The Last Mona Lisa by Jonathan Santlofer

Author:Jonathan Santlofer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2021-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

50

Nothing I had read added to the explanation or secret of the missing pages, other than the repeated fact that I would need a magnifying glass to find out. I made a note to buy one and headed to the library. I needed to go through the journal again.

One of the two scholars I saw almost every day, the one with the ponytail, was in the courtyard. I was about to head in when he stopped me. “You are an American artist and art historian, sì?”

I was not in the mood to strike up a conversation but was curious to find out how he knew.

“Chiara,” he said in response to my question. “She make it her business to know everything about anyone in the library.”

I hoped Chiara didn’t know everything about me.

“Marco Pisano,” he said, extending his hand. “I teach art history at Florence University of the Arts, contemporary Italian art, transavanguàrdia my specialty.”

“The three C’s—Cucci, Chia, and Clemente.”

“So you know their artwork.”

“Very well. I’ve taught the Italian trans-avant-garde, as we call it in America, in my art history class. I’m a big Francesco Clemente fan.”

“It is too bad you were not here last month to see his exhibition at Le Murate Progetti Arte Contemporanea.”

“Le Murate?” The name stopped me. “Isn’t that the name of an old prison?”

“It is the old prison,” he said, explaining that the lower part had been renovated by the arts organization but that much of the prison remained intact.

It had never dawned on me that the prison might still exist.

Less than an hour later, Marco and I were in an enclosed courtyard at a table of a hip restaurant, literally carved out of part of the prison, Caffè Letterario. When I’d told him that part of my research involved the prison, he’d called his friend, the director of the arts organization, and she’d invited me for a tour. Beside us, a table of young people eating pizza and drinking beer were talking and laughing loudly while I tried to imagine my great-grandfather imprisoned in these stone walls.

Valentina Gensini, the artistic director of Le Murate, dark-haired and olive-skinned, was as attractive as she was interesting. She asked about my project, and I told her half the truth: that my great-grandfather had been imprisoned in these walls and I was thinking of writing about his life. “A book, how wonderful! You must come back and read from it when you are finished,” she said, a surprising offer.

I took in the high stone walls of the courtyard, which looked clean and scrubbed, while Valentina described how the place had been built in 1424 to house Benedictine nuns, who had chosen a walled-in life, “so the name, Murate, which means ‘walled-in.’” It had not become a men’s prison until the mid-1800s and remained so until 1985, when it was “crumbling and overcrowded,” Valentina said, “and several prisoners drowned in the great Arno flood of sixty-six—and there were riots!” She was proud that the arts organization had fought to make

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