The Two Margheritas
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About this ebook
The story passes through different periods in history based on the progress of the plot. The character of Margherita appears at times as a holy figure of the 12th century, and at times in the form of a modern day Margherita.
Was there an imaginary connection created between the two characters? Is the modern day Margherita influenced psychologically or physically by the Holy Margherita? Is it a case of reincarnation? revelations, parallel lives shrouded in mystery and mysterious, hallucinatory reality, occurring in the most beautiful region in the world where history always blended with romance, religion and mystery.
Uri Jerzy Nachimson
Uri J. Nachimson was born in Szczecin, Poland in 1947 and two years later his parents emigrated to Israel. As a young boy he loved to write, photograph and paint, and in 1966 he was drafted into the Israeli army where he served as a war photographer in the Northern Command. He participated in the six days war as a photographer in combat and his photographs were displayed at various exhibitions.His travels and adventures around the world are recorded in the various books he has written that are as of now are published. As an adventurer from birth, he wandered around in Prague as crowds demonstrated in front of Soviet tanks. His travels to Egypt are the inspiration for his book Seeds of Love.When in 1990 he went back to Poland to seek his roots, he was deeply affected by the attitude of the Poles towards the Jews both during and after World War II, and decided to research the history of the Jews of Poland during that era. Thus the trilogy was born; Lilly's Album, The Polish Patriot and Identity. The book The Polish Patriot, was translated and published in Italian and Polish. It featured this year at the International Book Fair in Turin, Italy.Uri's grandmother, Ida Friedberg, was the granddaughter of the Jewish writer A.S. Friedberg, editor of the Polish Jewish newspaper Hazefira, as well as the author of many books. As a teenager, Uri was greatly influenced by A.S. Friedberg's writings where the author describes his imaginary journeys to different countries. Uri decided to experience for himself the adventures to be able to tell them in his books.Ten years ago, Uri decided to move to Tuscany in Italy where he lives with his wife. He has two sons, a daughter and is the proud grandfather of seven grandchildren. While in Cortona he wrote Two Margheritas and Broken Hearts in Boulevard Unirii which was recently translated into Italian.'As long as I was busy with raising the children and supporting my family, I could not do serious writing, however, since I settled in Cortona, I have dedicated a lot of time to creative writing and the words just flow by themselves'
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Reviews for The Two Margheritas
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What a wonderful idea, a great story set in the beautiful Tuscany that I love so much. I visited the city of Cortona and saw the 800-year-old Santa Margherita. Great, great, don't miss it.
Book preview
The Two Margheritas - Uri Jerzy Nachimson
A Novel by Uri Jerzy Nachimson
We all have our inner demons
Glenn Beck
Published by:
Uri Jerzy Nachimson
Cortona, Italy
First Edition © 2015 by Uri Jerzy Nachimson
Written in Cortona, Tuscany. Originally in Hebrew - 2013-2014. © All rights reserved to Uri J. Nachimson Registration Number: 3516344444. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to jerzynachimson@gmail.com
This book is a work of fiction; Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Prologue
This story passes through two different periods in Tuscan history, with the character of Margherita appearing at times as a holy figure of the 12th century, and at times as a modern - day Margherita.
Is there any connection between the two characters? Is the modern-day Margherita influenced psychologically or spiritually by the Holy Margherita? Is it a case of reincarnation?
The reader will experience two historic periods, eight hundred years apart, intertwined with each other, revelations and parallel lives shrouded in mysterious, hallucinatory reality, occurring in the most beautiful region in the world, where history has always blended with romance, religion and mystery.
Historical Background
The year is 1247; the village is Laviano, a small rural community located in Umbria, in the valley between the Tuscan town of Montepulciano and Lake Trasimeno.
Margherita was born to a poor family. Her mother died when she was eight years old and her father remarried and had more children with his second wife. The second wife hated Margherita, and as a result Margherita was pushed aside and totally neglected.
After running away from home at the age of sixteen, Margherita met Arsenio Del Pecora, a young man from a wealthy, respectable and aristocratic family in the town of Montepulciano. He was ten years older than her, and drawn to her beauty and spirit. They decided she would take up residence with him at his parents’ home.
However, the members of the family were not keen on welcoming a member of the lower classes planning on living with their son without being married. Their disapproval notwithstanding Margherita stayed in the house, became pregnant and eventually bore a son.
Margherita lived a life of luxury, banquets and trips, and there was no doubt in the minds of everybody in the town that she was the wife of the most desirable and popular member of the aristocratic community of Montepulciano in Tuscany. She was instrumental in organizing cultural and social events in the region, and became the most beloved citizen of the town; except to Arsenio’s family.
In 1273, after nine years of happiness and wealth, Arsenio mysteriously died while hunting in Petrignano del Lago, an agricultural village which belonged to his family near Lake Trasimeno. Arsenio’s loyal dog ran all the way home and summoned Margherita who followed the dog to the dead body.
