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Found among the private papers of Vittorio Matteo Corcos

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“I write these words in the quiet of an evening that feels like the last breath of a long, exhausted summer. The house is still. Florence sleeps. And I—an old man with paint-dusted memories—feel compelled to gather the fragments of my life before the night carries them away.

I was born in Livorno in 1859, where the sea taught me the ache of longing. It gave me my first hunger—for colour, for horizon, for the unreachable. Even as a child I sensed that beauty was not a possession but a pursuit, a shimmering apparition that invites you forward only to retreat, smiling softly, into the distance.

When I left for Florence, I believed I would learn how to capture the world.
I did not know the world would instead capture me.

Then came Paris, that fevered dream of light and silk possibility. The salons where laughter floated like perfume, the wide boulevards trembling with life, the women whose steps left echoes of elegance on the air. I was young, hungry, trembling with a desire I could not name, except to say it was the desire to touch—through art—the very soul of beauty.

An afternoon on the terrace

Ah, the women.
How they entered my life like constellations, each one brilliant, unreachable, and burning with her own light.

Lina Cavalieri

Their faces were maps of tenderness and danger. Their complexions—smooth as petals, warm as whispered secrets—drove me to the edge of obsession. I touched my brush to colour as one might touch lips to the skin of a beloved: gently at first, then with a devotion that threatened to undo me.

Stella

But it was their eyes that enslaved me.

Those eyes…
They were the pages on which they wrote their truths, and I, foolish man, read every word. Some eyes held me like a promise; others like a farewell. A few were so clear, so luminous, that I feared to paint them—afraid my hand would tremble and reveal too much of my longing.

I remember one woman—her name I shall not write, for it still trembles inside me like a candle not yet extinguished. She sat by the window, the afternoon light resting on her shoulder like a lover. When she looked at me, the world dropped away. “Do you wish to see me as I am,” her gaze asked, “or as you desire me to be?”

I did not know the answer. I still do not.

Her eyes were deep enough to drown in, and I let myself sink without resistance. Every painter dreams of capturing truth; I merely sought to capture that moment when truth and beauty become indistinguishable. If I succeeded even once, it was because of her.

My age—the soft rustle of gowns, the perfume of violets, the hush of rooms where secrets floated like dust in morning light—has vanished. Long gone. The world now moves too quickly, speaks too loudly, feels too little. But I remember. Oh, I remember everything: the sweep of silk, the quiver of a smile, the tremble in my chest when the woman before me lifted her eyes and allowed me to see the unguarded part of her soul.

These portraits the world admires… they are not mine.
They belong to the women who lent me their beauty and to the sadness that always followed it.

For desire is not merely wanting.
It is the fear of losing.
It is the knowledge that all things slip away.

Perhaps that is why I painted them with such reverence.
I was not celebrating their beauty;
I was begging it to stay.

Now, as my hand trembles and the days grow small, I confess to these pages what I never dared confess aloud:

Every portrait was a love I could not speak.
Every gaze I captured was a heartbeat I feared to forget.
Every stroke of colour was my plea to time itself:
Let her remain. Let this moment live. Let beauty endure.

But time is deaf.

And so I leave these words hidden, folded among these fading papers, for whoever may one day open them. Know that the women I painted—those shimmering beings of a gentler century—were not merely subjects to me.

They were the stars by which I navigated my entire life.

And though the world has changed, their eyes still shine in the silent chambers of my memory, bright as the last light on the sea of my childhood.

If you look closely at my portraits, you may see them too.
And if you feel your heart tighten just a little, then you will understand why I spent a lifetime chasing beauty:

Not to possess it,
but to love it
even as it slipped, shimmering,
through my fingers.”

AFTERWORD

Going over the pictures I had included in my post on the Belle Epoque exhibition we saw recently at Pisa’s Palazzo Blu, I realised that I had gathered more photographs of the paintings of one artist: Vittorio Matteo Corcos. Why? The obvious answer was simply that I liked him. Several think he was rather chocolate-boxy, and perhaps he did verge upon that description — but what chocolates they were, and how exquisitely fine.

Vittorio Matteo Corcos was born in Livorno and became greatly admired in his lifetime. Yet, as happens so often to artists who shine brightly while they live, his reputation dimmed after his death, only now rising again as the whole age in which he worked is being rediscovered and revalued.

What do I enjoy when I look at Corcos’s art? His brushwork, miraculous in its delicacy, ranges from the tiniest photograph-like details to impressionistic sweeps that shimmer like fleeting light. His subjects are equally varied, from girls and women in salon interiors to figures wandering the countryside. His women — but what women! They smoulder with quiet seduction.

Consider the way the girl’s back, on the right of this pair, curves sensuously into the fashionable bustle of the eighteen-eighties. Belle Epoque fashions, with their tight corseted waists and flowing silks and draperies, tempt like houris summoned from some languid dream. Behold the skill with which he paints the faint veil brushing the arms of this beauty

Yet Corcos could also embrace the new fashions that followed the massacre of the First World War, that cataclysm which swept away the elegance and grace of la Belle Epoque as if wiping a fresco from a wall.

Here, then, are aristocratic flappers, reinventing style and fashion for the new woman.

