MASS
When chilled Leopardi yearned for a cloakless sojourn among the scent of orange trees in Massa
A POET, A MUCH-LOVED SISTER, AND A PRINCESS
As for thecoming winter, I am now resolved to go and spend it in Massa di Carrara, which is seventy miles away from here; that climate is excellent, similar to that of Nice…one goes out and walks without iron; in the middle of the public square orange trees grow, planted in the ground.
So wrote the chilled Giacomo Leopardi from Florence in October 1827 in a missive to his dear sister Pauline, a “prisoner” in the palace of Recanati.
For some years, in fact, a double row of orange trees had been “planted in the ground,” not in greenhouses or protected courtyards, to crown the new public square desired by Elisa Baciocchi, Napoleon’s sister and Duchess of Massa, as a suitable front for the monumental Baroque facade of the Ducal Palace.
ORANGE SQUARE, OFFICIAL LIVING ROOM OF THE LITTLE DUCHY
They hadbeen planted in 1819 the “bitter” but beautiful melaranches to encircle three sides of the ducal square, and, for that matter, already a few centuries earlier, in his “Description of all Italy,” Leandro Alberti depicted the landscape around the city thus:“a vague garden, since such can be called all that country, being full of thick forests of cedars, oranges and olives.”
And Carducci echoed him when he wrote, “do you know that in Massa there is a square all surrounded by double rows of orange trees?“
It is a very mild climate that since the Middle Ages has favored the development of citrus cultivation in the surrounding area of Massa, thanks to the nearby sea that mitigates the seasons and the precious cloister of the Apuan Alps that protects its vitality from the cold winter winds. And so orange and lemon trees vegetate abundantly in family gardens and frame not only the Piazza Ducale, but streets and other squares, like unusual street furniture.
MARBLE LIONS AND THE AWARD-WINNING SCULPTOR IN PARIS
Forsome time a marble obelisk embarked for Barcelona had been sent back to its native land, and lay abandoned on the seashore beach as a valuable remnant of a winter swell “straccore.”
In 1853 it was brought and placed in the center of the square. But the marble “stem” was lost in the vast space from the tree belt, and Professor Giovanni Isola, a great ornatist and winner at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, then proposed to allocate at its base four proud lions, to be carved at the local sculpture school, in marble blocks of 190 palms.
It took more than 30 years, however, for them to be finally carved and placed, and Professor Isola did not have time to see them, leaving the task to his son Lodovico. Legend has it, however, that the four felines were fashioned equal to each other, but on a mysterious summer night they changed their posture and attributes in grasping, between their sturdy paws, four different prey.
Since then they have been keeping watch as stern guardians over all the passers-by who, on rainy autumn days or sunny summer afternoons, but never as cold as Giacomo in Florence, cross the Piazza degli Aranci, as Giosuè Carducci did fifty years later, to follow their more or less fragile fates.