The next tragedy that befell Margherita was that her dead lover’s family drove her and her son out of their home. The most popular socialite of the community suddenly became a homeless wanderer, as even her own father refused to take her back. She was forced to sell her body in order to survive.
In despair, and as a last resort, Margherita decided to relocate to the city of Cortona, and to settle in a recently founded Franciscan Order. She befriended two monks, Giovanni de Castiglione and Fra Giunta Bevegnati, who guided her and counseled her to live a new life. In 1277 Margherita entered the Franciscan Third Order where she devoted her life to prayer, repentance and acts of charity.
In 1278, Margherita founded an order called Ordine delle Poverelle to help poor women. She also founded a hospital near the Church of San Basilio and an association called Santa Maria della Misericordia for women who dedicated their lives to the care of the poor.
Margherita died on February 22, 1297. Her body was embalmed, dressed in clothes embroidered with gold thread, and buried in the Basilica of San Basilio. In 1728 Pope Benedict XIII raised her status to that of sainthood. When the church was completed in 1887, she was re-interred in a glass coffin, lying on her back with her arms crossed wearing the same shoes and clothes she had worn since her death.
The Guelphs and Ghibellines
The Guelphs and Ghibellines were factions supporting the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, respectively, in central and northern Italy. During the 12th and 13th centuries, the split between these two parties played a role in shaping the internal policy of the Italian city-states. A struggle for power between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire had arisen with the Investiture Conflict, which began in 1075 and ended with the Concordat of Worms in 1122. The division between the Guelphs and Ghibellines in Italy, however, persisted until the 15th century.
Margherita D’Acquaviva
Margherita D’Acquaviva was born on a cold winter day in February 1247, in a small stone house in the village Laviano, Umbria, which is located in the vicinity of Lake Trasimeno. It is a picturesque parish in the valley surrounded by swamps on the route from Montepulciano to the town of Cortona.
The village consisted of a number of houses scattered throughout the valley with a small marketplace in the center. Here, every few days the peasants, merchants and farmers from the nearby villages came to set up stalls to sell their wares. A small church stood among the houses, built from local white limestone which was found in abundance along the waterways that flowed from the hills. The entire area was inundated with swamps, as the soil was clay and couldn’t absorb rainfall. As a result the entire area became marshy and regularly flooded the surrounding villages.
Overhead, on the ridge of the hill, stood a large house where the farmer Guglielmo Il Rosso, known as Red
lived. He was given that name because of his red hair. He managed the farms of Duke Lorenzo della Valle who lived near Montepulciano in a castle surrounded by high walls and virtually invisible to the public.
The house of Guglielmo Il Rosso was a long stone building of which a significant portion was partially used as a barn and partially used as a warehouse. In it he stored beets and grain and also used it to hang pork forequarters for smoking. In one area he stored tools that he distributed to farmers with whom he had a sharecropping agreement; half of the produce went to the duke who was the landowner and the other half remained with the farmer.
The house stood on the hilltop and looked down onto the valley of scattered pastures and terraces bordered with rows of small stones to protect their crops from being flooded.
The stone houses scattered in the valley below had roofs made of straw and clay that held them together. The cattle and chickens lived on the ground floor.
To reach the first floor it was necessary to climb a ladder. The floor was made of planks of rough wooden beams sawn from pine trunks and chestnut trees; trees that grow in natural woods. They grow in exposed areas suitable for farming and grazing sheep and cattle. On the floor there were mattresses made of burlap stuffed with dry straw on which the family slept. The upper floor was used as the living quarters.
One of those farmers was Tancredi Bartolomeo D’Acquaviva, a tall, burly hardworking man who worked all day in the field tending his grain crop which sometimes rotted due to excess rain and sometimes was the only food the dwellers of the house ate. He lived with his wife Rosalinda, a thin woman with a pretty face and their eight-year-old daughter Margherita, a happy girl with the face of an angel.
Immediately after the birth of Margherita, Rosalinda was forced to return to work in the fields tending the cattle, so she had no choice but to have Margherita looked after by Graziella, the daughter of a neighbor. Because of her ugliness, no man wanted her and she worked as a housekeeper to help the family put food on the table.
From the day she was born, Graziella bestowed the name Margherita
on the infant, because of her beautiful shining face and golden hair. It reminded her of the white and yellow flowers scattered throughout the meadows during the spring season. Tancredi showed no interest in the naming or anything else that happened at home, but Rosalinda was very happy with the name suggested by the neighbor’s girl and adopted it.
When Margherita was three years old, she would stand in a field near her house and look at the sky, staring for hours, watching the clouds and the birds passing. She would do so even on rainy days, shivering in the cold and wet, staring for hours as lightning tore through the sky. Even the echoes of thunder did not frighten her. She stood there as if looking to the Creator and wondering about the beauty of nature and movement of the heavenly bodies.
