Lake Nemi was sacred to the virgin goddess Diana, huntress and protector of childbirth the remains of her shrine have only been partially excavated.  The moon is associated with her and the lake is called Speculum Dianae (Diana’s Mirror) – it particularly captivated the poets and composers who made their homes here.

The Roman emperors recreated naval battles known as  Naumachie on nearby Lake Albano, a form of gladiatorial spectacle involving killing and actual sinkings. When they found submerged boats on Lake Nemi in the 1930s they were presumed to be pleasure boats rather than warships as Lake Nemi was a sacred lake. They were raised and a museum built, but sadly they were destroyed by accident during WW2.

Section of ancient Roman wall in Diana’s shrine, showing ‘opus reticulatum’ and brickwork

Diana’s altar, still in use by modern adherents to her cult, offerings of fruit, prayers and candles.

Nemi is also associated with the myth of Rex Nemorensis, the story of which begins and ends James Frazer’s famous work of anthropology, The Golden Bough (1890). The story goes that the high priest of the shrine at Nemi to Diana, achieved the role through mortal combat with his predecessor; he in turn would be slain by his successor, and so on through the ages. As Macaulay put it:

Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain.

The contender had first to prove his metal by plucking a golden bough (most likely mistletoe growing on the sacred oak) from Diana’s Grove, thus the origin of the legend. Recently, archeologists discovered the fossilised remains of an oak within the sanctuary. Cannabis was cultivated on the shores in ancient times and may have been involved in sacred rituals.

statue of Diana in Nemi village

Nemi, the main street

Strawberries both wild and cultivated

Patrick holds up the famous bread, baked in wood-fired ovens, in nearby Genzano (with a wild boar sausage necklace).

Nemi on the distant hill and Lake Nemi in 1831

A fanciful view of Lake Nemi in The Golden Bough by JMW Turner (1834)

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The most notable building is the edifice commonly known as The Colosseo Quadrato (Square Colosseum) designed as part of the EUR project in 1938. It is officially called The Palace of Italian Civilisation and was designed for the 1942 World’s Fair that was cancelled in 1941 following Mussolini’s declaration of war on Britain and France in 1940. It was not completed till 1953. The frame is reinforced concrete clad with Travertine limestone. Atop the building incised in giant letters are the words from a speech Mussolini made in 1935, ” A people of poets, artists, heroes, saints, thinkers, scientists, navigators, migrants.” No one could take issue with this list.

One of the Dioscuri statues, either Castor or Pollux

The statuary, in Carrara marble, was added from 1942 on. The statues in the arches on the ground floor, represent trades, arts and sciences, while the four equines represent the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux. Although the building has featured in numerous films to illustrate solid Italian clerical-conservatism, I find it an extraordinary radical style of architecture rooted in the classical past. It is also most photogenic in any season or light.

The Flaminia Bridge,  Ponte Flaminio

The Flaminia Bridge was started in 1938, damaged in WW II and not completed till 1951. It features in the 1993 film Dear Diary, and the left-wing director Nanni Moretti is vociferous in his love for the architecture – despite its Fascist origins. The architect, Armando Brasini was popular with the fascist regime and would have demolished large swathes of central Rome as part of a Le Corbusier-style planning revolution in the late 1920s if he had had his way. He was responsible for the architecture and urban planning in various parts of Mussolini’s empire such as Tripoli and Tirana, Albania. He designed many remarkable buildings, but worked little after the war. His grandson lives in Orvieto.

The Fascist Eagle on the Flaminia Bridge

I will publish more posts shortly about Rome’s architecture.

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The red granite Spartali tomb stands behind an armless statue in Norwood Cemetery. The entrance has been bricked up. The Orthodox chapel behind, under scaffolding, is undergoing restoration.

Cristina Cahen died, from an overdose of chloral, possibly accidentally, aged 37, in 1884. It was a fashionable drug in artistic circles, both her sister’s husband Stillman and the painter Rossetti, were habitual users. It calmed the nerves, it was also known as a hynotic drug.

Christina Spartali Cahen

Thankfully, however, after her separation from Eduard, she had had a rapprochement with her father Constantine Ionides. He had her remains brought back home to London from Meran in South Tyrol, Austria (now in Italy), for burial in the Spartali family vault in Norwood cemetery, London. Cahen was despised by Christina’s father, on account of his being short and Jewish, the Spartali family was Greek Orthodox, but also possibly, for his poor taste; evident in the manner in which Count Cahen refurbished his castle near Orvieto. The faux Renaissance mythological and rustic frescoes may have had something to do with Christina’s reluctance to follow her husband there.

Happy, half-naked peasants harvest on the Cahen estate. The mediaeval style Cahen castle tops the hill behind. Extreme right, on the crest of the hill, stands Orvieto.

A scene from the Arabian Nights? Or King David spying on Bathsheba?

A jolly Bacchanalian scene in the grounds of the Count’s castle.

