Photo 1: This is the square of my city, Vicenza: Piazza dei Signori
It is now increasingly common to see a multitude of people walking around the city with their shoulders hunched and their eyes fixed on the screen of their smartphone. I hope you can be as lucky as me to live in a Renaissance city where you can walk tall. Why you ask me, but because the history of the city is written on the walls of a medieval city like Vicenza. Looking up, you come across many things from the past that tell of life and misdeeds that happened. The tombstones, the inscriptions are the means that our ancestors have chosen to hand down to posterity the facts that have characterized a certain period of life of the city. For this reason, today I will take you around the main course of Vicenza and its squares to discover together how in the past, since there was no internet and even less smartphones, important facts were transmitted, and why not, even gossip! In the meantime, we will discover that violence and crimes were quite common a few centuries ago and that life was certainly not easy, indeed we will say that if there was one easy thing, it was precisely to die, at the hands of some violent or overbearing boss, or of hunger or disease.
Photo 2: July 3, 1548, this infamous column commemorates the murders that took place in the city in those days practically in front of the house of the architect Andrea Palladio. Galeazzo from Rome with other delinquents entered the Valmarana house in Corso Palladio at lunchtime, while the doors were being opened to let the poor in to receive food. The conspirators entered the house and killed the three brothers Tomaso, Nicolò, Alberto and two servants, then and killed the lawyer Giovambattista Monza, then fled the city. All this for a refusal by the youngest of the Valmaranas to marry the widowed sister of Galeazzo and much older than him. Only one of the killers was caught and executed. The most responsible, Galeazzo, managed to escape and start a new life and founded a family that later became noble. The infamous column was erected in the place where the house of Galeazzo existed which was razed to the ground in order not to leave any testimony of the earthly passage of whoever was guilty of this crime.
Photo 3: Another plaque to remember the misdeeds of the camerlengo of the city who appropriated the city’s assets and for this wicked work he was banned for life from the city despite being of very high noble origins.
Photo 4: This plaque on the Torre Bissara is Latin and I haven’t been able to find what fact it can refer to, no news on the various books I have about Vicenza or even on the internet. I promise you that I will try to find out what mystery it may hide!
Photo 5: On a niche of the Cathedral of Vicenza this plaque commemorates the assassination of the Bishop of Vicenza which took place in 1183. That too was a period of struggle between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, i.e. those who sided with the Pope or the Emperor, with fratricidal struggles in the urban centers of Italy. The Bishop was truly a holy man and personally cared for the poor of the city. The citizens venerated him and prayed to him and asked several times that he be declared a saint, but only in the 1800s was he declared blessed.
Photo 6: The plaque on the Bissara Tower commemorating the placement of a mechanical clock on the tower itself in the 1300s, one of the first in the world.
Photo 7: This is not a tombstone but a reminder of sad moments closer to us. During World War II, anyone on the street during an air raid alert had to look for this signal. It was the indication that an air-raid shelter existed inside that house and the “P” indicated the number of people it could accommodate. Most likely this was the shelter that my child mother used to shelter from the bombs.
Photo 8: A cannonball fired on November 3, 1805 and driven into a wall during the siege by Napoleon’s troops of Vicenza defended by an Austrian garrison.
Photo 9: The plaque commemorating Luigi da Porto, author of the novella Romeo and Juliet, later taken up by Shakespeare to make it a masterpiece represented all over the world.
And in your city, are there any of these tombstones or other methods of remembering both happy and sad events?
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