The Monster of Florence

by Douglas Preston

The first was Villa Sfacciata, where one of his very own ancestors, Amerigo Vespucci, had lived. Vespucci was the Florentine navigator, mapmaker, and explorer who was the first to realize that his friend Christopher Columbus had discovered a brand-new continent, not some unknown shore of India, and who lent his name Amerigo (Americus in Latin) to this New World.

It seems… an almost American story. And your own FBI was involved—that group Thomas Harris made so famous, the Behavioral Science Unit. I saw Thomas Harris at one of the trials, taking notes on a yellow legal pad. They say he based Hannibal Lecter on the Monster of Florence.”

Florence invented the very idea of the modern world. With the Renaissance, Florentines threw off the yoke of medievalism, in which God stood at the center of the universe and human existence on earth was but a dark, fleeting passage to the glorious life to come. The Renaissance placed humanity at the center of the universe and declared this life as the main event. The course of Western civilization was changed forever.

fictional Pazzi appeared in the twentieth century, when the writer Thomas Harris made one of his main characters in the novel Hannibal a Pazzi, a Florentine police inspector who gains fame and notoriety by solving the case of the Monster of Florence.

(The palace is one of the few seventeenth-century edifices in the city—disparaged by Florentines as “new construction.”)

(Today, DNA testing might still recover important information from the rag, but so far we know of no plans to test it.)

(It was said that Perugini was not pleased with Harris’s return on his hospitality, by having his alter ego gutted and hung from the Palazzo Vecchio.)

The forensic examination of the crime scenes had been, in general, incompetent.

Investigators had not generally kept samples of the victims’ hair, clothing, or blood, to see if their presence might be associated with any suspects.

“Have you ever considered,” he said, “that Pacciani’s trial might be nothing more than a case of the acquisition and management of power?”

Life was more about the process of living than reaching some end result.

“There is no longer true communication among us, because our very language is sick, and the sickness of our discourse carries us inevitably to sickness in our bodies, to neurosis, if not finally to mental illness. “When I can no longer communicate with speech, I will speak with sickness. My symptoms are given life. These symptoms express the need for my soul to make itself heard but cannot, because I don’t have the words, and because those who should listen cannot get beyond the sound of their own voices. The language of sickness is the most difficult to interpret. It is an extreme form of blackmail which defies all our efforts to pay it off and send it away. It is a final attempt at communication. “Mental illness lies at the very end of this struggle to be heard. It is the last refuge of a desperate soul who has finally understood that no one is listening or ever will listen. Madness is the renunciation of all efforts to be understood. It is one unending scream of pain and need into the absolute silence and indifference of society. It is a cry without an echo. “This is the nature of the evil of the Monster of Florence. And this is the nature of the evil in each and every one of us. We all have a Monster within; the difference is in degree, not in kind.”

I missed my life in Italy, but Maine was quiet, and with the frequent foul weather, fog, and cold, I found it a marvelous place to work. (I began to understand why Italy produced painters while England produced writers.)