A balloon’s eye view of Orvieto. Viewed from a hang-glider today the city would appear almost identical.

A reminder of the fate awaiting a wayward wife perhaps?

The count’s Landau carriage. Christina would never have ridden in it: when she visited the castle there was not even a paved road leading there from Orvieto.

It would be too pathetic if the Count sought to impress his worldly and cultured wife with these provincial offerings. Whatever, he refused to concede her a divorce. But Cahen could be generous: at his death in 1894, he left a worthy sum in his will to Marie Spartali Stillman, to atone perhaps.

Norwood Cemetery

Spartali over door

The cemetery was consecrated in 1837, the year Queen Victoria ascended to the throne, and immediately attracted high class burials such as Sir Henry Doulton (founder of Royal Doulton china), Sir Hiram Maxim (inventor of the machine gun), Mrs Isabella Beeton (cookery and home management writer), Sir Henry Tate (sugar magnate and founder of the eponymous gallery), Baron Israel Paul von Reuter (founder of the news agency).

The cemetery had state-of-the-art funerary machinery in the mid-1850s. This hoist lowered coffins into the Gothic-style catacombs.

The Greek ‘Stunners’

The central section of the cemetery was bought by the Greek community in 1842 for burials in the classical style, contrasting with the predominantly Gothic architecture of the rest of the cemetery. Many of the women who frequented the demi-monde of the Pre-Raphaelite artistic brotherhood and oftentimes modelled for artists such as Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Ford Madox Brown are interred here. These beautiful, exotic, women were known in artistic circles as ‘stunners’. The brilliant circle of the patriarch Alexander Constantine Ionides also included William Morris, Watts, Whistler, Walter Crane, du Maurier and others.

Maria Zambaco and Ned Burne-Jones (in sepia) with fellow Pre-Raphaelite William Morris (black beard). Mrs Georgie Burne-Jones is seated left. Most of the company looks very glum.

Cristina Spartali, the future Marchioness Cahen of Torre Alfina, was the model for one of Whistler’s most famous paintings, ‘La Princesse du Pays de la Porcellaine’. Her cousin Maria Cassavetti Zambaco was not only Burne-Jones’ model, but his mistress, he painted her obsessively, even as an androgynous-looking man, in several pictures. She posed for all three of his Three Graces. The three ‘stunner ’cousins Marie Spartali, Aglaia Ionides Coronio and Maria Cassavetti Zambaco were known collectively in their circle as “The Three Graces”.

Aglaia Coronio. Portrait by Rossetti 1870

Cristina’s sister Marie not only modelled, but was an accomplished artist in her own right. She enraptured the poet Algernon Swinburne who said of her, “She is so beautiful that I want to sit down and cry”. She died in 1927, was cremated, and unlike the others, was not buried in Norwood, but cremated and interred in Surrey with her husband, the American painter William Stillman. The third beauty of the trio, Aglaia Coronio, is buried alongside the Spartali tomb. A woman of considerable talent, she took her own life after the death of her daughter, stabbing herself with scissors. Theodore Coronio buried his wife and daughter on the same day.

Aglaia’s gravestone

Christina’s sister Marie Spartali Stillman 1868

The large Cassavetti tomb to the left wherein lies Maria Zambaco.  Aglaia Ionides Coronio’s white gravestone lies in the foreground. The large white Ionides family vault stands to the left.

Cupid Delivering Psyche (1867)  by Burne-Jones who portrayed his mistress, the voluptuous Maria Cassavetti Zambaco as Psyche, while Marie Spartali took the part of the somewhat androgynous Cupid. He was as obsessed with the subject as he was with Maria, painting several versions.

The Cassavetti tomb. Maria Cassavetti Zambaco died in Paris, 1914

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On his three visits to Orvieto, Freud always stayed in the comfortable Hotel delle Belle Arti on Corso Cavour in the town center, midway between Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele (now Piazza Repubblica) and the central clock tower, La Torre del Moro. There is a plaque. There were then 7,300 inhabitants, about three thousand more than now inhabit the old town.

Doorway of Freud’s Hotel delle Belle Arti in Corso Cavour. The plaque is on the right of the door.

In September 1897 Freud stayed in the Hotel Belle Arti with his younger brother Alexander and patient and pupil Dr Gertl, a rather mysterious figure who disappears without trace a few years later. One wing of the former hotel is now a lawyers’ office, the other,  the salon ( in Freud’s day, it was the dining room) has remained largely unchanged.

Hotel Belle Arti, Orvieto 1897

Ballroom, former Dining Room, Palazzo Bisenzi 2020

Here follows an excerpt from The Idler magazine in which W.L.Alden sets the scene in Orvieto a few years before Freud’s visit in 1893, “At the Hotel of the Fine Arts (Belle Arti) where you will inevitably go, you will find three other tourists, probably German, sitting silently in a vast room, waiting for dinner, which is the only thing the tourist does after he has seen the cathedral.” Orvieto offered little to the tourist after dinner, Freud probably wrote letters while his brother Alexander, somewhat of a ladies’ man, could not wait to move on to Rome. However, Freud would refuse to go on this occasion, something akin to a phobia was blocking him. He finally overcome his resistance in 1901, calling his first Roman visit, ‘the high point in my life’.

