he grew
restless, impatient, bored even by romance. Then he left,
traveled north to Switzerland, turned south and went to Rome,
the city of his dreams, where a wealthy woman became his
patron and where he stayed until he had the courage to return
to the city that had exiled him but to which he unequivocally
belonged. By then Valeria had faded to an insignificant
detail, erased by the fullness and bravado of his biography.
In Città, though, he stayed long enough for Valeria to be
seduced by hope, the depths of hope, its deep recesses and its
wells, and to find himself basking in it, too, though they
both knew that he was incapable of staying forever (that
deceptive word) and that he would never have taken her away
with him and that she would never have left. That is what she
had loved about him, that from the beginning she knew their
time together would not last. That was the draw, the pull, the
urgency behind the love-the desire to conquer the impossible.
The “if only” at that love’s core, the “if only” triumphing to
become all. But art trumped and Benvenuto left Città and he
left Valeria and he left, as well, the story in the fresco, a
token of his gratitude, an ode and a bow to exquisite pain.
For a long time, 453 years to be exact, the fresco remained in
the dining room of Fiori, the villa in the hills above Lago
Maggiore, thirty kilometers outside of Città. It presided over
parties and dinners and the ordinary family meals of twenty
generations of Cellinis (Sunday dinners of polenta and
uccellini, tiny birds with bones as delicate and tasty as
marrow, shot by the Cellini husbands in the estate’s bird
arbor) until Giovanni Paolo Cellini and his wife, Elena, at
great expense, had the fresco removed and restored and fronted
by protective glass and rehung in the more tempered
environment of their Città villa. Humidity (the enemy of
frescoes everywhere) was eating the lime plaster and
corrupting the pigment, slowly devouring the picture, and the
Cellinis wanted to save it. They wanted it to last. For twenty
generations it had survived. Giovanni Paolo Cellini, a short
elderly man (he had his first child at fifty) with a halo of
white hair and a missing hand disguised by a stiff black
leather glove that endowed him with the aspect of a laborer
rather than the banker that he was, would not allow the fresco
to die on his watch. Elena, tall, thin, dark-haired,
big-eyed, good wife, wouldn’t either. Through the centuries
the job of the Cellini wives had been to preserve the Cellini
family’s rituals and customs, and Elena well understood her
role. So in the 1970s, when Elena and Giovanni Paolo’s son was
a teenager, the elaborate process of separating the fresco
from the wall (digging out and destroying a good foot of
plaster and stucco behind the picture) was undertaken.
Young Cesare was all but oblivious to this exercise. He was a
boy caught up in history, studying Latin and Ancient Greek at
the Liceo Classico. He read Aeschylus in the original yet
preferred the comedies of Aristophanes because he liked to
laugh and make others laugh. His little sister, Laura, had
this same love of laughter, but she went even further. A funny
little girl with thick curly white-blond hair, the source of
which eluded everyone, Laura’s ambition was to one day become
a clown. Three years younger than Cesare, Laura already knew
who she was and what she wanted, and one day she would run
away to clown school in Switzerland; but that’s later, much
later.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from L’America
by Martha McPhee
Copyright © 2006 by Martha McPhee .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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