SOLITARY CONFINEMENT

SOLITARY CONFINEMENT.                                                             VGow  20/04/12

Catch the train from Florence to Certaldo. In just under an hour this pleasant ride meanders through the pencil pined countryside of Italy. The symbol of the town is the onion. Onion shields present themselves on the walls of all the major buildings of the town. There is a handsome onion symbol at the entrance of the station. Out from that bleak station where morbidity hangs in the air, walk on and find a funicular. This cable car will take you up to the hilltop where the old, walled, medieval Tuscany town stands testimony to the vicissitudes of time.  Take care to search for a story.

Famous for growing the best purple onions in Italy this town was the home of Giovanni Boccaccio, the 14^th Century author of the Decameron. This is an epic story of 100 tales told in the vernacular to amuse the Florentines of the Renaissance period. The Decameron tells of ten people staying in a villa to escape the plague. Over ten days they tell ten stories based on certain themes, love lost, trickery, intrigue, some are the retelling of oral traditions. Most read like some back street gossip to stir up trouble or to give rise to scandal. The many layers of story are like peeling the onion.

Long ago Etruscans hid coins from ancient Lydia in the folds of the stone foundations of this place. The land between the Arno and the Tiber River held their stone temples and statues. Here they practised irrigation and their kings were perhaps the first Kings of Rome.700 years Before the Common Era. They also held storytelling sessions around campfires. Their seers read the future in dismembered entrails of sacrificial animals. The entrails were a powerful source of omens. Seers could tell a story of good fortune or bring down a curse that would smother the land and its people for years to come. It all depended on the rings that formed when the entrails were swished around and let settle in shape of sliced onion rings.

Romans mixed marriage with those of the elder race, languages blurred and time layered the land with a Common Era.  Florence became a Princely state and man decreed a Baron to rule over the onion lands. Hunts took place in the hills surrounding the hilltop town A great castle overlooked the forests. Barons grew rich on copper and iron trade. Agriculture was ample and the people well fed. The mighty purple onion spread its rings over the general population. Stories were told in praise of its magnificent onion soup.

Some say that Boccaccio danced with ancient seers on moonlit nights in the woods. Some say this is where he found his muse. Certainly, Boccaccio made fun of nobles and church in his tales, but he was protected by high birth from despoilment. However, his cohorts would be punished instead. Boccaccio would lose his muse. He could be made solitary by taking away the people who reveled in his playmaking and he would be confined to his own company. Humble seers were rounded up and deposited underground in dank dungeons in the castle on top of the hill town.  They were placed in solitary confinement, where they could not alter the success of the town.

Imprisoned by the Baron, who was the butt of one of Boccaccio’s tales, was a beautiful girl of fifteen. Her father was an onion grower of a quiet nature. The Baron desired her but she was promised to another.  She was of the elder race, and her eyes had a seer quality. The Baron did not stand for any refusal. Summonsing her father and mother, he drew his sword and quickly dispatched them.  The Baron then made short work of the promised youth, too. He threw the girl into solitary confinement.

Being below ground she crawled around in her cell, until her hand found a chink in the crumbling stonewall. Something was embedded into the wall. It was an old coin from Lydia. Often the story had been told around the fires at night of the power of a wish one would have on the finding of such a coin.  She rubbed the coin and it glowed.

Catch the train from Florence to Certaldo, ride the funicular up to the hilltop castle. Slip a lira into the hands of the caretaker. He will undo the lock, allow you to go down, under the ground where the cells for solitary confinement stand mute in their walled misery. There find the old storyteller fingering an ancient coin attached to a dulled gold chain around her throat.  Ask her to reveal the aonions grow over these hillsides of Tuscany.