Urban Venus

Chapter Twenty

‘È per te,’ Sophia says, brandishing the phone as I lounge on the sofa on Monday morning. ‘È Signore Di Girolamo.’

He sounds a bit frantic and preoccupied with something.

‘Can you meet me for coffee this morning?’ he asks hurriedly. ‘I have something I need to tell you.’

Is this it? Is the big confession coming? Actually, Lydia, I had dreams just like yours. I understand exactly what you’re going through… I sincerely hope so, and this hope makes the excitement bubble up inside me. After finishing his book yesterday I’ve been left hanging; I need to know more. Not just how he knows what he does, but what happens next. Did he have any more dreams after finishing the book? Does he know what happened to Emilia? I have been unable to stop thinking about that child; there is so much more I want to know about her.

Today I have to go back to the gallery; I need another dream of my own. The trouble is, they don’t always follow in sequential order. I could just as easily dream about Maria’s early days with Titian than the next instalment in her story; something which might help to build up an overall image of how she lived and loved, but doesn’t progress the storyline at all. It’s all very well me trying to ‘pre-order’ a dream about a specific event, but that doesn’t tend to be the way it works.

We meet in a little bar just round the back of the Duomo. Di Girolamo is there before me, seemingly agitated and nervously fiddling with the catch on his bag as he waits for me, a cooling espresso congealing on the table in front of him. A gentleman of his generation, he stands to greet me and waits until I have sat down before taking his own seat again. He clicks his fingers and gives the barista a nod; she scuttles away to fetch two more coffees.

‘I needed to see you. To explain,’ he begins, a nervous cough playing at the back of his throat.

‘What is it, are you OK?’ I ask, wanting him to get straight to the point and tell me everything.

‘I’m so sorry, but I wasn’t entirely honest with you the other day. Will you please forgive me for pushing you out the door like that; it was very rude of me.’ He takes a short pause and a deep breath for courage, before continuing:

‘You see, I’ve never told anyone about my dreams before, and when you told me about yours, I couldn’t quite believe it could be possible for someone else to have them too. I was overwhelmed with the discovery, I suppose. In shock, you could say.’

YES!! Finally. What a relief to hear him admit it. I was right.

‘It’s OK, Signore Di Girolamo,’ I begin, ‘you don’t have to apologise to me. You know I’d suspected all along that you’d had dreams too, and I’m so glad you feel you can tell me about it now.’ Here he looks relieved, the nervous tension caused by the build-up to telling me starting to lift a little from his shoulders. ‘I just couldn’t see how you could know so much – after all, none of this stuff is in the history books, is it?’

‘You and I, we are very fortunate creatures,’ he goes on, more calmly now. ‘We have been given a rare insight into what happened in these people’s lives. But you can understand now why I didn’t make the book widely available, can’t you? It would have caused a scandal. I’d have been forced to confess I had dreamt it all, and, well, how many respected historians do you know of who write their books based on dreams? It could have finished me. They’d have put it down as a work of fiction and that would be my reputation in tatters. I’m a historian, not a historical novelist.’

He continues: ‘Finding you has been like a dream come true, if you’ll pardon the pun. All these years I’ve been thinking that maybe I just made this all up, that the dreams were my fantasies, but now I know you have them too, and bizarrely with such a similar subject matter, it corroborates our stories, doesn’t it? Quite marvellous,’ he says with a huge smile, clapping his hands together. ‘Whoever would have thought it!’

Di Girolamo (I still struggle to call him Antonio, despite his insistence) goes on to tell me about his dreams. Apparently they started when he was in his thirties, at which time he was a visiting tutor on a year’s fellowship at the Sorbonne in Paris. He’d not long moved there, and had barely settled in to his new job when he found himself being drawn daily to Titian’s Concert Champêtre, ‘The Pastoral Concert’ painting in the Louvre. Pretty soon he was visiting it regularly, just like I do with Venus, desperately hoping for another instalment in the story which seemed to be unfolding in his head. He, of course, took on the persona of Titian; who else could he possibly have been?

