I'm
walking in Pistoia's
Piazza del Duomo (dome square), or
"piazza grande", with the
music of Van Morrison
in my earphones, thinking that "the great Van" sang a few
times in this square for the
Blues Festival
that is held here every July. You wouldn't expect such
beauty from Pistoia,
medieval town, former roman municipality, quite outside of
the mass tourism circuit, unfairly underestimated.
Also called "the silent", it's a city of valuable craftsmen,
nurserymen, train constructors and artists, with a small
Palio di Siena,
called Giostra
dell'Orso
(Joust of the bear), an animal which also appears in the
arms of the city.
The roman Pistoia ended after the
destruction of the city by a horde of Germanic peoples led
by the goth
Radagaiso,
whose fabulous treasure around Fiesole,
where he was defeated and killed, has never been found. The
roman street via Cassia used to cross the city where today
you find the street called via degli
orafi,
which is one of the roads leading to
Piazza del Duomo
and
which used to be called via taberna,
because of the many taverns in the area. You can hardly
imagine how it was. The Giostra
dell'Orso, also entitles to San Jacopo,
the city's patron saint, was created in the 13tg century,
and Boccaccio
wrote about the edition of 1348, the year of the
pest. Maybe the right music in this historical context
should be another one, but I don't care and I keep
Van Morrison.
I imagine the ghost of Fernando
Melani
walking on these stone slabs, always dressed with blue
overalls for workers, yellow scarf and a basque, and also
the horses of Marino Marini,
sculptor from Pistoia and friend of Picasso, De Chirico e
Kandinskij, seem to cross the square and disappear inside
the Palazzo del Gonfalone
from the 14th
century, which today hosts the city council.
Actually,
Have I told you lately
that I love you
by
Van Morrison suits perfectly the city of Cino da
Pistoia,
the poet of
Dolce Stil Novo,
but also great jurist, with his strong emotional attachment
to the theme of love, and friend of
Dante,
Boccaccio
and
Petrarca,
father of the Renaissance.
Petrarca, in his Canzoniere,
wrote a poem full of emotion for the death of the intellect:
Piangete, donne, et con
voi pianga Amore;| piangete, amanti, per ciascun paese, |poi
ch'è morto collui che tutto intese... | Piangan le rime
anchor, piangano i versi, perché 'l nostro amoroso messer
Cino | novellamente s'è da noi partito... (Cry, women, and
with you love may cry too; cry, lovers, for each village,
since the one who understood everything is dead... May the
rhymes cry, may the verses cry, because our beloved mr. Cino
left us...?)
Cino da Pistoia had his ideal woman too, like Dante had
Beatrice, Boccaccio had Fiammetta and Petrarca had Laura:
her name was Selvaggia de
Vergiolesi,
and she died in the Castello di
Sambuca
on the hills over Pistoia, where she found shelter while
escaping from the violences of the Guelphs. In case you
want, you can find anecdotes everywhere: every single spot
that you can see hides a story or a legend. On the facade of
this lofty town hall you can find medieval banners,
including a black marble
head
with an iron mace above: a popular legend identifies this
with the traitor
of the city Filippo
Tedici,
even if probably it's the representation of King Musetto II
from Mallorca, killed by the captain from Pistoia Grandonio dei
Ghisilieri,
who was in service for the city of Pisa
during the conquer of the
Balearic Islands in the 12th
century. Tedici's head is surely on the portal of the
Chruch
of Sant'Andrea
and tradition says that it's black because, as a sign of
contempt, people used to turn off the torches on it before
entering the church. Tedici was the nephew of Ormanno Tedici,
lord of the city in 1323, who was loved by the people. In
1325, Filippo unseated his uncle and secretly opened the
doors of the city to the conqueror Castruccio
Castracani,
in exchange for a nomination to Captain of the People, for
Castruccio's daughter and a lot of money. As soon as
Castracani died, he was exiled and then killed around the
village of Popiglio, in the mountains above Pistoia.
