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| Prince Francesco Lanza Spinelli di Scalea (1834-1919), Mondello, Sicily |
In reading
authors through the ages, we may form a circle of virtual literary friendships
not entirely unlike community of people from the past that is a given for Count
Venceslao Lanza. Starting around the turn
of the millennium in the year 1000 C.E., he knows many characters in his family
history in novelistic detail.
I had met
with Venceslao Lanza’s thirteenth-century ancestor, Galvano Lanza (d. 1268), in
writing my dissertation on one of his associates, the nobleman vilified as a
“terrible tyrant” in Dante’s Inferno, Ezzelino da Romano, and his sister,
Cunizza, glorified in Dante’s Heaven.
Galvano Lanza owed his good political fortunes to kinship with Bianca, a
wife of Emperor Frederick II (d. 1250).
According to a propagandistic medieval chronicle of the city of Padua,
the emperor gave the sister of Galvano Lanza to Ezzelino in marriage, but not
long afterward, in 1244, Ezzelino imprisoned Lanza after procuring an annulment
from the sister. Lanza was forced to
repay a large sum of money, said to have been stolen from the city of Padua
during his tenure there as podestà. The chronicler includes this tale among his
polemics against Ezzelino’s violations of the tacit social code for respecting
kinship ties.[1] In my travels in Italy, I have found that a
surprising number of people from the Veneto today recognize the name of
Ezzelino with horrified familiarity that seems above and beyond the compulsory
high school Dante curriculum.
After an
earthquake destroyed the city of Noto in Sicily in 1693, the civic government
turned to Giuseppe Lanza, the Duke of Camastra (1630-1708), to lay plans for
the reconstruction. He died before
seeing the full realization of the city that is now a UNESCO world heritage
site,[2] not to
mention the glimmering backdrop of Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960). There is
little to see today of Giuseppe Lanza’s planning in the small city of Santo
Stefano di Camastra, although it is said to have been the calling card that
caused the city of Noto to choose him;[3] however, the historic center of Santo Stefano di Camastra is a lovely place to
shop for ceramics, after an improbably steep climb from the train station (I
think arrival by bus is more convenient).
Count
Lanza’s paternal grandfather heard Richard Wagner play a long concert of
variations on the overture to his newly completed opera, Parsifal, during the maestro’s visit to Palermo in 1881. At the end of the concert someone dared to
applaud, and Wagner, offended, began the entire concert over again and played
it in its entirety.[4] Count Lanza’s grandfather used to say: “That
was the first and last time I ever listened to Wagner.” While completing Parsifal, Wagner strolled in the gardens of the Villa Tasca, a
Lanza estate that was part of the dowry when Lucio Tasca married Beatrice Lanza
di Trabia e di Butera in 1860. Tasca
became the Duke of Camastra in the bargain.
Today, at the Tasca d’Almerita terroir in Regaleali, Venceslao Lanza’s
in-laws produce a wine named Cygnus after the swans Wagner saw in the Tasca
gardens at the villa in Palermo, still in the family, with some rooms available
for summer rental.
Twenty
minutes on a city bus today from Palermo brings you to the exuberant beach at
Mondello, with sky blue waters, creamy sand, some areas cordoned off for
private subscribers, vast public tracts for everyone to sunbathe, play and
swim, and open air cafes. On each end of
the hemispheric beach is a rocky mountain in the distance, and parallel to the
beach is a half-ring of turn-of-the-twentieth-century villas, like variations
on a theme. It is difficult to imagine
that, until the late nineteenth century, this very area was an insalubrious
swamp, associated with malarial outbreaks.
Starting around 1864, Prince Francesco Lanza Spinelli di Scalea
(1834-1919) led the civic project to transform the area by draining the swamp,
achieving the needed civic consensus, developing the urban plans, raising the
funds, hiring the professionals, and commissioning the tram from the city.[5]
Not all of
Count Lanza’s ancestors acceded to the high corporate expectations on the part
of the aristocratic family. Giacchino
Ruffo (1879-1949) was the brother-in-law of Giuseppe Lanza Branciforte, the
Count of Mazzarino, Venceslao’s paternal grandfather (the one who had heard
Wagner’s interminable piano concert of Parsifal
in 1881). To make an important family
alliance, Gioacchino Ruffo was married to the Roman Princess, Flaminia
Odescalchi, in 1909. According to family
lore, the couple embarked on their honeymoon journey by train, and, at the
first stop, the groom excused himself to take some air on the platform. At the station, however, he met his lover and
ran off with her, never to return to his wife.