He became totally obsessed with it, he says, so much so that it started to detract from his work in the university. So after his academic obligations there were over, he decided to stay on for a further year, on an unpaid career break, putting together all the notes he’d taken at the time to make into a book.

‘Despite my initial confidence in it all, when it came down to publishing I lost my nerve,’ he admits. ‘In the end I paid a publisher quite a substantial amount of money to produce just a couple of copies for me, one to keep and a spare one just in case the first one became lost or damaged. Those were all my precious remembrances in there; I pretty much kept them under lock and key for fear of losing them, and with them losing the valuable insight I’d had into the sixteenth century.’

‘So why did you publish the second edition again recently, and why not make it more widely available? Couldn’t you have changed your name or something, used a nom de plume?’ I ask.

‘I don’t know what compelled me to do it. I suppose part of me wanted some recognition for what I knew, yet the other part was still holding back for fear of exposure as a fraud. Historical novels seem to be all the rage these days, don’t they, but I didn’t want my book being classified as one of those, even if it sold well and made me lots of money. I suppose it’s just a point of principle. So once again, I published – a few more copies this time – but I still didn’t distribute it widely. Only to a few select people who I thought might enjoy it, or even just like to have one on their bookshelves, unread, like Vincenzo.’

‘You’re no fraud,’ I say. ‘Your story backs up mine and vice versa. But I don’t know how we’d ever convince the art world that all this stuff really happened, do you? And now with media coverage the way it is, I do understand your motives for keeping quiet; they’d have ripped you to shreds, wouldn’t they?’

He doesn’t answer my question, but instead goes on: ‘Lydia, I have to tell you this. That painting, the Champêtre, they say – these so-called experts – that it was painted circa 1510. But I know for a fact that Titian didn’t meet Maria until some time around 1537…’

‘…the Pope’s visit to Bologna! You dreamt about that too. That’s a well-documented historical event,’ I interrupt.

‘Yes, exactly. But my point is, the girl on the left hand side of the painting is Maria. Just look at this.’ He pulls a copy of the book from his bag and opens it at a marked page, tapping the picture with his index finger. ‘Could there be any doubt in your mind that it’s her?’ he asks. ‘I, or rather Titian, painted her in one of my dreams.

‘You and I have both seen her face so many times in our heads to know well enough that Maria is that girl pouring water from the ewer,’ he goes on. ‘Not only is she Maria, but if you look very closely at this man here, playing the lute, he bears a striking resemblance to Titian as a much younger man. He was quite a lot older than that when he met her, of course. You can imagine that’s how he’d want to look, for her sake, how he’d want her to see him, I suppose. She was young and beautiful and he was an old man in his late forties, after all. This painting proves he was conscious of that fact. I always felt in the dreams that he believed himself so lucky to have a woman as beautiful as Maria as his lover.’

‘You’re right,’ I reply, awestruck by his revelation. ‘I’ve never noticed that before. It’s definitely Maria, though. I haven’t dreamt about that particular painting, but he’s forever painting me – or rather her – in my dreams. There are just so many paintings where she was the model in one form or another. But, you know, in the dreams, I’m oblivious to Tito’s age; it doesn’t matter that he’s older than me – her. And you’re right, she worships the ground he walks on, has done right from the start. There’s such a strong feeling of love in the dreams. Did you feel that too?’

‘I did,’ he replies. ‘I think that’s what made the dreams so addictive for me really. It was at a time in my life when I was alone, and that bothered me, and so I lived my love-life vicariously, through Titian, I suppose. To all intents and purposes, Maria was my lover, even if that sounds a bit weird.’

‘No, not at all,’ I say, so glad to have someone to share these deepest emotions with. ‘Well, my boyfriend ended our relationship because he couldn’t cope with the so-called competition from my sixteenth century lover. So there you go; we’re not so different.’