Non bad for a start, but there's much more in Pistoia: as
Patrice
de La Tour du Pin
said,
In Pistoia, which was the capital of culture 2017, we will
welcome you in the heart of the city: apartment with fine
finishes, a double bedroom, 1 single bedroom, beamed
ceiling, 50 meters from Piazza del Duomo, wifi and smart tv,
with Netflix, Amazon Prime.......
I
don't know why, but trains always excited me since I was a
child and this city has been, and partly still is, thanks to
the Breda factory (now Hitachi Rail), one of the main Italian centers for
railway industries, which are today declining because of
wrong political and strategic choices. In one of the shed of
the old factory, you can now find the wonderful San Giorgio
Library, which quickly became a meeting point for young
people and adults, as well as a top level cultural center.
A
few years ago, I attended here the annual meeting of
Wikipedia Italia and I remember I imagined comparing this
shed when it used to produce trains to transport people far
away, "who knows where?", now hosts books and the
encyclopedia Wikipedia which often leads you far
away, "who knows where?". Besides railways, people from Pistoia
always worked with iron and they were famous all over Europe for
swords and armors. The word "pistola" (gun, in Italian),
which was born around the half of the 16th
century, seems to derive from Pistoia. According to someone,
this could not be a virtue.
Do you know what a
vivarium is? Well, this area is filled everywhere with trees
and plants of any kind, lined up as they were soldiers of
infinite green battalions ready to conquer the world. It is
no coincidence that Pistoia is one of the world capitals for vivariums, and they sell plants from Russia to the deserts
of Arabia.
On a
corner in Piazza del Duomo you can find
Catilina's tower,
named after the roman
senator who was accused by Cicero
of attempting to subvert
the Roman Republic; defeated in Pistoia by Roman troops,
Catilina seems to be buried under this medieval tower.
When
you arrive from the motorway, you see the cupola of the
Basilica della
Madonna dell'Umiltà
(Basilica of Our Lady of Humility) by Giorgio
Vasari,
together with the 13th
century bell tower of the dome, dedicated to the "Dark
haired bishop",
San Zeno,
which is 67 meters tall. This landscape by far mustn't be
too different from the one that
Niccolò
Machiavelli
saw while coming to Pistoia on behalf of Firenze,
in order to try to stop a bloody feud in the city. The
author of Principe (the Prince) advised his city to take
advantage of the situation and to conquer the rival town.
This is also the town of Vanni Fucci,
maybe the darkest and most negative character of the whole
Hell of Dante
("son
Vanni Fucci bestia, e Pistoia mi fu degna tana"
-
“I'm Vanni Fucci the
beast, and Pistoia was a worthy lair for me").
The city was perfect for that kind of character according to
Dante,
also because it belonged to the faction of the Black
Guelphs, enemy of the faction which the poet belonged to. A
couple of years ago there used to be a Restaurant called
Vanni Fucci Beast
in Pistoia, and I remember it was the place where the first
local members of the
5 star Movement
by
Beppe Grillo
used to
meet. Who knows where Dante would put the genoese comedian
now?
If you plan to visit the magnificent cathedral, you
will find a masterpiece: the silver altar
of San Jacopo,
which was stolen and damaged by Vanni Fucci,
and lately restored also by Brunelleschi
when he was young. Another citizen of Pistoia, according to
many people even quite similar to Vanni Fucci, was Licio Gelli,
the worshipful master of the masonic lodge P2: son of a
miller, he was born in Gore e Barbatole street, in the
outskirts, near Porta al
Borgo.