Freud embarked on his life’s journey into archeology while on his first visit to Orvieto through his friendship with Riccardo Mancini, proprietor of the Etruscan Necropolis below the walls and a showroom of artifacts found in a long career as an archeologist. It is probable that antique hunting provided the excuse to return to Orvieto on two further occasions, in 1902 and 1907. He may however have revisited old haunts such as the cathedral and Signorelli’s fresco cycle of the end of the world.

Entrance doorway (left) to Riccardo Mancini's Antiquities Emporium on Corso Cavour. Mancinelli Theatre in the distance. Listed in Baedeker's Guide at N°85, it is now 130.

Entrance hall to Mancini's Emporium showing Etruscan funerary 'cippi' in oval niches unearthed by Mancini in the Etruscan Necropolis.

Ceiling of corridor leading to Mancini's Emporium

 A 15-minute Video on Freud’s visit to Orvieto

More blog posts on this subject of Freud and Orvieto:

Tale of Three Cities Part I

Tale of Three Cities Part II

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The Val D’Orcia is one of the most famous valleys in the world even though the name itself may not mean much. Tourists have travelled the Roman road called the via Cassia since the 16th century on the Grand Tour, but before them it was trod by pilgrims on their way to Rome and before that the Roman Legions. In fact scenes from The Gladiator were filmed here.

The Grand Tour

The Medici family constructed Post Houses along the road to welcome the Grand Tourists on their travels. We visited the Osteria Grande in Radicofani and photographed its abandoned interior in 2017. Personally I love photographing uninhabited ghostly buildings. Constructed in 1584 , it has welcomed through its doors almost every celebrity to have ever visited Rome before the age of rail. Mozart was here with his father Leopold, Charles Dickens complimented the spacious, carpeted quarters with its open fire. The Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph II, Stendhal, Chateaubriand and many more stopped over.

Medici Post House portico, Radicofani  with rings for tethering horses. Known as Osteria Grossa, the Great Hostelry. The coach house door is at the far end.

The Medici Portico, fountain and horse trough from 1603. The Six Balls are the Medici Arms. This was sketched by William Turner in 1828 when he stayed here.

The Medici Hostelry from the road

The Chilly Interior

Medici Hostelry Entrance Hall scaled by scores of celebrated artists, writers, musicians and dandies.

Kitchen and Dining hall

Radicofani stands at 800m and it was notoriously cold in the travelling season of Spring and Autumn. This was the only fireplace other than the Popes’ quarters so very often  ‘milord’ would sleep in front of this fire with his servants rather than in the door-less, unheated rooms upstairs.  An alternative was to sleep in the basement in his coach warmed by the horses.

The Basement was warmer

stables in basement of Medici Hostelry

The Loggia affords a  fine view up to Radicofani town with its castle above.

stairs leading to sleeping quarters

Popes had it better

The Popes’ apartment had a fireplace with a chariot race fresco above, and even doors. Did the Medici ever let it to lesser mortals?  After all, only two popes ever stayed here, Pius VI  and Pius VII (no relation). Pius VI is one of the real people who features in De Sade‘s  1797 novel ‘Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded‘. His audience with Juliette ends in an orgy involving the pope himself.  The Marquis  also stayed here, could they possibly have met? Napoleon, though notoriously anticlerical himself, imprisoned De Sade for the depravities of the novel for the rest of his life.  Casanova  was also a guest.  And was this the fireplace Dickens described?

Popes had ‘mod cons’,  even a bathtub

Pope Pius VII passed a night 3rd November 1809 suffering from a light fever on his way as a French prisoner to crown Napoleon in Paris.

The art critic Brian Sewell made an entertaining documentary ‘Brian Sewell’s Grand Tour’ in which he reads from entertaining actual accounts of the ‘milords’ who stayed here. We forget how tough travelling was before the railway age,  even for the wealthy. Later he also visits Orvieto where he makes some amusing comments within the cathedral. Highly recommended, unless you find his voice too much – somebody said, ‘He even makes the Queen sound common.’

Read Part One – Grand Tour: Radicofani on the Cassia – here

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A fallen woman flying on a devil’s back, one of the images by Signorelli that so stimulated Freud

Freud, Orvieto and Signorelli

 Freud, Orvieto, Signorelli: the Renaissance frescoes by Luca Signorelli had a profound effect upon Freud. In the entrance hall of Freud’s last home in London, on the right, is a picture of Tivoli, a reminder that Italy was his favourite holiday destination and his spiritual home.

