I looked through the pile, it gradually became clear to me that, in fact, there was rhyme and reason in the seeming madness, and once I had acknowledged as much, it did not take me long to spread out the documents on my bed in some kind of chronological order:
Maestro Ambrogio’s Journal (1340)
Giulietta’s Letters to Giannozza (1340)
The Confessions of Friar Lorenzo (1340)
La Maledizione sul Muro (1370)
Masuccio Salernitano’s Thirty-Third Story (1476)
Luigi Da Porto’s Romeo & Juliet (1530)
Matteo Bandello’s Romeo & Juliet (1554)
Arthur Brooke’s Romeus & Juliet (1562)
William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet (1597)
Giulietta and Giannozza Family Tree
Once I had them laid out before me, however, it took me somewhat longer to make sense of the collection. The first four items, all from the fourteenth century, were mysterious and often fragmented, while the later texts were clearer. But most important, the later texts had one thing in common; they were all versions of the story of Romeo and Juliet, culminating in the one that most people knew: Shakespeare’s Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.
Although I had always considered myself a bit of an expert on that play, it came as a complete surprise to me to discover that the Bard had not, in fact, invented the story, but had merely piggybacked on previous writers. Granted, Shakespeare was a genius with words, and if he had not run the whole thing through his pentameter machine, it is doubtful whether it would ever have become widely known. But even so it looked, in my humble opinion, as if it had already been a darn good story when it first landed on his desk. And interestingly enough, the earliest version of it–the one written by Masuccio Salernitano in 1476–was not set in Verona at all, but right here, in Siena.
This literary discovery very nearly distracted me from the fact that I was, quite frankly, left with a pretty hefty personal disappointment. There was nothing in my mother’s box that had any monetary value whatsoever, nor was there, among all the papers I had looked at so far, the slightest suggestion of family valuables hidden elsewhere.
Perhaps I should have been ashamed of myself for thinking like this; perhaps I should have shown more appreciation for the fact that I was finally holding something in my hands that had belonged to my mother.
But I was too confused to be rational. What on earth had made Aunt Rose believe there was something tremendously valuable at stake–something worth a trip to what was, in her mind, the most dangerous of places, namely Italy? And why had my mother kept this box of paper in the belly of a bank? I felt silly now, especially thinking of the guy in the tracksuit. Of course he had not been following me. That, too, must have been a figment of my all too fertile imagination.
I started leafing through the earlier documents without enthusiasm. Two of them, The Confessions of Friar Lorenzo and Giulietta’s Letters to Giannozza, were nothing more than collections of fragmented phrases, such as, ‘I swear by the Virgin that I have acted in accordance with the will of heaven’ and ‘all the way to Siena in a coffin for fear of the Salimbeni bandits.’
Maestro Ambrogio’s Journal was more readable, but when I began leafing through it, I almost wished it wasn’t. Whoever this Maestro was, he had had a bad case of verbal diarrhoea and had kept a journal about every single triviality that had happened to him–and, by the look of it, his friends, too–in the year 1340. As far as I could tell, it had nothing to do with me or with anything else in my mother’s box, for that matter.
That was when my eyes suddenly fell on a name in the middle of the Maestro’s text.
Giulietta Tolomei.
I frantically scrutinized the page under the bedside lamp. But no, I had not been mistaken; after some initial musings on the hardships of painting the perfect rose, the verbose Maestro Ambrogio had written page after page after page about a young woman who happened to have a name identical to mine. Coincidence?
Leaning back in my bed, I started reading from the beginning of the journal, occasionally checking the other fragmented texts for cross-reference. And so began my journey back to Siena in the year 1340, and my kinship with the woman who had shared my name.
And in this borrow’d likeness of shrunk deathThou shalt continue two and forty hours
Siena, A.D. 1340
Oh, they were fortune’s fools!
They had been on the road for three days, playing hide-and-seek with disaster and living on bread as hard as rock. Now, finally, on the hottest, most miserable day of summer, they were so close to their journey’s end that Friar Lorenzo could see the towers of Siena sprouting bewitchingly on the horizon ahead. And here, sadly, was where his rosary ran out of protective power.
Sitting on his horse cart, rocking wearily along behind his six mounted travel companions—all monks like himself—the young friar had just begun to imagine the sizzling beef and soothing wine awaiting them at their destination when a dozen sinister-looking horsemen came galloping out of a vineyard in a cloud of dust to surround the small travelling party and block the road to all sides, swords drawn.
‘Greetings, strangers!’ bellowed their captain, toothless and grimy but lavishly dressed, no doubt in the clothes of previous victims. ‘Who trespasses on Salimbeni territory?’
Friar Lorenzo yanked on the reins of his cart to stop the horses, while his travel companions did their utmost to position themselves between the cart and the bandits.
‘As you can see,’ replied the most senior of the monks, holding out his shoddy cowl as proof, ‘we are but humble brothers from Florence, noble friend.’
‘Huh.’ The brigand leader looked around at the alleged monks, his eyes narrow. Eventually, his gaze settled on Friar Lorenzo’s frightened face. ‘What treasure on the cart back there?’
‘Nothing of value to you,’ responded the senior monk, backing up his horse a bit, the better to block the bandit’s access to the cart. ‘Please allow us passage. We are holy men and pose no threat to you or your kinsmen.’
‘This is a Salimbeni road,’ the captain pointed out, underlining his words with his blade—a signal for his comrades to move closer. ‘If you wish to use it, you must pay a toll. For your own safety.’
‘We have paid five Salimbeni tolls already.’
The villain shrugged. ‘Protection is expensive.’
‘But who,’ argued the other with stubborn calm, ‘would attack a group of holy men bound for Rome?’
‘Who? The worthless dogs of Tolomei!’ The captain spat twice on the ground for good measure, and his men were quick to do the same. ‘Those thieving, raping, murdering bastards!’
‘This is why,’ observed the monk, ‘we should rather like to reach the city of Siena before dark.’
‘She is not far,’ nodded the brigand, ‘but her gates close early nowadays, on account of the grievous disruptions caused by the rabid dogs of Tolomei to the general disturbance of the fine and industrious people of Siena and even more so, I might add, to the grand and benevolent house of Salimbeni—in which dwells my noble master—in particular.’
The captain’s speech was received with supportive grunts from his gang.
‘So, as you can surely appreciate,’ he continued, ‘we do, in all humbleness of course, rule this road and most other roads in the general vicinity of this proud republic—of Siena, that is—and