Di Girolamo offers his condolences with great empathy. As we discuss each aspect of our experiences, we are both amazed at the similarities emerging. We’ve each been given our very own exposés of Titian’s and Maria’s private lives, from two different angles but with a corroborating storyline. And the way it has happened is very similar too; both of us have or had the very same urge to fall asleep within minutes of setting eyes on our respective paintings, both of us feel or felt a pull, as though some invisible force was trying to reel us in.

‘So why did your dreams stop?’ I ask. ‘I’m desperate to know what happened to Emilia – why don’t you talk about her more?’

‘The dreams simply stopped once she was born. I don’t know why. I tried going back and I’d sit there and wait and nothing would happen. For whatever reason, Titian only wanted me to know so much, and I have to be grateful that he has shared that much with me, I suppose.’

‘I can’t ever imagine my dreams stopping,’ I say, ‘but I suppose they will one day. When I leave here, if not before. God, imagine if I have to go back to England and I’m still getting them. It’s going to be really hard to leave if I don’t feel like the story is complete.’

Di Girolamo can’t comment on that, of course. Nor can he answer any of my questions about Emilia and her destiny. She is born in his book and that is that. End of story. And we both know there’s nothing about her in the history books. Yet Titian lived such a very long time after Emilia’s birth, and went on to paint so many more great works of art. I’d like to think that Maria – and Emilia – had been beside him through all that, but at the moment I don’t know any more than what I’ve dreamt.

‘Why do you think we’ve been chosen?’ I ask the all-pervading question. ‘What makes us so special – receptors for these dreams?’

‘Now, I haven’t yet revealed to you my theory on that,’ he says, conspiratorially. ‘After the dreams started, I too was looking for a reason for being ‘chosen’, as you call it. So I started to look into my own family history, not really knowing what I was looking for, but with an inkling of suspicion that there might be something tying us. And I found a link. I’m related to Titian. I managed to trace my roots, with great difficulty, I can tell you, back to the mid-sixteenth century, and it turns out that I am a descendant of Titian. Via one of his legitimate children, Lavinia, so I am no relation to Maria or Emilia.’

I sit back in my seat in shock. Wow, that really is something of a revelation. Titian is one of Di Girolamo’s ancestors! The implications of this are overwhelming. Could this mean that I too might somehow be related to one of these characters from my dreams as well?

I must have turned a deathly shade of pale as Di Girolamo asks:

‘Lydia, are you OK? You’ve gone very white. Was that a shock to you?’ He summons the barista again, who this time fetches me a glass of water.

‘So, do you really think I might be related to them, too?’ I ask.

‘It has to be a strong possibility, but really there’s only one way to find out,’ he replies. ‘And if you do decide to go down that route, then you have a lot of work ahead of you. It would, of course, be my pleasure to assist you, to the best of my abilities.’

Oh my God, this really is a lot to take in. I could have some kind of family tie to these people, and that is why they’ve chosen me – and chose Di Girolamo too – to tell their stories. But why have they chosen me again now, when he’s already been through it, already lived out the story once before in his head. All I can think of is that there must be more, some aspect of the story they still need to tell, something Maria wants to reveal to me that didn’t make it into Di Girolamo’s book. Maybe even something Maria knew but Titian didn’t. Baffling.

Even if I’m shocked at this discovery, it’s reassuring from talking to Di Girolamo to discover that I’m not a freak, that there’s a reason for these dreams and I’m not alone in my experiences. But even so, to be told there might be a verifiable reason why I’ve been ‘chosen’ is slightly unnerving.

I’ve never really been into family trees and all that stuff. I love the history side to my course, and history as a subject for its own sake, but I’ve never felt the urge to go digging into my own family’s past; my present-day relatives have always been quite enough for me. Until now. How could this regular little suburban family from Sussex be related to one of the greatest artists the world has ever known? It’s pretty mind-blowing stuff. It’s scary, but it does make me feel quite special, reinforces that feeling of having been ‘chosen’.