Gardens of Villa Este, Tivoli

50 years after his death in London a collection of black and white Italian postcards was found in a drawer. Purchased during his first of three visits to Orvieto in 1897 they depict frescoes by Luca Signorelli from the San Brizio Chapel in Orvieto cathedral. His encounter with the Renaissance artist from Cortona had a profound effect upon him that profoundly influenced his life and work.

When Freud arrived in Orvieto 120 years ago in 1897 he was going through a turbulent period for several reasons: he was mourning his father who had died in December; partly as a result of this he was in the process of jettisoning his conclusion that hysteria was caused by paternal seduction in childhood turning instead towards the idea of infant sexuality; curiously, the man who sought the source of almost everything in sex had recently set out on a life of celibacy after siring six children in nine years.  Furthermore, two years before he had embarked upon self analysis, then an uncharted journey into the unknown, and in 1896 coined the term psychoanalysis.

Orvieto Duomo and Stars of David

The wonders that Freud saw when he walked into the San Brizio Chapel in Orvieto Cathedral. The Fra Angelico frescoes on the ceiling, the Signorelli on the walls.

The frescoing of the walls was undertaken by Luca Signorelli in 1499 aged about 54. Signorelli’s vision is apocalyptic.

The Antichrist panel left and the Elect in paradise right. Fra Angelico frescoes above on the vaulted ceiling.

On the left is the preaching of the Antichrist followed by the elect cavorting, largely naked, in paradise.

Antichrist left and the Elect in Paradise right. Bottom left corner are Signorelli himself left with hat and Fra Angelico behind, both in black.

Other walls and lunettes show scenes of angels smiting the ungodly with death rays – in fact there is a lot of smiting going on all over the chapel, a veritable orgy of sex and violence.

the wicked smitten by death rays from on high

On the wall opposite are two tableau, both a riot of eroticism and naked flesh, not perhaps what what one would expect in a church, the damned thrown into inferno by devils followed by the saved hauling themselves up from their graves to eternal life.

The damned thrown into hell.

The resurrection of the dead

The tableau that seems to have exerted the greatest fascination upon Freud is the Antichrist. An unusual subject, it was commissioned by the powerful Monaldeschi, a Guelf family, always close to the papacy and in opposition to the Ghibellines who supported the Emperor; the scene is a polemic against heresy, especially the Cathars who had been particularly bothersome in Orvieto, but also against Jews.

The devil whispers to Antichrist, probably based on Savonarola. On left the usurious Jew bribes a blonde.

Freud had been aware of antisemitism since his childhood in Moravia when his father had told his young son that he had humbly turned the other cheek when accosted by an aggressive antisemite on the street. Ever since, Freud had admired more martial father-figures like Cromwell, Hannibal and significantly, Moses.

A spectator watches the mayhem above. He is surrounded by ‘grotesques’, painted just after the recent discovery of the grottoes of Nero’s Domus Aurea in Rome.

The Catholic Church at the time saw Jews not merely as infidels, but Jesus-killing heretics. Freud, who was suffering emotional and intellectual turmoil after his father’s death, stood surrounded by Signorelli’s apocalyptic maelstrom and saw the son, Christ, effectively slaying the father, Judaism.

A smitten Dante figure

Self-portrait of Luca Signorelli surrounded by mayhem looks out of the frame. Behind him stands Fra Angelico or perhaps not – it could be the Archdeacon.

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Freud and a Tale of Three Cities: Vienna, London and……. Orvieto.

The Vienna home in Berggasse 19 is easy to spot – he lived and worked in two modest, dark flats on the mezzanine floor left and right of the long red Freud sign; 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London, is by comparison quite understated, just the round Blue Plaque; Orvieto now has a modest grey plaque to the right of the doorway.

The Vienna flat contains little: his hats and cane, a hip flask used on his travels and the furniture of the waiting room where he held his 8.30 Wednesday evening meetings which Anna Freud returned to Vienna.

Freud lived in Vienna for 47 years,  whereas he lived in London for a mere eighteen months till he died an exile just after the outbreak of World War II in 1939, though his daughter Anna lived on in the Freud home in  Hampstead for another 40 years.

The London home contains most of his possessions shipped from Vienna before the war. His chair was specially built for him so that he could read with his leg over the arm. The glass jar above the antiquities cabinet contains his and his wife’s ashes. The original Apulian krater with a Dionysiac imagery was smashed by burglars in 2014.

In Orvieto he never lived at all, but he did stay in the Hotel delle Belle Arti in Corso Cavour 36 in 1897, 1902 and 1907. However, this small Umbrian town was to contribute to the development of his theories quite disproportionately.

The Former Hotel delle Belle Arti in Palazzo Bisenzi (building on right with balcony) where Freud stayed on the main street, Corso Cavour, Orvieto.