According to an investigation and a series of articles of a
young journalist of the local newspaper
La Nazione, Giulio
Giustiniani,
the young
Gelli was expelled by all schools in the reign because he
hit with a fist one
of his teachers during a political discussion. He later
became a fervent fascist and tried to get a diploma
privately but he ended up getting very bad grades in history
and geography and even in fascist culture, and even worse
grades in latin and natural sciences. He failed the exam and
he retired from school, but, unfortunately for Italian
people, he managed to be a protagonist anyway. After the
war, Gelli worked for a stall in the market, then opened a
bookshop in Gramsci Avenue and later worked for Permaflex
(its logo is a man in a pajama with vertical lines), which
patented the first spring mattress ever, under the property
of Giovanni Pofferi,
double of the actor
Amedeo Nazzari. The former mattress
factory, now disused, is located at the beginning of the
road that leads from Pistoia to Abetone,
on the mountains. At that time Gelli gave the Pope Paul VI a
white mattress as a present, embroidered by the nuns of
Pistoia. Because of the investigation and the articles on
the worshipful master, the journalist Giustiniani and his
director, Piazzesi,
were fired. Pistoia is full of anectodes of this kind, all
ready to be discovered.
This town, which is basically two steps away from
the mountains of the Tuscan-Aemilian Apennine and
from the cities of Lucca,
Prato
and Florence, as well as from the sea and basically
everything, is one of those province towns which is
as intriguing as a capital.
Many foreign people only know it for the
Pistoia Blues Festival,
one of the major festivals in Europe for this kind
of music. If only they knew...
You can
also eat very well in Pistoia: around the medieval square La
Sala
you can find restaurants with a great quality/price
ratio. Try it to believe it..
At
the top of its power, in the 14th
century Pistoia managed to hold off the powerful neighbour
enemies: Florence and Lucca.
After eleven months of siege the city it surrendered to the
two powers, the same ones which today get all the
international touristic mass of people. In Pistoia, in
unison, the story still seems to beat his time with the
Piazza del Duomo, the old court, the ancient head office of
the bank, the city market, the monumental palaces and
romanic and gothic churches, and also the old houses, the
small squares and, among them, the narrow streets full of
charm also for the golden light that escapes from the
wrought iron street lamps.
Once,
Pistoia
was surrounded by walls
up to 15 meters tall, with towers and bastions, such as the
still existing Bastione
Ambrogi
andBastione Thyrion.
The historical documents of the town tell us that there used to
be 3 walls:
the first was built around the 8th
century and probably traced a perimeter approximately around
the current streets called via Pacini, via Palestro,
via Cavour up
to
via Curtatone, via Buozzi and via Montanara,
arriving to via Abbi Pazienza and via delle Pappe. The
second wall was built around the 12th
century and included the further urbanization which had
developed by then, including borgo di San
Bartolomeo,
which grew around the Abbey of San
Bartolomeo in Pantano.
The perimeter of this second wall embraced the areas of
Santa
Maria di Ripalta, Ospedale
del Ceppo
(the city's public hospital), via Chiappettini and via
Trentufuni, up to Santa Maria Nuova and corso Amendola e
Gramsci. The third wall was erected during the period of the
Florentine siege of Pistoia in 1306 and it partly
substituted the second one: its traces are still visible
along the avenues called
viale Matteotti
and
viale Arcadia:
these last buildings were provided with towers and bastions
(the most important of which was the Medici fortress) and
large ditches which filled with water of the nearby torrents
such as Ombrone.
Nowadays the walls of Pistoia do not exist anymore, not
because they have been destroyed during wars, but because at
the beginning of 1900 (as it also happened for many other
Italian towns) it was necessary to initiate a urban
development era. The walls are now remembered by the ancient access
roads to Pistoia,
besides theMedici fortress of Santa Barbara,
which hosts an open air cinema in summertime. You access the
city through the four ancient gates
of Pistoia,
whose names derive from the city from where you arrive:
Porta
Lucchese (for
those who arrive from the city of Lucca), Porta
Carratica (from
Florence), Porta
Al Borgo(from
the mountains) and Porta
San Marco(from
the street called via Montalese, the ancient Via Cassia on
the direction Prato-Pistoia).
Entering
the city through any of these ancient ports, the same ones
that give their name to the quarters of the central part of
the town, you arrive to the historical
center of Pistoia,
which is dominated by the piazza del
Duomo:
it's a huge open air space which gives you an idea of how
important this city used to be during its florid past.
