The most impressive church in Verona was originally built outside the city walls—S. Zeno, an imposing Romanesque structure. It is but a short walk from the city center, even on a hot day without a map it takes less than an hour. The high sweeping doors are covered in bronze reliefs depicting scenes from the life of Christ, many of which date back to the thirteenth century.
Inside is an imposing space. The nave is cool and wide, filled with enigmatic historic knights performing the sacred and the profane. The guide book will give a name to some of the knights and you have to take their word on the attribution, for it is not always clear who is doing exactly what in some of the scenes, but you come away with a clear sense that the church is a repository for important political events. It is easy to see that the abbey had long been a favored resting place for German emperors passing down from the Alps into the turmoil of Italian city state rivalry.
Today, in the piazza outside the S.Zeno there is a small market that sells socks and fruits. If you walk across the sun-filled place to a row of trees on the far side, you can find a café where old men have all found their shady seat to drink wine in the afternoon. If they may have left one table free, it is basking in the sun. The struggle between light and shade is all that occupies the piazza now, but if you sip your drink and stare across the plaza, you can easily believe that in 1238 the medieval emperor Frederick II celebrated the marriage of his natural daughter, Selvaggia, to Ezzelino da Romano in this place.
Ezzelino was a rising political power whom the emperor needed to court in his attempt to assert control over Italy. At the time of the wedding Ezzelino was not yet the hated tyrant , infamous for his cruel treatment of enemies, despised by an army of exiles, excommunicated by the Pope, and denounced in the vilest terms available to medieval Christianity. Dante imagines him in a river of boiling blood receiving his just punishment along with other tyrants. Ezzelino was notorious for burying his enemies in castle dungeons, sometimes bricking over the cells as the inmates pleaded for bread and water. His vicious nature grew with his power. If a castle’s defenders resisted his siege, he would have their eyes put out once he captured the place. Jacob Burkhardt opens is masterful book, Civilization of the Italian Renaissance, with the stark contrast between Ezzelino, the vicious usurper, and the worldly emperor Frederick.
As you sit before S. Zeno, you can think how the marriage between Ezzelino and Selvaggia unfolded across six days of feasting on the piazza. We don’t know much about Selvaggia other than that she was the described as the emperor’s beloved natural (i.e. illegitimate) daughter. Some years later, after Ezzelino was strong enough not to need the emperor’s approval, he married another. In footnotes, historians debate what became of Selvaggia . Ezzelino, we know for certain, was eventually caught exposed without many troops in a running battle outside Milan. Wounded in his foot, he died in prison. Verona, like many other cities in the region, declared a holiday upon receiving the news of Ezzelino’s death, at the time it was announced that the city’s freedom should be forever celebrated on that day. One wonders if it is still so remembered.
Photo taken from Wikepdia commons
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