A terrible scandal followed, not the least reason for which was the
dowry agreement. As a result, Ruffo’s
father disinherited him and left the entire art collection to a number of
institutions, among them the Certosa and Museum of San Martino in Naples.[6]
Venceslao
Ludovico Fabrizio Lanza, Count of Assaro e Marchese of Villa Urrutia, was born
in Paris and still pronounces the “r” as the French do, with a roll in the back
of the throat. He was the second of
three brothers. His family survived the
war in Rome, where, during his high school years, he was among those called to
compulsory attendance at what was to be Mussolini’s final public speech
there. On his feet for hours at the
event, Lanza afterward wandered off in search of food, a scarcity at that point
in the war, and he happened upon a priest at the Church of Ara Coeli, famous
for a Renaissance wooden statue of the baby Jesus, which congregants would
cover in jewels ex voto.[7] The priest at Ara Coeli found Lanza a grey
piece of bread and asked him where he would go next. When he suggested he would go find his school
companions, the priest said, “No, run home now!
It’s over, can’t you see?
Mussolini has lost his mind.”
Count
Lanza ran his family estate, not far from Noto, as an agricultural concern,
yielding cotton, olives, almonds, oranges, lemons, flowers and garden
vegetables, until his brothers finally prevailed upon him to sell the land and
retire. When his wife, a distant cousin,
Anna Mastrogiovanni Tasca, opened a cooking school to complement the winery run
by her cousins on their family estate, Regaleali, Count Lanza was on hand to
entertain the guests, often chefs in search of new recipes or vacationing
Americans, such as the gang of college roommates who held their annual reunion
there.
When asked
what he thought about today’s political controversy in Italy, he said he
preferred not to think about it. In
addition to the world fiscal crisis, Italy was facing the mess of its own
making, thirty years of Berlusconian mania.
To fix it, he said, we would have to have a parliament with “backbone”
(he used the English term).
While his
daschund, Vabinsky, rested on a break from an ongoing dialogue with the
neighbor’s dog, toward the end of our conversation, I learned that he had only
recently inherited the title, “Count.” I
had been calling him, “Marchese,” and, when I suggested I ought to use the new
title, he refused, on grounds that he missed his elder brother whose recent
death had caused him to inherit the title: “We saw or spoke with one another
every day of our lives.”
When I
suggested that he write his memoirs, Count Lanza said he felt the only
autobiographical books that sold were ones that spoke ill of people, and he would
not do so. “…and then there’s more time
for enjoying the beach,” I suggested.
“That, too,” he nodded.
I asked what
it meant to him to be the heir to so much known historical detail. What he had inherited, he said, was a way of
life: “The essential thing is to maintain the tradition; the essential thing is
to live at the very height of your own life.”
[1] See my article,
“Marriage and Political Violence in the Chronicles of the Medieval
Veneto,” Speculum 86:3 (July 2011): 652-687:
http://journals.cambridge.org/repo_A83E1kBm
[2] C. G. Canale, Noto -- La struttura continua della città tardo-barocca: Il potere di una
società urbana nel settecento (Palermo: S.F. Flaccovio, Editore, 1976)
14-15; and "Architettura e società
a Noto nel secolo XVIII," in L'Architettura
di Noto: Atti del simposio, C. Fianchino, Ed. (Siracusa: E.P.T., 1979), 29
and 34, n. 2.
[3] C. Sofia, Noto città barocca, (Milano: Silvana
Editoriale, 1986), 6.
[4] This story is confirmed
in P. Violante, “Quando l'aristocrazia si scoprì devota al Maestro,” la Repubblica (2009): http://palermo.repubblica.it/dettaglio/quando-laristocrazia-si-scopri-devota-al-maestro/1420804
[5] L. Crimi, R. Zapulla, Mondello: sviluppo storico urbanistico e
analisi delle architetture del primo ‘900 (Palermo: Edizioni Grifo, 1900),
14-23, and passim.
[6] For an example of this
bequest, see:
http://cir.campania.beniculturali.it/museosanmartino/itinerari-tematici/galleria-di-immagini/OA1000339
[7] Sadly, the Renaissance
statue of the Christ child was stolen by unknown intruders in 1994, never to be
returned. P. Lombardo and G. Passarelli.
Eds., Ara Coeli: La Basilica e il
Convento dal XVI al XX secolo attraverso le stampe del fondo della Postulazione
della Provincia Romana dei Frati Minori (Rome: Tiellemedia Editore, 2003),
170.