She would flood Graziella with questions such as, Who makes it rain?
or, Who created the mountains, valleys and lakes?
Graziella, being the ignoramus that she was, could not answer any of her questions.
Rosalinda became pregnant for the second time and that is when the problems began. She had contracted tuberculosis and never completely recovered from it. The pregnancy made her very weak and she could barely get out of bed. She was constantly vomiting and her skin became so transparent that her veins were visible. She suffered from labored breathing due to viscous mucus in her lungs.
The birth was a very difficult one because Rosalinda did not have the strength to push the baby out. The local midwife could not stop the flow of blood which flooded the mattress while she took out the dead baby from the mother. A few hours later, she returned her soul to her maker.
Rosalinda and her baby were buried next to each other in the graveyard of the small church, the church where she used to pray every day. A plain wooden cross made by Tancredi marked the mound of earth under which they were buried. The father stood in front of the grave and looked at the sky, as if searching for an explanation to the dual disaster that had befallen him; he was burying his wife and his newborn.
He stood there for many hours waiting for some kind of sign from heaven. When it got dark and the snowflakes began accumulating on his hair and shoulders, he turned to go home. When he got home, he silently bowed his head while completely ignoring little Margherita who was lying, huddled and crying, in the corner on top of a cold, damp rotting pallet.
A few weeks after the death of Rosalinda, when Margherita had barely turned eight years old, her father brought home a new wife. She was short, with rude features, a dark complexion from spending much time in the Tuscan sun and quite a bit older that Rosalinda. The relationship between her and Margherita could hardly be called loving, as the new wife did not utter a kind word to Margherita and showed no affection whatsoever. She did not care to see Margherita walking around aimlessly most of the day, or sitting glued to Graziella, who gave her love and affection.
Within a few months the new wife became pregnant and ultimately gave birth to a son. Margherita was busy most of the day cultivating her vegetable garden in a small area behind the house and became completely neglected, since the attention of the proud father was given entirely to the new baby. Since neither father nor stepmother acknowledged her existence, Margherita stuck to Graziella whom she saw as a true friend.
The next year, the new wife became pregnant once again, and gave birth to another son. Tancredi’s happiness knew no bounds as now he had two sons who eventually would be able to help him in the fields.
When Margherita turned nine, Graziella left for another village where she found steady work as a laundress at the home of a wealthy landowner. She could not earn enough money from the intermittent work that Tancredi threw her way. Margherita suffered most from Graziella’s absence, and began walking around barefoot and half-naked among the farm animals. During the cold winter days when she played outdoors with neighbors’ children, she was not warmly dressed and was always in rags and worn-out cloths..
Margherita, despite being beautiful with long golden hair that attracted the attention of strangers and passersby alike, never once received a caress or a hug, not from her father nor her stepmother. At home she felt detested and unwanted. Her father Tancredi associated her with his former troubles, and turned his head away from her because she reminded him too much of his first wife.
At the age of twelve, Margherita looked after her two younger stepbrothers, and became a slave in her own home. Her world centered around household chores and the children. Her best moments were on Sundays when she went with everyone to church to pray, and was dressed in clean neat clothing. Market days were also days of joy for her, because she felt like a queen when everyone gave her admiring glances because of her extraordinary beauty. She wore clothes that emphasized her budding breasts emerging from beneath her shirt, and subtly swayed her hips as she walked among the stalls while traders threw gifts at her. Some gave her apples, while others gave her walnuts from the forest, and deep-fried baked bagels whose smell attracted the market’s visitors from all around. At times she even received a chunk of smoked pork, or goat’s cheese, and at times she sensed the quickness of the traders as they tried to pinch her behind or send her a sly wink.
Margherita Giacona
In February 1987 in the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, Tuscany, Margherita Giacona was born. Her mother Federica arrived with her husband Giancarlo at the hospital, just minutes before the birth, in a state of emergency as her amniotic sac had suddenly broken while at home in the city of Cortona. Speeding the whole way, it took them nearly a half an hour to get to the hospital.
Margherita weighed three kilos at birth and her condition was listed as fair, although there were signs of jaundice. As a result the doctors decided to keep her for a few days in the hospital.
Federica cried day and night because she was afraid that her daughter would not live. Although only twenty-four, she had already experienced two miscarriages half-way through pregnancy.
The name Margherita was chosen by Giancarlo as that was the name of his mother who had died the year before. He loved the name Margherita, which means daisy,
a flower whose natural colors are yellow, white and green. It was the city of Cortona’s trademark; the city he was born in and where he and his family lived.
Three days later Margherita, a plump and beautiful baby, was released from the hospital.
When Margherita turned five, her parents decided to leave Italy and move to Germany, settling in Berlin. Giancarlo opened a small Italian café, while Federica stayed at home caring for Margherita