Freud admitted to three passions: travelling, archeology and smoking. Freud was an ardent, but anxious, traveller. He did most of his writing while away from Vienna. Italy was his favourite destination, he came here 24 times, seven to Rome alone. Travelling in Italy gave him the freedom and relaxation that he lacked in Vienna which he confessed to his friend Fliess was a city he loathed.

Archeology was more than a hobby, it dovetailed with his delving into the human psyche, in fact he had more archeology books in his library than any other subject. Just before his Orvieto trip he started collecting antique statuettes a hobby that developed in Orvieto when he met Riccardo Mancini who not only offered him newly unearthed antiquities, but invited him to the Etruscan necropolis at the Cimitero del Crocefisso where he preserved a tomb as it had been found with its grave goods and two skeletons. This tomb was to feature in an important dream of Freud’s.

Freud’s dream: “I had already been in a grave once, but it was an excavated Etruscan grave near Orvieto, a narrow chamber with two stone benches along its walls, on which the skeletons of two grown men were lying.The inside of the wooden house in the dream looked exactly like it, except that the stone was replaced by wood. The dream seems to have been saying:’If you must rest in a grave let it be the Etruscan now”.

Mancini even offered Freud a plot of land that was guaranteed to give up more Etruscan treasures; after mulling it over a while he declined.

Freud’s third passion was smoking, twenty-five cigars a day, yet he failed to quit even though he knew it was killing him and causing him terrible pain.

Freud’s father Jacob had died in October 1896, prompting a crisis in Freud’s thinking and writing in early 1897 that was to result in his embarking upon self-analysis, something that no one had ever done before. At around this time, he had also decided on chastity after his youngest and last child Anna (destined to become his intellectual heir) was born December 1895. From 1896 he would sublimate his libido into his mission, psychoanalysis, the term he coined in 1897.

When Freud arrived in September, Orvieto had, until the recent opening of the railway to Rome, been an out of the way place, a Bruges La Morte under an Umbrian sun. Olave Potter in her turn of the century book A Little Pilgrimage in Italy 1911 called the chapter on Orvieto, City of Woe; the Pre-Raphaelite painter Burne-Jones passing through in 1871 thought the people striking to look at, but the saddest looking folk he saw in all Italy.

Orvieto at dawn in April

From the station Freud would have taken the new funicular cable car up the precipitous rock and through the dark tunnel beneath the Albornoz fortress, itself a charged experience for someone of Freud’s sensibility.

Next to the funicular is the 16th century St Patrick’s Well, a tourist attraction mentioned in Freud’s Baedecker guidebook. Although Freud does not mention a visit it is unlikely that he would have passed up such a Dantesque experience on at least one of his sojourns.

The well is 62m deep and of a double helix spiral, like DNA, so that the donkey carrying water up did not meet the donkey going down. The increasing gloom during the descent, the marvel of the engineering, the effort of returning to the light up a sort of Jacob’s ladder, the suggestive nature of the spiralling shaft must surely have impressed him; yet he never mentions the well.

Freud though a non-believer was well read in the scriptures and would certainly have known of many references to wells and their importance to a desert people, not least Moses with whom he identified in his quest for a psychoanalytical promised land; indeed, Moses met his wife Zipporah at the Midian well.  The commissioner of the well, Pope Clement VII (the one who gave Henry VIII such a hard time over his divorce), also saw himself as a new Moses, having a commemorative medal struck by Cellini showing Moses striking the rock with water gushing forth and the motto ”Ut bibat populous” (for the people to drink).

However, the letters he wrote to his wife’s sister Minna Bernays with whom he corresponded in the most intimate manner about his work, vacations and thoughts, are all missing from the period 1893 to 1910, the timespan of his three Orvieto visits. There has been much speculation that Freud and Minna had an affair, even that he procured her an abortion, and that their correspondence may have been occulted or destroyed for this reason.
The well may or not have been important to the formulation of Freud’s theories, but the frescoes in Orvieto Cathedral by the Renaissance artist Luca Signorelli most certainly were.

To be continued……..

Tale of Three Cities Part II

Tale of Three Cities Part III

Tale of Three Cities Part IV

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In April 2015 we went on a photo tour to the ruined city of Castro.

Castro before destruction painted around 1567

415 years ago a city in Central Italy the capital of the Duchy of Castro was totally destroyed, not by earthquake or flood, but by the Pope himself egged on by his sister in law who had a pernicious influence over him. The malevolent female appears to have been motivated solely by personal spite against her erstwhile neighbours, the Farnese family.

Castro as it is now, just a wooded hill. From here cannon bombarded the city in 1649

Nowadays it seems as though the world is going from bad to worse, but perhaps we just have to admit it is just the usual cycle of civilisation being assaulted from without and within by barbarism; after all 25 years ago we still had the Berlin Wall and the constant threat of nuclear war; 70 years ago the Second World War was drawing to a close, but hundreds of thousands were still to die in the last months; a hundred years ago the Armenian genocide began in the Ottoman Empire, and Italy despite observing the blood letting in France, Belgium, Gallipoli and Russia stood poised to enter the war against its erstwhile ally Austria in May 1915.