Piazza del Duomo was the protagonist of stories dated well
before the medieval times: during the works for the
extension of the ancient Via Cassia
from the Florentine territories which just here, in the
heart of the current Pistoia, crossed the
Decumano maggiore
(major decuman, which in roman cities went from east to west
and can be identified in the current street called via
degli Orafi)
and the 'cardo'
massimo,
which is the main north-south way (today the street called
via
Bracciolini).
Piazza del Duomo is very close to the crossing of the two
axis: once it hosted the Roman Forum and the noble house,
you still find some archaeological evidence of them. The
main square of Pistoia had its golden age during Medieval times
and the main monumental buildings can still be admired
today, since they all form one of the most beautiful squares
in Italy. Those building all belong to that period: Cathedral of
Santo Zeno,
Baptistery of San Giovanni in Corte,
Palazzo
Vescovile,
Palazzo
Pretorio
and Palazzo Comunale
(Bishop's Palace, the Praetorian Palace and Town Hall).
The
most characteristic element of the square is the
Dome:
the
Cathedral of Santo Zeno
is a small jewel worth discovering not only for its peculiar
external architecture, which has a Romanic style probably
deriving from an earlier paleo-Christian from the Lombard
period in the eighth century. Reliable sources refer to a
structure already existent in the 10th
century, known as
Ecclesia dei santi
Zenonis, Rufinis e Felicis.
The reconstruction of the facade and the addition of the
porch were made in the period 1379-1449, while the decorated
central archway is dated 1504 and it was made by
Andrea della Robbia,
one of the greatest Italian sculptors and artists. Don't
miss the inside part of the church, where you can admire
several paintings by artists such as Lorenzo di Credi, Andrea
Verrocchio, Giovan
Battista Paggi, Antonio
Rossellino e Filippo
Brunelleschi. The building
also hosts the wooden crucifix of San Zeno,
completely painted in tempera in 1274 by Coppo
Marcovaldo, one of the
most eminent figures of Tuscan painting of the
thirteenth century: he
also made the Madonna del Bordone
in
Siena
and another wooden crucifix guarded in the Pinacoteca
(picture gallery) ofSan Gimignano).
Next
to the dome, you can find the Baptistery of
San Giovanni in Corte di Pistoia,
a small jewel in gothic-romanic style which recalls the more
famous baptistery of
piazza del Duomo in Florence.
The one in Pistoia is characterized by a strong touch of the
style of Pisa,
although this building is generally considered as one of the
main expressions of the so called
gothic-tuscan style,
which concentrates architectural elements not only from
Pisa, but also from Siena and Florence. Its most ancient
origins are in the 13th
century: at that time it was built near the ancient Lombard
court, the
Curtis domini regis,
where the administrative power of the officer appointed by
the king lived (for this reason, the
Baptistery
is also called “in Court?). The current baptismal font was
made in 1226 by Lanfranco da
Como, as it's written in
the internal inscription; this work certifies the more
ancient origins of the whole structure, which was later
restored and renovated, in the 14th
century, and the external part was commissioned to Cellino di
Nese,
who had already worked at part of the works of Piazza dei
Miracoli
inPisa.
The
wonderful baptistery in white and dark green marble, with a
typical octagonal shape and surmounted by a dome, is located
between the ancient Palazzo dei
Vescovi (Bishops' Palace) of Pistoia
and the
Palace of Praetorium: the first building was built
in the 11th
century, altered a few times throughout the years and then
restored at the end of the 1980s; it was built in the place
that was previously occupied by a civic market with
lombard
origins
which historically represented the symbol of the
religious episcopal power in Pistoia; it is also know
because it hosted the emperor Federico
Barbarossa,
at the investiture of the imperial feud of the then bishop
Rinaldo. The Palace of
Praetorium of Pistoia
dates 14th
century and even if the external appearance has remained the
original
Renaissance
style, the internal one has been deeply altered in the 19th
century. It hosted the Podestà (mayor) during medieval
times, and later on the Florentine Commissioners during the
Medici period; court hearings are still held in the large
hall on the first floor. On a side of the square you find
the ancient Town Hall of
Pistoia,
12th
century, also known as
Palace of old people
(Palazzo degli
anziani) or Palazzo di
Giano (from
Giano
di Bella,
the mayor who probably decided to build it). The building is
adorned with a beautiful facade with double and triple
arched windows and, in order to build it, they had to
demolish a whole quarter of the town.
