The Dante Conspiracy

CHAPTER 17



Inspector Silvio Perini glanced at his watch in resignation. For some reason, sleep had eluded him that night, and about an hour earlier he’d abandoned all attempts to doze off and walked down to the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee. That, he knew, would make sleep even less likely, but he’d decided he would be more usefully employed trying to work out the hidden meaning in the alleged new ‘Dante’ verses than just lying in bed and pointlessly tossing and turning all night.

His wife had protested sleepily as he’d got up, but he knew she would drop off again quickly: she was well used to his disturbed nights and erratic working hours.

He read through the text of Bertorelli’s article twice, and then turned his attention to the verses themselves. The only bit that seemed obvious to him – or at least obvious now that Cesare Lombardi had put the idea of the Trojan horse into his mind – was that the relic had been sent to Florence either disguised as something else or, perhaps more probably, concealed inside another object. But he still had no real idea what the object could be, except that it would have to be fairly small for the Trojan horse idea to work. And for it to remain hidden and overlooked down through the centuries.

Eventually he decided that reading the verses wasn’t working for him. He needed to write them out himself, and maybe that way he could assign tentative meanings to some of the words and phrases. That might make things clearer.

He took a clean sheet of paper and wrote out the verses in block capitals down the left-hand side, leaving the other part of the sheet free for his conclusions. Assuming he came up with any, obviously.

Then he took a red pen and underlined the expression ‘animal of the Greeks’, drew a straight line from that to the other side of the page and wrote down ‘Trojan horse?’. Some of the phrases in the verses didn’t seem to refer to anything very specific, but he read them carefully anyway, just in case they made sense as part of larger expressions. Eventually, he had identified several phrases that he felt were significant in some way, even though he still had little idea what they meant.

‘By his hand the masterpiece lies below Gaetani’s bane’ and ‘combine the first of the five next to mark he who shall receive’ both seemed particularly obscure, but he thought the expression ‘author of the arena and the campanile’ was probably specific enough for him to be able to decipher it, so he started his investigation with those words. The key to that part of the text seemed to be the city itself, unsurprisingly, not least because of the phrase ‘home of the fiore and the fiorino’ in the previous line, the meaning of which had struck him immediately, while he was writing out the verses. He’d already underlined and tagged that expression with the single proper name ‘Florence’.

Fiorino almost certainly had to refer to the fiorinod’oro, the florin, the gold coin first minted by the Republic of Florence in 1252. It had been issued without significant alteration for almost three hundred years, and went on to become the staple coin of trade in Western Europe, something like the Euro of its day. And the best-known site and the crowning architectural jewel of Florence was the domed cathedral of the city, Santa Maria del Fiore, known as the Duomo, the second largest cathedral in the world. So Florence was very clearly the ‘home of the fiore and thefiorino’.

But none of that seemed to take him any further forward. The cathedral of course had a bell-tower, a campanile, but as far as Perini knew Dante had never had anything significant to do with the building, and almost all of his achievements as an author had been made after he’d been exiled from the city, when he wouldn’t have even been able to visit the Duomo. And he had no clue what was meant by the word ‘arena’, apart from the word’s obvious literal meaning as a kind of amphitheatre.

So he started investigating, using the internet to research the Duomo, and almost immediately he discovered something that was both interesting and confusing, because what he found out had nothing at all to do with Dante, but put him on the trail of another influential and important Florentine.

Very little was known for certain about Giotto di Bondone, the late mediaeval architect and painter, better known simply as ‘Giotto’, but two projects he was definitely involved in were the design of the campanile of the Duomo, towards the end of his life, and the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. There, he had created a fresco depicting both the life of the Virgin Mary and the life of Christ, a work generally agreed to be not only Giotto’s most important surviving work but arguably one of the most accomplished and significant masterpieces of the early Renaissance period. And the Scrovegni Chapel, Perini then discovered for the very first time, was also known as the Arena Chapel.

So he’d cracked that expression: the ‘author of the arena and the campanile’ was almost certainly a reference to Giotto. But what that had to do with Dante, Perini hadn’t the slightest idea, and none of the text in that section of the verses didn’t seem to help.

And then he had a sudden flash of inspiration. Maybe this was a second reference to the Trojan horse, or rather an explanation of the mechanism which had been employed. Perhaps something, some work of art, bearing Giotto’s signature, had been given to a prominent official in the city of Florence, and hidden inside that work was the relic that had been owned or created by Dante. Unlike the author, Giotto’s genius had been widely recognized in his own lifetime, and as an important son of Florence anything he produced would have been a welcome gift for anyone.

Finally, Perini thought, he might be getting a little closer to the truth of the matter. If he was right, he now had at least an inkling of how the relic might have been delivered to the city of Dante’s birth.

Of course, he still had no idea what the relic actually was, or to whom it had been sent, but despite this he felt he was making progress. He poured himself another cup of coffee as a kind of minor personal celebration, and directed his attention once again to the lines of the verses.