Castro, the remains of St Savino church, patron saint of Castro. The bells now hang in St Agnes church, Piazza Navona Rome.

However, things in the mid 17th century were almost as bad with unusually cold winters, caused by decreased sunspot activity and meteor showers resulting in famine all over the world, and widespread wars. Bellicosity is usually attributed to men, but in 1649 a fearsome Italian female was to cause grievous harm purely out of spite. Donna Olimpia Maidalchini was the sister in law of Pope Doria Pamphilj, Innocent X . Venal, mean, unscrupulous, felonious and avaricious as it was conceivable to be, yet she somehow insinuated herself into the Pope’s confidence and possibly his bed as well.

San Savino church, open charnel chambers in the foreground still containing the bones of the forbears of Castro

She was particularly antagonistic towards the powerful Farnese family. She convinced the Pope to initiate a dispute over the placement of a bishop to the Dukedom of Castro, the Farnese seat. The luckless bishop was murdered possibly by Farnese agents and Donna Olimpia now had her excuse.

Patrick Nicholas stands amongst the ruins in 2013 which have now been cleared to beautify the ruined city

The same area now after spending €445,000 of EU funds – a sea of cement.

She convinced Pope Innocent to send his German mercenaries to lay siege to Castro in the summer of 1649. When the city fell the order went out that nothing was to remain more than knee high. Explosives blew up fortifications, cables pulled down principal buildings, carvings and statues were cast down into the ravines. It all sounds horribly familiar, but this was a papal army destroying a Christian city a mere 100km north of Rome.

Restoration at Castro. Faux iron railing beloved of these restoration projects

The surviving population, including its Jewish community, was dispersed amongst local towns, the forest took hold and Castro, a city that had been continuously inhabited since Etruscan times and before, was given the epithet The Carthage of the Maremma.

…but rescue is on the way, public funding, hooray!

However, the destruction has not stopped. The ruins have been plundered of treasures over the last 40 years. Fireplaces from Castro end up in refurbished country houses, 16th century doorways now open onto manicured Tuscan lawns, and frescoes revealed by recent legal excavations of enthusiastic, unpaid volunteers have disappeared onto the international art market, while what remains is being either ‘renovated’ with tons of cement, metres of plastic sheeting, and dozens of pointless mock iron railings, as a way of tapping into Euro-funding, or is disappearing fast through neglect.

Before

……. and half a million €uro after. Note that the paving is no longer there. Probably now in some local councilor’s rockery.

The neglect round the corner is  astonishing – how could so much be spent on a useless ‘restoration’ when round the corner is a scene of utter desolation?

Santa Maria Intus Civitatem, open to the elements and crumbling, is not 25 metres from the ‘restored’ area. The protective plastic sheeting  is all but destroyed.

a modern crucifixion

The frescoes that have not already been stolen are crumbling and fading

shotgun wound

After Castro was completely destroyed the Papal army placed a stele in the middle of what remained of Piazza Maggiore, “QUI FU CASTRO” Here was Castro. Even that has disappeared. Maria has been weeping ever since, but she will not be weeping much longer, she will be gone along with almost everything there was worth weeping for.

fast fading weeping Virgin in St Maria’s church

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Near Orvieto on a ridge looking over a deep valley into Southern Tuscany stands a sinister looking castle in the mock-Gothic style of the late nineteenth century. It once belonged to the immensely rich Cahen family, still remembered in Orvieto where a square is named after them. The castle was intended to be the country home of Conte (later Marquess) Edoardo Cahen and his beautiful Anglo-Greek wife Christine, but neither of them were ever to live there. Édouard Cahen d’Anvers died in Rome in 1894 before the castle was completely refurbished; she separated from him and died in Meran in 1884. Now Castle Cahen in Torre Alfina is uninhabited, used only for private functions.

Creepy Places to photograph in Tuscany: Cahen Castle, Torre Alfina, Orvieto, Italy

Edoardo Cahen, scion of the Cahens d’Anvers, belonged to the cosmopolitan Jewish European aristocracy – akin to royalty but with a lot more cash – that moved effortlessly from one country to another, spoke several languages fluently, had branches of the same family in several capitals, and having made their fortunes in banking, commerce and insurance were happy to devote themselves to cultural pursuits rather than huntin’, shootin and fishin’ which were the most common pastimes amongst the older established aristocracies around Europe. The Cahens d’Anvers became rich through the novel idea of using the pigeon post between Antwerp and Amsterdam to steal a march on their stock market rivals. Edoardo Cahen was granted a concession to build part of the Prati neighbourhood of Rome after the Unification of Italy.

Alice (L) and Elisabeth Cahen (R) by Renoir. Elisabeth was murdered in Auschwitz.

