Florentine villas

About six miles from Florence on the high road to Pisa stands the fine villa of Castel-Pulci, now a lunatic asylum. In ancient times the Pulci owned large possessions in the Val d’Arno, but the first notice I have found of them is in 1278 when Jacopo di Rinaldo Pulci was denounced to the captain of the Guelph party in Florence for failing to keep a weir in the Arno near Ponte a Signa in proper repair. His son Mainetto sold this weir to the monks of the great Badia⁠[70] a Settimo, who in 1313 also bought an island in the river from Giovanni and Ponzardo, sons of Mainetto. Like so many of the great Florentine houses the Pulci failed in 1321 and villa and lands were seized by the cardinal Napoleone Orsini, one of the creditors. His heirs sold the estate to the Marquis Rinnucini who enlarged and beautified Castel-Pulci, which was bought by the government some fifty years ago.

Luigi Pulci, born on the 3rd of December 1431, was the author of the Morgante Maggiore, the first burlesque romance in European literature and the prototype of that form of poetry which Ariosto brought to perfection. His two elder brothers were also poets; Luca wrote the Ciriffo Calvaneo and the Driadeo d’Amore, and was considered by Varchi superior to Luigi, while Giovio calls him poeta nobile. Bernardo, the eldest, was among the first to write pastoral poetry in the vulgar tongue; he also made a good translation of the Eclogues of Virgil, and wrote a poem on the passion of Christ and many plays. His wife Antonia was a poetess of no mean fame in the same style. Verino celebrates the three brothers thus:

Luigi Pulci was an intimate friend of the Medici and formed one of the brilliant company surrounding Lorenzo il Magnifico, who mentions him in his poem on hawking:

Many were the jokes made by Lorenzo’s witty chaplain, Ser Matteo di Franco, a canon of the cathedral of Florence, and a favourite of Pope Innocent VIII, on the name of his friend Pulci (Pulex, a flea). He used to say of Luigi, who was very thin, “famine is as naturally depicted on his countenance as though it were a work by Giotto.” They wrote facetious sonnets to each other which were published in the fifteenth century and immediately placed on the Index, but a reprint of this rare volume was made by Marchese De Rossi in 1759. Both were admirers and intimate friends of Angelo Poliziano (to whom, by the way, some have erroneously attributed the Morgante Maggiore).

Luigi Pulci’s poem, which Lord Byron admired sufficiently to translate, tells of the hatred borne by the perfidious Ganellone to the chaste and generous Orlando and the other Christian Paladins. Charlemagne, deceived by Ganellone, whose envy, dissimulation, feigned humility and capacity for lying is admirably portrayed, sends him to Spain to treat for the cession of a kingdom for Orlando with King Marsilio. Instead of this he plots with the Spaniards for the destruction of Orlando, who is killed at Roncesvalle. Morgante the giant, after being baptised by Orlando becomes his faithful squire; the other giant Maggutte is a jovial pagan, laughing at everybody and everything, who ends his life in peals of loud laughter. The poem was composed for the amusement of Lucrezia Tornabuoni, the accomplished mother of Lorenzo de’ Medici, herself a poetess. “Luigi Pulci,” writes Symonds, “assumed the tone of a street-singer, opening each canto with the customary invocation to the Madonna or a paraphrase of some church collect, and dismissing his audience at the close with grateful thanks or brief good wishes.

“But Pulci was no mere Canta-storie. The popular style served but as a cloak to cover his subtle-witted satire and his mocking levity. Tuscan humour keeps up an obbligato accompaniment throughout the poem. Sometimes this humour is in harmony with the plebeian spirit of the old Italian romances; sometimes it turns aside and treats it as a theme of ridicule. In reading the Morgante we must bear in mind that it was written canto by canto to be recited in the palace of the Via Larga, at the table where Poliziano and Ficino gathered with Michelangelo Buonarroti and Cristoforo Landino. Whatever topics may from time to time have occupied that brilliant circle, were reflected in its stanzas; and this alone suffices to account for its tender episodes and its burlesque extravagances, for the satiric picture of Margutte and the serious discourses of the devil Astarotte. The external looseness of construction and the intellectual unity of the poem, are both attributable to these circumstances. Passing by rapid transitions from grave to gay, from pathos to cynicism, from theological speculations to ribaldry, it is at one and the same time a mirror of the popular taste which suggested the form, and also of the courtly wits who listened to it laughing. The Morgante is no naïve production of a simple age, but the artistic plaything of a cultivated and critical society, entertaining its leisure with old-world stories, accepting some for their beauty’s sake in seriousness, and turning others into nonsense for pure mirth.”⁠[71]

