of the 16th century, at the Cardinal’s request, it had been transferred from the convent of San Domenico to the more comfortable complex of St. Florian, while the Torrione di Mezzogiorno had remained the seat of the prisons where the condemned were held and tortured. Who knows what those removed pages of the book were about; perhaps there was a scabrous story in which the uncle accused his niece of witchcraft, had locked up her in the dungeons of the Torrione di Mezzogiorno, or in the more comfortable ones of the St. Florian complex, had tortured her and finally had burned her at the stake in the public square. Of course, this story would have tarnished the memory of Cardinal Baldeschi, and so someone in the family would tear out those pages to make them lose track.
It was starting to get hot, and Lucia opened the large window of the room, just the one giving on the balcony supported by the four strange statues, taking care to close the large mosquito net, so that air could enter, but not annoying insects. While the dean appeared, he reproached Lucia with his gaze, an inquisitive gaze, who seemed to want to interpret in the gesture of opening the window the young woman’s contemporary desire to light a cigarette.
I will certainly not give you satisfaction, old caryatid! I certainly don’t smoke here, if only because I can’t stand your mischief, but also out of respect for the precious objects, books, stuccoes, paintings, which are kept in here, Lucia brooded to herself, while she noticed the similarity between the dean, the almost seventy-year-old Guglielmo Tramonti, and Cardinal Artemio Baldeschi, as she saw him every day in a portrait hanging on the walls of the room and as he appeared to her in her recent dreams.
«Even though we don’t have air conditioning here, it’s best to keep the windows closed. Sweating has never hurt anyone, and the air could be harmful to the works we have in custody!» Lucia saw the dean heading towards the window, but instead of closing it as she intended, he opened the mosquito net and looked out through the metal railing on the balcony. In a moment, the dean disappeared. Lucia rushed to the balcony and looked down. Guglielmo Tramonti’s body laid lifeless on the pavement of the square, face down on the ground, dressed as a Cardinal and surrounded by a reddish patch of his own blood. How did it could happen? Where did all that blood come from? The height was not too high! Had he smashed his skull and his vital fluid was leaving him from an open wound on his forehead? And the clothes? Why was he wearing the purple suit? He wasn’t wearing it a few moments before! She looked up looking for the details of the Square and saw it again as it was in the vision she had had just before, when she had left the bar: the Square of a Renaissance city. The voice of the Dean, coming from behind, brought her back to reality. She found herself focusing with his eyes on the tombstone which, on the facade of the Church of St. Florian, remembered Giordano Bruno as a victim of priestly tyranny. Everything was again in its place, the fountain with the obelisk, the Complex of St. Florian, the Cathedral, the Bishop’s Palaces, Palazzo Ghislieri. A little further on, on the bell tower of the Government Palace waved normally the tricolour flag.
«Well? I asked you to close the window and what do you do, you go out on the balcony? But... are you sure you’re okay, girl? You look very pale. Do you want to go home for the day?»
«No, no, thanks, I’m fine. It’s all gone, just a dizzy spell. I instinctively needed to go out for some oxygen, to get some fresh air. But it’s all right now, I can get back to work.»
«Fine, but I’d be glad to know you’re getting a medical check-up. You’re not pregnant, are you?»
«The Holy Spirit hasn’t come to visit me yet», Lucia concluded ironically, accompanying these last words with an evasive gesture of her hand. She took the book on the History of Jesi and began to scan the first pages. On the tenth page, she opened the OCR program on the computer and started to manually correct errors, which allowed her to read some new parts, unknown to her.
THE LEGEND OF A KING
The story of Jesi began on a distant day three thousand years ago. A beginning without spectators. A small crowd of people climbed up the course of our river, stuck along the left bank. They advance slowly, opening the way between the thick brushwood and the tall poplar trees reflecting in the waters of the river.
They are strange people, with a strange name, “pelasgi” they are called, their faces are tanned, marked by the tiredness of a long and adventurous journey. They have worn-out clothes; someone wear skins of animals that smell wild. The faces of men are framed by thick hair and thick beards that endless days of sunshine have made them dry, wicked.
They are the survivors of a flotilla of small and fast boats that won the battle against the storms of the Adriatic sea. They landed a few days ago towards the mouth of that river that now crumbles into a thousand glistening rays of the sun. Emigrated from their land, which was the homeland of their elders, heroes sung by a blind poet for the villages of distant Greece, they are looking for a new land, a new homeland.
And here they are, after an exhausting march, at the foot of a hill that grew as if by magic in the heart of the valley that had welcomed them down, at the mouth of the river. All around, woods as far as the eye can see, climbed on the surrounding hills. And the silence of a nature asleep for millennia. Always.
A man, with a venerable and regal appearance, with the sign of command, points out that promontory that almost looks like a small island emerged at a beautiful position, in the middle of the valley, to collect some castaways. And he walks in that direction. The others follow him, keeping his pace, without speaking. On the highest part of the hill, the old king pushes his gaze away, discovering a marvellous landscape, drawn by the hundred shades of an immense green, barely cut by the sinuous trace of the river that sinks down, towards the sea.
The old king, then turned to his own, nods in agreement and everyone lays their poor things on the ground. So they finally found the promised land, they reached the goal of their long wanderings through seas and lands.
This, from now on, will be their new home.
And so it was that King Esius founded the city of Jesi.
And so the first Jesi’s inhabitants were Greeks, fleeing the destroyed city of Troy. Like Aeneas, who had gone up the coasts of the Tyrrhenian Sea to settle in Latium, King Esius had found the easiest way up the Adriatic Sea and reached the mouth of the Esino river.
Lucia had become enthusiastic about this history, and dreams and visions were now relegated to a remote corner of her mind. Her brain and imagination were already in gear.
This data and news could be used for a good publication or, why not, for the writing of a historical novel set in these areas, Lucia began to think, also meditating on possible gains.
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