Edoardo’s three nieces were painted by Renoir. However, his brother Louis disliked the painting of Alice and Elisabeth so much it was hung in the servant’s quarters; what is more he quibbled and stalled over paying the bill, 1,500 francs (about 10-15,000 Euros today), arousing a previously un-manifested anti-Semitism in the artist. The Cahens may have been notable patrons of the arts, but this incident perhaps demonstrates that their taste was possibly rather arriviste.

Irène’s daughter Béatrice along with her husband and two young children died in Auschwitz as did her sister Elisabeth and other members of the family. The painting became part of Herman Göring’s illicit collection.

Irène Cahen, Eduardo’s neice by Renoir

Edoardo’s father Joseph Mayer Cahen d’Anvers had lent considerable funds to finance the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy, and a grateful nation bestowed upon him the title of Conte. The influence of capital on the fate of nations is often underestimated. Edoardo Cahen then developed a large area of Rome, even before it became the capital of Italy, near the Vatican an area that was to be known as Prati.

After these exertions, he decided to retire with his wife to a tumbledown castle near Orvieto in the wilds of the Umbria-Latium borders. She was Christine Spartali the younger of two highly educated and beautiful sisters who moved in the artistic beau-monde of 1860s London. Christine’s sister Marie was considered by the Pre-Raphaelites, ‘one of the most beautiful women of her generation’. Indeed the poet Algernon Swinburne was so smitten he exclaimed, ‘She is so beautiful I feel as if I could sit down and cry.’ It has to be said however that he was quite wont to weeping.

La Principesse, now in the Peacock Room, Freer Collection, Washington D.C.

Marie Spartali had been painted by Rossetti and went on to become a notable professional painter for the rest of her long life, whilst Christine modelled for Whistler in 1864 – she was the ‘Principesse du Pays de la Porcellaine’ possibly his most famous painting. She was photographed by the most famous portrait photographer of her day, Julia Margaret Cameron sometime between 1865 and 70 probably in the Isle of White where they were neighbours. Exposures were long in those days so it was hard to manifest unbridled joy, but there is no denying that she has a more than usual Pre-Raphelite mournfulness about her.

The long exposures required by Cameron’s photography were as of naught compared with posing for Whistler: twice a week for 6 months till eventually Christine fell ill and had to be replaced with a stand-in to finish the picture. Besides the Whistler picture (which Spartali père did not like and refused to purchase) many of Marie Spartali’s paintings of typically Pre-Raphaelite subjects seem to portray her younger sister. This obsessive interest in one model was common amongst the Pre-Raphaelites.

Christine Spartali, Julia Margaret Cameron about the time she met Cahen

Both Spartali girls were exceptionally tall (Marie was 190cm) and highly educated, but whereas the elder sister studied painting under Ford Maddox Brown and became a noted painter for the rest of her long life, Christine never pursued a career. Marie fascinated Edward Burne Jones who portrayed her in his Cupid Delivering Psyche – in both male and female roles; he was known for his exotic sexual tastes.

Cupid and Psyche, Burne-Jones

Christine married Cahen in 1869 in Chelsea despite the opposition of her Greek Orthodox father, the Greek consul general in London. How did they meet? Did Cahen move in the arty world of the Pre-Raphaelites and their like? We have no picture of him and I cannot find any account of his time in London. One of his brothers, Albert, was a reasonably well-known composer in France who studied under César Franck.

Path leading to the Cahen mausoleum through The Sasseto wood

At first they had enjoyed the cosmopolitan life in Naples, Rome and Paris where their 2 boys were born, but it seems in Rome the marriage began to go wrong and by 1880 she was attempting – unsuccessfully – to divorce Cahen. Her health deteriorated, possibly owing to the depressing prospect of a chatelaine’s life in darkest Umbria, but at least this illness brought about a partial reconciliation with her father. She took to chloral hydrate and alcohol. According to Rossetti’s brother Michael she died miserable and alone in Tirol of catalepsy in 1884, though it is more likely that the chloral carried her off aged just 37.

Edoardo Cahen, lover of Greco Roman art, took the bizarre decision to build himself a mock gothic mausoleum which would not have looked out of place in Highgate Cemetery.

Cahen bought Torre Alfina in 1881, but it took 20 years to make it truly habitable by which time Cahen and his wife were both dead and there was practically nothing left of the original mediaeval building – what we see today is a mock gothic pile.

Cahen Mausoleum

Cahen Mausoleum in Sasseto Wood

Rather like the fictional Moisè Finzi-Contini who built a monstrous sepulchre looking like a set from Aida that all Ferrara’s Jewish community found absurd, Edoardo Cahen lover of Greco Roman art took the bizarre decision to build himself a mock gothic mausoleum which would not have looked out of place in Highgate Cemetery (where incidentally Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Sidall is buried).

It lies in the forest a kilometre or so below the mock Gothic castle which he never lived to see completed – he died in 1894 aged 62.