Close to Castel-Pulci, on the spur of a hill overlooking the Valle Morta (a name probably alluding to a battle fought there in 1113) on one side and the valley of the Arno on the other, is Monte Cascioli, now a farm-house, once the strong castle of the powerful Lords of Fucecchio. Here Count Lottario and his mother Countess Gemma held court in 1006 and gave large donations to the Badia a Settimo. Their descendant Ugo joined Ruberto Tedesco, Vicario of Tuscany under Henry III, against the Florentines, who marched out and fought a pitched battle in which Ruberto was killed and Monte Cascioli was stormed and destroyed.

From the terrace of Castel-Pulci one looks down upon the broad and fertile plain of the Arno, whose course is marked by lines of shimmering poplars, and the fine mass of Mount Morello rises in the distance. Close to the river bank the beautiful campanile, attributed by Vasari to Niccolò Pisano, of the ancient Badia a Settimo stands out against the green background. The Pulci once owned a strong castle near by of which no vestige remains, but the Badia had been a dependency of the great Lords of Fucecchio since 940, and was inhabited by Cluniacense monks, whose behaviour became so scandalous that in 1063 Count Gugliemo Bulgaro appealed to his friend St Giovan Gualberto for aid, and the saintly abbot of Vallombrosa introduced his own rule. Soon afterwards, by his order, St Peter Igneus went through the ordeal by fire at Settimo in the presence of a large concourse of people. The following inscriptions may still be read bearing witness to the fact:—

In 1236 Gregory IX, took the abbey and monastery under the immediate protection of the Holy See and gave it to the Cistercians, whose conduct was so exemplary that the Signoria of Florence entrusted them with the administration of the taxes, the maintenance of the city walls and bridges and finally gave the great seal into their keeping. The monks were made exempt from taxes and their revenue must have been large, as every abbot paid a thousand golden florins to the Pope on his investiture. The tall gatetower, once connected with the strong walls built round the monastery by the Republic of Florence, is very fine and a large and curious alto-relievo built up of brick and mortar, of Our Lord and two saints, is above the closed-up door. Under the feet of the Christ is a slab with the lily of Florence and an illegible inscription. Below that again is written—

“Anno Domini MCCXXXVI, S.S. Dmn. N. Gregorius IX dedit hoc Monasterium de Septimo Ordin. Cirterc. cum esset liberum et exemptum ab omni regio patronatu, quod in plena libertate a dicto Ordine pacifice possidetur.”

Badia a Settimo must have been magnificent with its moat and three other towers, each of which had a drawbridge. Now much of the ancient structure lies under fifteen feet of mud deposited by the perpetual inundations of the Arno, the monks’ refectory has been divided into cellars, the fine old abbey-church with its solemn, almost Egyptian-looking, columns is a tinaia where wine is made and the original height can only be seen by an excavation which has been dug round one of the columns. The monastery is a private villa, and the lovely cloister with its slender pillars, beautifully carved capitals and expanse of grass serves as a playground for the children. The present church was built in the thirteenth century at right angles to the ancient abbey-church and nearer to the campanile, on artificially raised ground. The steps which led up to the door are already deep under the earth and the bases of the columns supporting the loggia in front of the church are more than half buried. The high altar is a fine piece of pietra dura work, and round the top of the choir is a pretty frieze by one of the Della Robbia, of four-winged heads of angels alternating with a kneeling lamb holding a banner, emblem of the guild of wool manufacturers. In the left hand chapel is a small ambrey, or receptacle for the holy oil, by Desiderio da Settignano, of most exquisite design and workmanship; the walls of the chapel are frescoed by Giovanni di San Giovanni, and above the altar is kept a silver casket containing the bones of St Quentin. The saint was beheaded at Paris a thousand or more years ago and transported his bones by some miracle to a church on the opposite side of the river; not liking his quarters he moved in 1187 to the high altar of the ancient abbey-church, but still dissatisfied he placed the silver casket every morning in this chapel, which was the greatest miracle of all as the chapel was only built late in the thirteenth century. “And here he still is,” said the sacristan, “but without his head, which he could not find when he left Paris.” A short corridor behind the high altar leads into the old chapel of Lapi des Spinis, built according to an inscription in 1315. Dim traces of frescoes by some follower of Giotto are still to be seen, but the chapel is so silted up with mud that the present floor very nearly touches the level of the spring of the groined arches of the roof.