Lucignano

Today I'm going to write about a wonderful walled town in Tuscany that is well off the usual tourist routes, Lucignano. I chose it because it is the setting for the latest book in my Rick Montoya Italian mystery series, Tuscan Bloodline. More on the arrival of the book below.

My choice of settings for my Italian mysteries is guided by various factors, beginning with familiarity. I have to have spent some time in each of the towns, walking the streets and getting a feeling for the place. Thanks to my previous experience writing tourist materials, not to mention years living in Italy, there are a lot of towns I know well. Secondly, it must have some atmosphere conducive to a mystery, like dark streets or foreboding stone. That's almost anywhere in Italy, so no problem there. Then, I like to pick a place that most tourists may have never heard of. That rules out the larger cities like Florence and Venice. (The exception was Roman Count Down, where I kept my protagonist at home.) My hope is that someone will include the town on a future itinerary, since, in my opinion, the small towns are the real gems of Italy. Emails from readers have told me that this happened.

Lucignano, to use a much abused phrase, checked all the boxes.

Located in the south east part of Tuscany, it is the kind of town tourists drive past on their way to somewhere else. Though it sits on a hill, it avoided getting “mont” into its name, likely thanks to the Roman Lucini family that owned the land a couple millennia ago. Its most striking feature, like so many Italian towns, is the wall system that surrounds it. The seven balls of the Medici coat of arms are displayed over the main gate through the walls, an indication that for at least part of Lucignano's history, that family was in charge. As the main secondary character in Tuscan Bloodline notes when he and Rick walk through the gate the first time, “Those Medicis had some kind of cojones.”

There's not much to the town. One main street loops around inside the wall, criss-crossed by a web of narrow streets leading up to a small, rectangular square on the hill in the center. At one end of that piazza is the Palazzo del Comune, the 14^th century town hall. Besides civic offices, it houses the town museum which contains several minor masterpieces. But the crown jewel of the Lucignano Museo Civico is one of the more spectacular examples of the goldsmith's art.

The Albero di Lucignano is an ornate reliquary, eight feet high, enclosed in a glass case in the center of a room whose walls are decorated with wonderful frescoes. The tree, full of Christian symbols and imagery, was created over a seventy-year period in the 14^th and 15^th centuries by several master goldsmiths. It is worth making the trip to Lucignano just to see this amazing piece of art.

Alert readers will recall that in my substack a month ago on iconoclasm (click to return to February 1 post) I mentioned Lucignano because of the faded Mussolini quote on the wall. Most of the curiosities found in the narrow streets of Italian towns are little pieces of metalwork or stonework, so finding a visage of the duce on the wall is different, to say the least. Naturally I had to mention it in my book, which brings me, as promised above, to a shameless plug for the latest addition to the Rick Montoya Italian Mystery series.

The main secondary character in Tuscan Bloodline is Rocco Monti, Rick's Italian-American college buddy who shows up in Italy to solve the mystery of his great grandfather. Why did Benvenuto Monti have to leave Lucignano is such a hurry and flee to America? There were many Monti family stories about it, but they couldn't all be true, especially those insinuating that Benvenuto was in trouble with the law. Was it realistic to think they could find out what had happened a hundred years earlier? Rick is happy to help, especially since it means a break from noisy and overcrowded Rome to visit the Tuscan countryside. A separate plot involves Rick's girlfriend Betta working on the theft of a priceless Etruscan sculpture, but she finds time to help Rick and Rocco.

If that tease makes you want to read Tuscan Bloodline, you can order your own copy, in ebook or paperback, order here. Note that it is available exclusively on Amazon.

As I usually write at the end of my posts, this substack is free, but the way you can support it is by getting one (or more) of my mysteries. Now there are nine of them and here's the complete list click here.

Thanks for reading.