The Monster of Florence Read Online Free PDF Page B

Peeping Tom ambulance driver.

CHAPTER 3
    M any countries have a serial killer who defines his culture by a process of negation, who exemplifies his era not by exalting its values, but by exposing its black underbelly. England had Jack the Ripper, born in the fogs of Dickensian London, who preyed on the city’s most neglected underclass, the prostitutes who scrabbled for a living in the slums of Whitechapel. Boston had the Boston Strangler, the suave, handsome killer who prowled the city’s more elegant neighborhoods, raping and murdering elderly women and arranging their bodies in tableaux of unspeakable obscenity. Germany had the Monster of Düsseldorf, who seemed to foreshadow the coming of Hitler by his indiscriminate and sadistic killing of men, women, and children; his bloodlust was so great that, on the eve of his execution, he called his imminent beheading “the pleasure to end all pleasures.” Each killer was, in his own way, a dark embodiment of his time and place.
    Italy had the Monster of Florence.
    Florence has always been a city of opposites. On a balmy spring evening, with the setting sun gilding the stately palaces lining the river, it can appear as one of the most beautiful and gracious cities in the world. But in late November, after two months of steady rain, its ancient palaces become gray and streaked with damp; the narrow cobbled streets, smelling of sewer gas and dog feces, are shut up on all sides by grim stone façades and overhanging roofs that block the already dim light. The bridges over the Arno flow with black umbrellas held up against the unceasing rain. The river, so lovely in summer, swells into a brown and oily flood, carrying broken trees and branches and sometimes dead animals, which pile up against the pylons designed by Ammanati.
    In Florence the sublime and terrible go hand in hand: Savonarola’s Bonfires of the Vanities and Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus
, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and Niccolò Macchiavelli’s
The Prince
, Dante’s
Inferno
and Boccaccio’s
Decameron
. The Piazza della Signoria, the main square, contains an open-air display of Roman and Renaissance sculpture exhibiting some of the most famous statues in Florence. It is a gallery of horrors, a public exhibition of killing, rape, and mutilation unmatched in any city in the world. Heading the show is the famous bronze sculpture by Cellini of Perseus triumphantly holding up the severed head of Medusa like a jihadist on a website video, blood pouring from her neck, her decapitated body sprawled under his feet. Behind Perseus stand other statues depicting famous legendary scenes of murder, violence, and mayhem—among them the sculpture that graces the cover of this book,
The Rape of the Sabine Women
by Giambologna. Inside Florence’s encircling walls and on the gibbets outside were committed the most refined and the most savage of crimes, from delicate poisonings to brutal public dismemberments, tortures, and burnings. For centuries, Florence projected its power over the rest of Tuscany at the cost of ferocious massacres and bloody wars.
    The city was founded by Julius Caesar in AD 59 as a retirement village for soldiers from his campaigns. It was named Florentia, or “Flourishing.” Around AD 250 an Armenian prince named Miniato, after a pilgrimage to Rome, settled on a hill outside Florence and lived as a hermit in a cave, from which he sallied forth to preach to the pagans in town. During the Christian persecutions under the emperor Decius, Miniato was arrested and beheaded in the city square, whereupon (the legend goes) he picked up his head, placed it back on his shoulders, and walked up the hill to die with dignity in his cave. Today, one of the loveliest Romanesque churches in all of Italy stands at the spot, San Miniato al Monte, looking out across the city and the hills beyond.
    In 1302, Florence expelled Dante, an act it has never lived down. In return, Dante populated hell with prominent Florentines