The night after Beatrice confirmed her flight to Siena, Ben dreamed that he took her to the Museo. In the dream they were walking hand in hand from one empty room to the next. Beatrice kept consulting a creased museum brochure; the outlines of the gallery map wavered in the dim light. They walked for hours, the odd surreal fabric of the dream stretching and distorting the passage of time. At last they reached Ben’s favorite gallery, where the unfinished Accorsi Messina altarpiece hung alone against the back wall, filling the space with its power.
Hey Little B, here’s a painting I’ve always wanted to show you—Ben’s waking thoughts infiltrated the realm of sleep—even half done, doesn’t it blow your mind? But in the dream he felt Beatrice moving away from him, the contact between their two hands lost.
He stood in the doorway of this last gallery, unable to cross the threshold. Beatrice walked to the altarpiece and stopped, looking at the painting as if it were a window rather than a work of art. He could tell from the set of Beatrice’s shoulders and the angle of her head that she was thinking hard, her black hair falling down behind her like a dark waterfall. Beatrice’s hand disappeared into the flat canvas, then her other hand, then her body and head, moving into the painting as if it were a still lake. The long strands of Beatrice’s hair were the last to vanish, and the painting closed over them without a ripple.
Ben woke alone in his Siena bedroom, where maps of the city covered the walls and piled books formed unsteady towers by the bed. But as the dream faded, the image of Beatrice stayed behind in his mind. She’d be here soon, his little sister neurosurgeon who wasn’t so little anymore. “Maybe you’ll end up getting into history after all, Little B,” Ben said aloud, smiling in the dark, “just like me. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?” And this time, he drifted off into a sweet, dreamless sleep.
*
It was Sebastiano’s second birthday. Donata knew she must leave work soon to buy ingredients for the ricotta cake Felice and Gianni loved. Her youngest child was not quite old enough to choose a dessert for himself, but would eat it willingly, as he did most things. Donata lingered in the reading room of the university library on that bright March afternoon, fingering the binding of the book she’d requested from the archives. The leather cover was worn and stamped with a faded pattern of leaves and vines in gold. Donata rested the manuscript on the velvet-lined stand. A painting of Siena’s Campo illuminated the flyleaf. Donata knew that perspective well—it was a view of the piazza seen from the Torre’s height, its nine sections fanning out from the Palazzo Pubblico, the Duomo rising gravely over the city it protected.
Donata bent to look at the next page, and as she read a feeling came over her, as if someone were standing at her shoulder, close enough to touch.
To my beloved Siena
The city that opened her gates and heart to me across the centuries
And in my Brother’s memory
Written by my hand in this year of our Lord 1349
Beatrice Alessandra Trovato
Donata sat staring at the inscription. Outside, the trees had not yet begun to leaf, and the light streamed in through the tall leaded glass windows. She sat without moving until the bells began to ring the hour of Nones, then put away the book and went home to make a birthday cake.
Siena University News; Issue 213; March
Three scholars, working consecutively, have uncovered surprising new information about Siena’s medieval past. However, this work appears to have taken a toll on those scholars who undertook it. Beniamino Emilio Trovato, the well-known Sienese historian who began the project, died suddenly of a heart ailment before he could complete his work. The second scholar to become involved, his American-born sister, Beatrice Alessandra Trovato, mysteriously disappeared before she could finish the project. The trail of their efforts to uncover the secret of a six-hundred-and-fifty-year-old conspiracy has been picked up by Professoressa Donata Guerrini, a notable scholar of art history at the Università di Siena. Prof. Guerrini has publicly declared the work to be Beniamino Trovato’s discovery, and insisted that it be published in his name, angering some competing scholars who would speak against the veracity of his sources and methods of scholarship. Most disturbingly, the evidence appears to implicate members of the well-known Signoretti family of Siena as co-conspirators of the Medicis in a plot to overthrow Siena’s Nine more than six centuries ago. Since Prof. Guerrini began work on the project, her office has been broken into twice, fortunately without loss of any crucial documentation or injury to her person. The reason for the break-ins is suspected to be related to the alleged Signoretti controversy, though it remains unproven at this time. In an interview, Prof. Guerrini has revealed startling facts regarding the Medici involvement in Siena’s terrible losses during the Plague, and implications for the violent fall of Siena’s Nine seven years later.
With the assistance of local archivist Emilio Fabbri, Prof. Guerrini has identified the writings of a previously unknown Sienese medieval chronicler. Interestingly, the author shares her family name with Dr. Trovato and her brother. Dr. Guerrini, when interviewed about this remarkable coincidence, had no comment. In a harmonious marriage of text and art, the chronicle is illustrated by the fourteenth-century painter Gabriele Beltrano Accorsi, a pupil of Simone Martini. Accorsi’s work was not previously known to include manuscript illustration, and the numerous illuminations will provide academics dedicated to post-Plague Sienese art with a wealth of new material. The chronicle itself gives insight into the appearance of the original Fonte Gaia and suggests that Accorsi himself was the painter of the long-debated fifth fresco on the Ospedale facade. Finally and most dramatically, the research into this trecento chronicler’s work has uncovered evidence to illuminate Siena’s particularly devastating losses to the Plague, and its failure to recover after the Black Death’s retreat. These Trovato historians, both past and present, have together added a new and startling chapter to Siena’s great history.
AUTHOR’S NOTE