Peeking through the door to the open tomb

The earthly remains of Édouard Cahen d’Anvers, Born 1832 died, Rome, 3 May 1894 in the 62nd year of his life as it says on the coffin.

His body was embalmed by the Vatican’s own undertaker; his coffin placed on the top shelf in a vault designed to host generations of Cahens, it lies alone. The sons never brought their mother’s remains to the sepulcher. She was buried in the Spartali vault in London. The two sons left Italy with the introduction of the racial laws in 1938 when Jews were banned from owning property amongst other restrictions.

Edoardo Cahen’s coffin amongst on the top of otherwise empty shelves in the Mausoleum

photographer Patrick Nicholas is reflected in the water

The Writing on the Wall

The two Cahen sons left Italy following The Racial Manifesto of 1938 when Jews were stripped of their citizenship, barred from the professions, excluded from banking, education and the civil service; they were also liable to have their property confiscated. Italian Jewry had been emancipated during the process of the unification of Italy between 1860 and 1870, but now Mussolini determined to cement the Berlin Rome Axis by bringing Italian racial laws into line with Germany’s. 6,000 Jews emigrated 1938-1943. Of those that stayed something over 6,000  perished out of a pre-1938 population of  46,500.

Racial Laws in cartoon form with evident racialist stereoptypes in a fascist paper.

Rome Berlin Axis, Castiglione del Lago station, Trasimene

In 1943-4 the castle was used by the Germans as a command centre and suffered bomb damage as a result. The contents were auctioned off in 1969. Neither Cahen sons had children.

During wartime the mausoleum sacrificed its iron railings and recently the tomb was broken into, the grave stone smashed, the coffin desecrated.

The castle until recently belonged to an absentee landlord, the uncouth, corpulent, criminal bankrupt, Luciano Gaucci who starting from humble beginnings with a cleaning business in Rome, graduated to money laundering on a grand scale and onto wholesale corruption in the football business. He lists his enthusiasms as sex, horses and football.

The castle is now in the hands of a trust and is visitable.

The Cahen mausoleum

The abandoned swimming pool in the Sasseto grounds near the castle. Neither of the two Cahen sons had children.

Garden sculpture, the grinning faun in the Hermetic garden

The Hermetic garden

For those who have a taste for the sinister, we can include in our tour of places to photograph in Tuscany, the creepy Castle Cahen and its mock Gothic tomb in the woods.

Contact me for more info.

The post Creepy Places to photograph in Tuscany: Castle Cahen, a Mock-Gothic Style Mansion of the Late Nineteenth Century in Italy. appeared first on Camera Etrusca Photography Holidays & Workshops in Italy.

Castelluccio di Norcia is well known the world over amongst photographers for its picturesque vales of wild flowers at all times of the year – except when it is under snow which at 1500m is for most of the winter.

It is a bit of a trek to get there from Orvieto (around 2.5 hours) but we do pass through some of the most spectacular scenery in Italy not to mention the beautiful Umbrian city of Spoleto, home of the Two Worlds Festival every July.

Castellucio on the hill in the distance

The gentle slopes and olive groves of lower Umbria give way to furious rivers beloved of rafters rushing through deep limestone gorges flanked by mysterious dark forests worthy of Dante. This is the Umbria of Renaissance artists and pious people, saints …….and swine, after all the town of Norcia (Nursia) is famous all over Italy for its pork products known popularly as norcineria.

Spoleto Porta Fuga from which Hannibal’s army was repulsed in 217 BC

Brancaleone da Norcia pork-butcher’s shop

Curiously Norcia was once famous all over Europe since mediaeval times for its itinerant surgeons.  Surgery was prohibited amongst the clergy so the pig farmers of Norcia and nearby Preci who were already experienced castrators of livestock, turned their hands to gall bladder and cataract surgery and after 1588 with Pope Sisto’s ban on female opera singers, castration of boys. In fact the history of castration may go back much further into prehistory when ritual castration was carried out in these Sibilline Mountains as part of the cult of Cibele.

Gall stones were excruciatingly painful and extremely common amongst populations given to eating predominantly vegetables and pulses. Even a highly experienced surgeon was unlikely to achieve a success rate of 30% in gall stone removal.

It was a Norcia surgeon who operated successfully on the cataracts of Elizabeth I of England.

Siculo Coronation of the Virgin 1541

Surgery and butchery, not necessarily combined, brought wealth to the area and one of the delights of Italy is the way Italians even in out of the way places invested that money, not in the equivalent of BMWs and fancy watches, but in magnificent works of art. We opened the door of a church and there above the altar was Siculo’s Coronation of the Virgin. Absent for 25 years after the ruinous 1979 earthquake, it was restored only in 2005 by which time the locals had despaired of ever seeing it again.

The post Castelluccio Norcia: Photo Workshop Through Some of the Most Spectacular Scenery in Italy. appeared first on Camera Etrusca Photography Holidays & Workshops in Italy.