The
historic center of Pistoia is characterized by other very
interesting urban corners, not only historically or
architecturally. Each Saturday and Wednesday morning you
find a street
market where you can find about everything:
food, clothes and various objects. Every day, in the small
square called La Sala, you find the picturesque fruit and
vegetable market, in an atmosphere which is typical of the
ancient local markets. This square is one of the oldest in
town and its name came from the ancient lombard period, when
it indicated the palace of the public administration. In the
municipal age La Sala became a place for trading and
selling, and it keeps this function still today. The memory
of ancient professions still survives in the name of the
streets of the historic center of Pistoia and in the nearby
squares: via del Cacio (cheese street), via dei Fabbri
(smiths' street), degli Orafi (goldsmiths' street),
del Lastrone (stone street), which gets its name from the
huge stone on which fish used to be sold, or also piazza
degli Ortaggi (vegetables' square), on whose center you find
the work “Giro del sole? by the local artist Roberto
Barni.
Barni is not the only
great artist linked to Pistoia: among other distinguished
people who were born in Pistoia there was the poet and
jurist Cino da Pistoia (born with the name Guittoncino dei
Sigibuldi), who was one of the top representatives of the
poetic style 'Stilnuovo' and great source of
inspiration for Dante and Petrarca. You can admire his
memorial grave in the cathedral. Also from Pistoia was Giulio Rospigliosi (1600-1669) who became Pope with the name
Clemente IX, as well as architect Giovanni Michelucci (1891-1991) and sculptor Marino
Marini(1901-1980); indirectly, also the poet Giousè
Carducci, who was a professor of latin, greek and italian in
the Forteguerri Lyceum in Pistoia.
Culturally,
the city is rich in events and festival, among which you
can't ignore the very well known "Pistoia
Blues"
(in July), which since 1980 attracts thousands of blues
fans, with great
artists
and exciting performances (some names who participated to
the past editions are Fats Domino, Frank
Zappa, Alexis
Corner,BB King, Muddy
Waters, Bob
Dylan, Steve
Winwood, Richard
Johnston, Jono
Manson, Guy
Davis, Santana).
Not only cultural events can catch the tourists' and
visitors' enthusiasm. Try eating out in
Pistoia
and you will discover the
nicestTuscan
cuisine,
both for your appetite and your pockets. Many restaurants
and pizzerias, all good and with reasonable prices, with
authentic dishes prepared with fresh and genuine products.
Especially trattorias
can be appreciated in Pistoia, here's a few names:Iccio Trattoria dell'Abbondanza, Enoteca
la Bottegaia, Dada (creative,
with a nice environment, and located in the square of the
old hospital with a view on the famous majolicas). The
caffé
"La Corte"
in the street called via del Ceppo is a small venue both
practical and ethnical, close to the old hospital too, with
an internal space in the court of the building and very good
dishes for lunch. Also Enoteca (wine
bar) Baldovino
is worth a try. And if you want to spend little and eat
well, in the industrial area, easily reachable even with a
walk, every bar has a fixed price menu with simple and well
cooked dishes. If you fancy going on the hills of
Pistoia,
in the small village named Cireglio
we recommend Via dell'Orto,
while in the village of Maresca
look forpensione Tesi:
good fixed price menu, genuine and well presented food. If
you like to look for a place where you can eat very well, go
to the village called Pracchia,
at
Melini's
(memorable appetizer as well as everything else, including
service and price).
There's much more to
discover in this town: we give you
some advice in the pages
liked above. For example, if you want to spend a pleasant
family day, don't miss Pistoia's zoo, with bears, wolves,
jaguars, elephants, giraffes, reindeers and so on.