Conti

As visitors to Florence know, the nearby town of Fiesole has something of heaven about it.  Tucked away high on one of the surrounding hills, with its wonderful, refreshing air – so cool after the rigours of the crucible of infernal heat below – this little gathering of square, church, villas, gardens and Roman remains has an almost god-like view of the Tuscan plain that seems to cry out for a great painter to do it justice.

I had been here many years ago, and returning was pleased to recognise its layout and principal features.  But I had not reckoned on meeting another memory from that time, one that was rather deeper and more complex than those of the simple touristic visit I had made to the town itself.

It was a guidebook which gave the first indication that something had changed.  There was a relatively new museum here, it said, devoted to the works of an Italian artist who had spent the last years of his life here at Fiesole: Primo Conti.

It had to be the same, I though.  The same painter whom, some fifteen years before, I had been brought to visit here.  I was staying with a charming elderly spinster in Florence, living in a huge cool shuttered apartment near the centre of the city.  Her younger sister was something of an acolyte of the arts.  One of her great catches was Primo Conti – “Maestro” as she called hiim.  Partly to impress and partly to give pleasure she arranged for the three of us to visit his hillside villa.

We made the trip there in the dead heat of summer, the car climbing through the small winding roads out of Florence into the hills.  I soon lost my bearings, and therefore had no idea where this villa was when we finally arrived there.  But I could see at once it was stunningly placed at the edge of a hill with a huge panoramic view of the heat-blurred mountains around us.  The house itself was a simple Renaissance villa with an interesting internal design and remains of some School of Botticelli frescoes which had been uncovered in the house’s restoration.

Signor Conti was a dignified old gentleman with a brilliant white beard and hair as I remember.  He must have been in his late seventies when I met him.  His eyes took on a distant look and his voice became more reflective as he answered reverent questions of his female admirer with stories of long ago.  As we sat out on the terrace drinking iced tea by the pond, I was shown some of his works, and invited to be amazed by his precocious facility.  Ungraciously, I was not particularly impressed.

When I returned there recently, and saw the same villa, now a rather cold and sad museum, the rooms empty except for the paintings, and when I descended to his workshop – eerily left untouched since he last worked there – and looked out at that same scene, I had a chance to reconsider.  I saw now that Conti had indeed achieved something valuable with his life and his art, that the world he had created – this house, those paintings – was of real enduring beauty.  And I realised how wrong I had been those years ago, how incorrect in my youthful judgement, and how I had paid for my arrogant computation that day, and in the years until reckoning.

(14.3.92)

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