And what if I’d never come to Florence? If the idea of us being related turns out to be true, would Maria have had to wait until another distant relative came strolling by one day to sit in front of one of her portraits? Or was it always written in my destiny that I would be the one to come, that she would be able to reveal her story to me? I’m struck momentarily by that same sensation I get when I lie under the stars, gazing upwards and wondering at infinity, trying to grasp how small and insignificant we all are down here. Maybe ‘The Fates’ have more to answer for than we think, and this moment has been mapped out for me from the day I was born.

‘So how did you do it? How did you trace your family history all the way back to Titian?’ I ask.

‘Well, that year, after I’d published the book and hidden it quickly away again, I started trawling the libraries and archives, looking for clues, anything I could, really. And it wasn’t as easy in those days; we didn’t have the internet to help us, like you will do now, if you decide to start investigating. All those wonderful ancestry websites that are out there, there was nothing like that. It was the old-fashioned way, searching for actual, physical documents, or looking at ream after ream of stuff on microfiche. It ruined my eyesight, I can tell you. I didn’t need glasses until I started my research.

‘I spent months tracing back through generation after generation. Fortunately, in the old days in the little villages like the one I grew up in, people didn’t move around like they do now. Families grew up and stayed together, sons and daughters setting up homes in the same town or village as their parents and grandparents. And being so deeply religious, a lot of them kept family bibles, and in those they would document all the births and deaths as they happened, creating their own family tree as the years passed. Some of these bibles are a couple of hundred years old. Both my sets of grandparents had bibles dating back to the early eighteenth century, so that was a couple of centuries covered off for me almost instantly. I was really fortunate. And from there backwards it was hard slog, I’m afraid. A case of the long trawl round archives, finding out little snippets when and where I could.

‘The trouble with trying to trace your family tree with a particular person in mind (and I suspected at the start that Titian was the one to whom I’d be related) is that you don’t know which branch to follow, which side of the family will lead you to them. What with marriages, or trying to follow down the female line of a family, names change frequently, so you just have to pursue every branch as fully as you can, hoping that somewhere along the line you’ll hit on something hopeful. And that’s a huge amount of people. It took ages, but it was all very exciting to do, I have to say.

‘Fortunately I hit upon the Vecellio surname before I’d investigated too many branches of the family. It made its first appearance some time back in the late seventeenth century, so of course from then on I knew which branch I had to follow. And thereafter it was comparatively plain sailing, really. Which was just as well, as finding records which are that old isn’t easy. Records aren’t complete either, as you’d like to hope they are now. A lot more people would slip through the net of authority, especially those of lowly or illegitimate birth. And few people were literate, either. That proves a bit of a barrier sometimes.’

‘It looks like I have a big job on my hands, then,’ I say, feeling a bit overwhelmed but also quite excited now at the prospect that I might be related to one of these characters. ‘Just supposing I’m related to Maria, I don’t even know her surname! It’s a very long way back from the Irvine family of twenty-first century Britain to the Vecellio’s and co of Renaissance Italy. There’s a long way to go until I – hopefully – bump into one of them, so with any luck her name will have come to me in a dream by then.’

‘Her name is Maria Rossi,’ he says simply. ‘I don’t mention it in the book, and I don’t know why really. It just never became relevant, but it is definitely Rossi. You must excuse me now, my dear. I have a lecture to get to. But before I do, this is for you.’

He reaches into his briefcase and pulls out a mint condition copy of ‘A Life In Art’. ‘Your own copy,’ he says. ‘Look inside.’

I open the cover gently, with reverent respect for a brand new (and quite rare) book, not wanting to break the spine, and flick through the first couple of blank pages to the title page.

‘To Lydia, a fellow dreamer. Wishing you the very best of luck with your research. All good wishes, Antonio Di Girolamo.’

‘Thank you, Antonio,’ I say.