Florence was actually at war the year we made this journey. She had sided with the 
great and famous Francesco Sforza, to take over the city of Milan. The cities of Naples 
and Venice were on the side of Milan. It was a terrible war. But it didn't touch us.
  It was fought in other places and by hired men, and the rancor caused by it was heard 
in city streets, not on our mountain.
  What I recall from it were two remarkable characters involved in the fray. The first of 
these was the Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, a man who had been our enemy whether 
we liked it or not because he was the enemy of Florence. But listen to what this man was 
like: he was hideously fat, it was said, and very dirty by nature, and sometimes would 
take off all his clothes and roll around naked in the dirt of his garden! He was 
terrified of the sight of a sword and would scream if he saw it unsheathed, and he was 
terrified too to have his portrait painted because he thought he was so ugly, which he 
was. But that was not all. This man's weak little legs wouldn't carry him, so his pages 
had to heft him about. Yet he had a sense of humor. To scare people, he would suddenly 
draw a snake out of his sleeve! Lovely, don't you think?
  Yet he ruled the Duchy of Milan for thirty-five years somehow, this man, and it was 
against Milan that his own mercenary, Francesco Sforza, turned in this war.
  And that man I want to describe only briefly because he was colorful in an entirely 
different way, being the handsome strong brave son of a peasant - a peasant who, 
kidnapped as a child, had managed to become the commander of his band of kidnappers - and 
this Francesco became commander of the troop only when the peasant hero drowned in a 
stream trying to save a page boy. Such valor. Such purity! Such gifts.
  I never laid eyes on Francesco Sforza until I was already dead to the world and a 
prowling vampire, but he was true to his descriptions, a man of heroic proportions and 
style, and believe it or not, it was to this bastard of a peasant and natural soldier 
that the weak-legged crazy Duke of Milan gave his own daughter in marriage, and this 
daughter, by the way, was not by the Duke's wife, poor thing, for she was locked up, but 
by his mistress.
  It was this marriage which led eventually to the war. First Francesco was fighting 
bravely for Duke Filippo Maria, and then when the weird unpredictable little Duke finally 
croaked, naturally his son-in-law, handsome Francesco, who had charmed everybody in Italy 
from the Pope to Cosimo, wanted to become the Duke of Milan!
  It's all true. Don't you think it's interesting? Look it up. I left out that the Duke 
Filippo Maria was also so scared of thunder that he was supposed to have built a 
soundproof room in his palace.
  And there is more to it than that. Sforza more or less had to save Milan from other 
people who wanted to take it over, and Cosimo had to back him, or France would have come 
down on us, or worse.
  It was all rather amusing, and as I have said, I was well prepared already at a young 
age to go into war or to court if it was ever required of me, but these wars and these 
two characters existed for me in dinner table talk, and every time someone railed about 
the crazy Duke Filippo Maria, and one of his insane tricks with a snake out of his 
sleeve, my father would wink at me and whisper in my ear, "Nothing like pure lordly 
blood, my son." And then laugh.
  As for the romantic and brave Francesco Sforza, my father had wisely nothing to say as 
long as the man was fighting for our enemy, the Duke, but once we had all turned together 
against Milan, then my father commended the bold self-made Francesco and his courageous 
peasant father.
  There had been another great lunatic running around Italy during earlier times, a 
freebooter and ruffian named Sir John Hawkwood, who would lead his mercenaries against 
anybody, including the Florentines.
  But he had ended up loyal to Florence, even became a citizen, and when he departed this 
earth, they gave him a splendid monument in the Cathedral! Ah, such an age!
  I think it was a really good time to be a soldier, you know, to sort of pick and choose 
where you would fight, and get as carried away with it all as you wanted to.
  But it was also a very good time for reading poetry, and for looking at paintings and 
for living in utter comfort and security behind ancestral walls, or wandering the 
thriving streets of prosperous cities. If you had any education at all, you could choose 
what you wanted to do.
  And it was also a time to be very careful. Lords such as my father did go down to 
destruction in these wars. Mountainous regions that had been free and pretty much left 
alone could be invaded and destroyed. It happened now and then that someone who had 
pretty much stayed out of things got himself worked up against Florence and in came the 
clattering and clanking mercenaries to level everything.
  By the way, Sforza won the war with Milan, and part of the reason was that Cosimo lent 
him the required money. What happened after that was absolute mayhem.
  Well, I could go on describing this wonderland of Tuscany forever.
  It is chilling and saddening for me to try to imagine what might have become of my 
family had evil not befallen us. I cannot see my father old, or imagine myself struggling 
as an elderly man, or envision my sister married, as I hoped, to a city aristocrat rather 
than a country baron.
  It is a horror and a joy to me that there are villages and hamlets in these very 
mountains which have from that time never died out - never - surviving through the worst 
of even modern war, to thrive still with tiny cobbled market streets and pots of red 
geraniums in their windows. There are castles which survive everywhere, enlivened by 
generation after generation. Here there is darkness. Here is Vittorio writing by the 
light of the stars.
  Brambles and wild scratching things inhabit the chapel below, where the paintings are 
still visible to no one and the sacred relics of the consecrated altar stone are beneath 
heaps of dust.
  Ah, but those thorns protect what remains of my home. I have let them grow. I have 
allowed the roads to vanish in the forest or broken them myself. I must have something of 
what there was! I must.
  But I accuse myself again of going on and on, and I do, there is no doubt. This chapter 
ought to be over.
  But it's very like the little plays we used to do in my uncle's house, or those I saw 
before the Duomo in Cosimo's Florence. There must be painted backdrops, props of fine 
detail, wires rigged for flight and costumes cut out and sewn before I can put my players 
on the boards and tell the fable of my making.
  I can't help it. Let me close my essay on the glories of the 1400s by saying what the 
great alchemist Ficino would say of it some years later on: It was "an age of gold." I go 
now to the tragic moment.
  
  
  3
  IN WHICH THE HORROR DESCENDS UPON US
  
  THE beginning of the end came the following spring. I had passed my sixteenth birthday, 
which had fallen that I year on the very Tuesday before Lent, when we and all the 
villages were celebrating Carnival. It had come rather early that year, so it was a bit