The legend of the Cathedral in Piazza dei Miracoli: the Devil’s scratch (and he counts it as a ritual)

Decayed, monstrous, forced — it seemed — to wander among men, often even mocked by crafty peasants (this according to the stories daughters of the Tuscan rural tradition that my grandmother told me), yet ever proud and unyielding in his pursuit of evil ends, the character of Satan fascinated meand the idea of ​​being able to see a tangible sign of it (although I was also a skeptical child, and therefore didn’t expect realist epiphanies) mixed with that particular excitement that one always has, as a child, when it happens to spend time “out context» with friends normally placed only in the space-time of the holiday.

Like this, here we are looking for the fateful imprint — in those days, since geolocation didn’t exist, there wasn’t, as we shall see, only the enigma of their actual number, but also the challenge of finding them again, and I advise anyone who wants to see them to do so, without Google — between the blocks of marble that formed the walls of the Cathedral. I can’t tell if the adults directed us, but we soon found her, and when they pointed them out to me, I felt a disappointment which immediately, however, turned into further perturbation. In fact, the signs of the devil’s slap were not five (or four, or six, or seven) as might be expected from the usual representations, monstrous but always anthropomorphic: they were at least a hundred, which suggested to my childhood imagination a limb at least sprawling, bristling with pseudopodia (certainly stinging as they are capable of affecting the marble): more than the devil, it looked like the imprint of Cthulhu or Yog-Sototh, other demons not inferior to Satanasso in terms of narrative potential.

At six or seven, just as I hadn’t read Milton yet, I hadn’t read Lovecraft either, and yet the entity that revealed itself to my mind in front of that string of black dots, some of which bore traces of white-out or felt-tip pen of some blasphemer who had tried to count them with external aidswas undoubtedly attributable to the kind of cosmic horror imagined by the Providence Dreamer. From there, with an inevitable shudder, we started counting them and comparing the figures, which could not but be different, given that the trick lies in the definition of the parameters: the holes, according to some, the result of a preparation for cutting from the Roman era (in fact the block comes from those times) then aborted, according to others the remains of a frieze with beads and whorls chiseled away to use the block without reliefs, they are of very variable dimensions, some large and indisputable, others smaller, and still others so small as to leave their inclusion or exclusion to the evaluation of the individual. If my memory serves me right, it moved around one hundred and fifty, but the numbers were very different, and perhaps we really liked that they were different (two equal results would in fact have irretrievably broken the spell).

Alone when I returned to Pisa when I grew up – meanwhile the “count” had also become a student ritual linked to the “hundred days” from the final exam – yeseppi another version of the legend, which saw the Devil not passing there, but specifically gone to sabotage the construction site of the Cathedral, and pulled down by the legs by an archangel, with the resulting vertical “scratch”. More plausible than the shape of the footprint, but also a little less glamorous. A legend, among other things, also told by tourist guides on alternative tours to discover lesser-known stories of the city. However, a Pisan took care of rekindling the suggestion, who, seeing me there (naturally) counting the footprints, suggested that I also go to the Camposanto and shout somethingfacing the dome. He answered me, in the form of an echo, the least famous but no less disturbing “devil’s laugh” and so I left happy, emotionally reunited with my impression of a child. How? What if I saw the ghost of Galileo, who also haunts there? Who knows, maybe: but this too is another story… that maybe we’ll tell right on these pages.

The newsletter

If you want to stay updated on the news of Florence, subscribe for free to the Corriere Fiorentino newsletter. It arrives every day directly in your inbox at 12. Just click here