The Audi leaps up the autostrada like Buffalo Bill´s ´water-smooth silver stallion´in e.e.cummings´poem. Or like Joseph & Mary´s donkey; because it´s going home to be taxed.
Its home is in Bayern. The route from Pisa to Munich is studded with history like stocknageln on a hiker´s staff. First, there are the war-zones. Two thousand years ago one might have seen war-elephants trudging across the top of our road and watering in the Lima, if any survived Hannibal´s crossing of both the Alps and, twenty kilometres´from here, the Val di Luce pass over the Appenines.
Seven hundred years ago the same road would have been raided by the army of Lucca, under its fearsome commander, the professional mercenary Castruccio Castracani, ´the castrator of dogs´. Castruccio had Machiavelli, no less, for a biographer, who compared him favourably with both Philip of Macedon and Scipio Africanus. Deep in the ravine below our village he had a bridge built, which is still named after him, so his army could cross the Lima, file up the other side, then filter down through the hills to attack Pistoia and Firenze. That way he evaded being spotted from the watchtowers the Pistoians had built above Popiglio to give early warning of any advances up the road from Lucca.
One could still tramp this route from the bridge today; the line the route should take through the contours of the mountain is visible from our roof-terrace. After a pitched battle on the bridge Castruccio had the enemy commander´s head carried back to Pistoia and displayed on a pike. But Castruccio upheld the Ghibellines, the Holy Roman Emperor´s cause, and after his demise it was the Guelphs, the Papacy´s cause, who triumphed. After his demise his aristocratic family were ruined.
Sixty years ago the same stretch of road was again a no-man´s-land, between the armies on the Linea Gotica. German troops occupied Popiglio, our house (as it is now) among others, whilst the British, my father (as he is now) among others, enjoyed the rarity of hot baths on campaign, at the spa down the road at Bagni di Lucca. Present-day families in the regions of Lucca and Pistoia still sometimes speak of each other as though they lived in rival city-states with no love lost between them (though Castruccio compelled them both as Ghibelline). Few buses, even, are scheduled to run between the towns.
It is St. George’s Day, April 23rd., the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth and death. I decide to give a miss to Verona’s fake ‘Juliet’s balcony’, crossing instead the misted causeway over to Mantua. Here Romeo, exiled from Verona and from Juliet after a fatal duelling incident, buys poison for his senseless suicide. Mantua’s Disney-perfect riverfront facade blurs to sinister mirage in the perennial fog of Lombardia. The malarial marshes around Mantua seem a more potent setting for the play than Verona. Romeo’s friend Mercutio, accidentally stabbed under Romeo’s arm in the same duel, dies cursing Romeo’s Montague family and Juliet’s Capulets, “A plague on both your houses!”. In Mantua Mercutio’s plague is palpable, all but visible. It rises with the miasma from the Po and combines with the seepage from the crypts of embittered ancestors to infect successive generations with viral vendetta. Horribly prophetic, this disease which corrupts romance as if through an open wound.
It is almost a relief to re-enter po-faced chilly human history. Trento’s bulky bleached castle in the 16th. century housed the first session of the 19th Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church. Initially intended to have been held in Mantua, the Buonconsiglia, as the tourist signposts call it, responded comprehensively to the challenge of the Protestant Reformation whilst to its credit inviting Protestants to attend and propose what they wished to see reformed; some actually did so. Since the cardinals of the church had at first altogether opposed Pope Paul III’s suggestion of a council, one supposes it was only the Pope’s personal wish which succeeded in getting Protestants represented at all. That seems especially likely in view of the fact that otherwise the council mostly attracted hardliners, and in the end it was they who were empowered by it.
The papal bull announcing the ecumenical council began: ‘Whereas we deemed it necessary that there should be one fold and one shepherd for the… flock, in order to maintain the… religion in its integrity, and to confirm within us the hope of heavenly things; the unity of the [tradition] was rent and well-nigh torn asunder by schisms, dissensions, heresies.’ I wing towards the Brenner Pass, glad as ever to adhere to a devolved religion mutating in successive generations out of non-dual visions; manifold rather than schismatic, neither dogmatic nor heretical, requiring no pontiff or primate, no imposed reforms or counter-reforms. One mountain above the pass resembles Padamsambhava’s Dorje Zahorma hat. In the Himalayas mountains of such form are always spoken of as places where Padmasambhava stayed in retreat. The Europa Bridge soars in between, a luminous thread through the generous grandiosity of the elements.
