The bicycle is the accepted means of transportation here: the motionless air rings with their shrilling bells. Resolute bluestockings fly by with a warning glissando; professorial men in tweed jackets glide past, erect, with a ping! Groups of students and tourists pass along the old paved streets in weaving flocks, their many bells trilling and squawking as they go. For a while we walk, but we are birds without wings. We return to the city gates, where earlier we passed numerous bicycle shops without realizing their significance. There we are given bicycles at a daily rate, in descending sizes like the furniture of the bear family that so preoccupied Goldilocks, whose tastes and proportions ruled their little owner to the degree that she could feel no sympathy with the world. I have never cared for the moral of that story, nor for Goldilocks either: but the bears in their shameless conservatism I like least of all. I do not want to be Mrs. Bear, with her middle-sized possessions, her brown motherliness, her sturdy bear’s body that contrasts so with the blond whimsicality of her intruder. I do not want to be the Bear family, pedaling sedately on their bicycles of descending sizes.
But it is too late: up we go, up to the ramparts, where a breeze rustles the great skirts of the trees and the laid-out paths and lawns, so strangely elevated, recede down their long, curving perspectives. It is four kilometers all the way round: on one side there is the plain with its dove-gray light, its pale geometry of roads and buildings and here and there the classical forms of Lucchese villas, sunk in their soft beds of trees; on the other there is the slowly revolving ancient town. We see its bell towers and palaces, its piazzas and churches, the Guinigi Tower with its mysterious forested top, all seeming to turn like a jeweled mechanical city pirouetting on a music box. We go faster and faster, flying along the gravel paths, whirling through colonnades of trees, but the strange feeling persists that we aren’t moving at all; that the city is rotating while we are standing still.
In the afternoon we wander the paved streets: we visit the Piazza dell’Anfiteatro, which stands on the site of a Roman amphitheater and retains its cruel elliptical shape. It has vaulted sides with low archways that faintly suggest the introduction of victims, though there are cafés there now and souvenir shops. The children buy a souvenir each, a little china bell and a ceramic bowl with Lucca written on them. There are people here, people in the churches and the cafés, up the towers and on the streets. They seem perfectly satisfied with all this magnificence: they seem content. They look at the Roman remains and the Palazzo Pretorio. They lunch in the Piazza Napoleone, named after Napoleon’s sister Elisa, who once governed the principality of Lucca. What is it to them, I wonder, this place whose layers reach down so strangely, so intricately into time like a crevasse into the frozen mystery of a glacier? What, in a personal sense, does it signify? They come to marvel at the sublimity and passion that human beings once were capable of: I wonder why its monuments fail to shake them out of their composure. Do they not want to be passionate themselves, and sublime? Why do they care so much for it, with their video cameras and guidebooks and long lenses, with their money belts and sensible shoes, when it cares so little for them?
In the Piazza San Martino is the duomo. Its tiered tower is slightly askew and its front with its three colonnaded layers has an ornamental severity, like the lace on an old lady’s mantilla. It seems a little reproachful, in its gray and delicate austerity. The bluestockings whir by, ringing their bells. There is a sculpture above the porch, of a man with a cloak and a sword on horseback. Another man stands beside him: the cloaked rider is turned toward him, though not to smite him down. It is his own cloak his sword is directed at, for he is St. Martin, who was asked for alms on a cold day by a wayside beggar and unexpectedly responded by sawing his garment into two. The beggar was presumably pleased: half a cloak, I suppose, is better than no cloak at all. The night after this event, St. Martin is said to have seen a vision of Jesus in a dream, wearing the half he gave away. I am surprised by this: visions of Jesus rarely advocate the morality of fifty percent. Inside the duomo we see the sculpture of St. Martin again. The one outside is a copy: the original has been brought in, to protect it from the weather. It is more affecting, this ancient, eroded image, for its symbolism has become the unique form of its vulnerability. The rain and the wind have rubbed away at St. Martin: he may as well not have kept his fifty percent after all. He shields but he is unshielded, and were it not for the different kindness of our curatorial age he would be whittled down to a peg of stone.
Nearby there is a painting by Tintoretto of the Last Supper. It is small, or perhaps it is merely crowded, for it contains many figures. Generally Tintoretto’s human beings are large things: life is all, or seems to be. And indeed the figure of Jesus at the far end of the table is the painting’s furthest and smallest point, as though to express the remoteness of the conceptual, of self-sacrifice, in a busy room where a woman reclines breast-feeding her baby in the foreground and men are leaning across the table to talk, eager living men with brown skin and muscular arms, talking and gesticulating around a table laden with food and wine. The two men at the nearest end of the table are distinctively dressed: one wears a purple tailored coat, and the other has the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to the biceps. They are talking together: they possess a great reality, the reality of the living moment, of the chunks of bread and the half-drunk glasses of wine, of the plates and crumpled tablecloth and the woman who watches their conversation instead of the baby at her breast.
I look at this painting for a long time. I try to understand it. I try to understand the difference between the people close to Jesus at the far end of the table and the people down at this end, close to us. The closer they are to us, the less attention they pay him. Yet it is more beautiful down here; it is richer and more alive. At the other end, Jesus bends to put bread in the bearded mouth of Peter and Peter ardently clasps his hands. That, too, is a moment of life in this painted scene. I don’t doubt that Tintoretto believed it himself. But the reality of the man in the purple coat, whose hand rests on a fallen keg of wine, is too powerful. Perception is stronger than belief, at least for an artist, who sees such grandeur in ordinary things. In this it is the artist who is God. And it is a strange kind of proof we seek from him, we who are so troubled by our own mortality, who know we will all eat a last supper of our own. We want the measure of the grandeur taken. We want to know that life was indeed what it seemed to be.
The Last Supper, c. 1592, by Tintoretto (1518–94)
On the train home we find our guidebook in a bag, and discover that we have seen virtually nothing of the glories of Lucca, neither the National Museum nor the Villa Guinigi, neither the Filippino Lippi altarpieces nor the della Quercia engravings. The children sit in a corner, studying their souvenirs. Later we will learn to fillet an Italian city of its artworks with the ruthless efficiency of an English aristocrat deboning a Dover sole. We do not yet know the hunger that will take us in its grip. But for now we are perfectly satisfied; like all the other tourists who daily circumnavigate Lucca’s terrifying walls, we are quite content. In a few days we are going south, to the house that will be our home until the summer comes. I wonder what awaits us there. I wish I knew better, how to tell the difference between the good and the bad, the truth and the imitation. I wish I could learn how to read the structure of life as weathermen read the structure of clouds, where the future must be written, if only you knew what to look for.