But Corcos had foreseen this new woman long before — independent, unbound from impeding skirts and strict corsets — in an earlier work, The Dream. This, perhaps his most famous painting, shows a young woman sitting provocatively cross-legged on a bench, with a straw boater resting to her right. Provocative indeed: in her time it was considered improper, even daring, for a woman to sit with her legs in such a posture.

Dreams

Corcos — not one of the great masters, perhaps — yet certainly one of the most gifted, capable of capturing the eternal feminine in all her radiance: in her expressions, in her desire to present herself beautifully, in her aspirations, her hopes, her moments of dejection, and her innate and unfailing grace. How did he manage it so well? Perhaps his own words reveal the secret: “If I’ve got my subject’s eyes right, then everything else that follows flows easily.” And indeed, when one meets the gaze of those eyes, even for a single heartbeat, one is immediately ensnared — for surely, as the poet reminds us, the eyes are the doorway to the soul.

The Old Church (Part 3).

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But the mountains remember.

The stones remember.

The shadows remember.

My great-uncle Alsworthy, according to the story I found in his desk in a sunny room of his old mansion in Worcester County, drew a circle of salt on the church threshold, engraved with symbols older than Rome.
Also included were those he found in a Mithraeum during his Roman walks, a figure symbolizing the victory of the light of goodness and truth over the darkness of demonic forces.

In his hand he held a crucifix.

He murmured Latin prayers in tune with harmonics hidden among the mountains.

The shadows trembled, writhing in anticipation.

The water of the Howling Den, frozen and blessed, hissed and steamed, flowing over the threshold.

Insects spiraled upward, forming chains of golden light.

Sage and myrrh traced an ancient pentagram.

The fire turned into blue and green flames, tornadoes that captured malice.

When the ritual ended, the mountains exhaled a long relief.

Residual echoes.

Remains linger: petrified faces in the caves, screams fused with those of the Howling Den’s victims.

Indistinct shapes appear along the walls of the refuge: fleeing monks, twisted faces.

Insects trace golden arches across the mountaintops.

Whispers, fragments of the ritual, brush the ears.

The Big Church hovers above the fire: blackened walls, twisted ivy, gaping door… alive in miniature.

My great-uncle returned to London.

The fame of his exploits reached the Vatican.

The Holy Father recognized the grandeur of his deed: Alsworthy became Chief Exorcist for Great Britain.

He had purified a place of ancient darkness, where human malice and mountain magic intertwined.

As I finished my story, the fire flared up one last time.

The shadows retreated into the corners.

The insects rose to the ceiling, leaving golden threads.

The mountains seemed to be drawing closer.

The whispers faded, but remained suspended.

The refuge breathed, alive with memories, with magic.

“Where did you hear all this?” someone whispered.

I smiled.

“Calm down. I heard it all from the mouth of Reverend Alsworthy, my great-uncle, as I told you. A man of lion-like courage and impeccable learning.”

For a long moment, the mountains seemed to listen.

The insects flapped their wings in unison.

And though silence returned, each of us knew:

The story was not over.

She was alive.

Still moving.

Still waiting.

Still suspended in the infinite cosmos of magic.

The Old Church (Part 1)

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I’m Freddy Peters.

An entomologist by profession…

And yet, tonight, I’m not just that.

I’m something else.

Something suspended between the world of the living and the breath of the mountain.

The Transapuan trail winds through twisted roots, moss glistening with rain, wet leaves reflecting the moon like small secret mirrors.

Every rustle in the trees, every sigh of the wind, every trembling leaf carries with it a forgotten song, ancient, invisible, that vibrates in the heart.

I walk alone.

But here, solitude doesn’t weigh.

Here, solitude is waiting.

It’s a suspended tremor.

It’s an omen.

The mountain breathes with me.

The mountain listens.

The mountain leads me toward something I can’t yet see… but I feel it’s been waiting for me, invisible, inevitable, forever.

The rocks breathe.

The roots move like sleeping snakes.

The ground pulsates beneath my footsteps.

Every leaf, every drop of dew, every strand of moss vibrates with the memory of time.

The wind carries echoes of ancient footsteps, of forgotten voices, of presences no human eye has ever seen.

Hours of walking.

And then, among the rocks, a flickering light.

A tiny cabin, growing like a sprout among ancient stones.

As if the mountain itself had cultivated it, waiting for me.

The smell of burning wood, of smoke, of hot food envelops me.

Time slows.

The shadows breathe.

Every breath becomes a thread that binds my body to the place, to the time, to the magic.

The mountaineers watch me.

In their eyes shines something ancient, secret: wisdom, memory, curiosity that spans centuries.

They are not just men.

They are keepers of stories.

Mountain spirits dressed in flesh and blood.

Walking souls among us, guarding invisible secrets.

They offer me barley and wild boar soup.

Every bite tastes of earth, roots, fire, tradition.

I listen to their stories, and my mind, usually ready to catalog and observe, slows, bends, merges with the silence.

Every sound, every breath, every small movement is woven into an invisible yet living fabric, suspended between present and memory, between dream and reality.

The CAI group is having fun telling local stories and legends.

“But won’t you tell us a story too?” insists one of the group.
The others agree.

They want me to tell a story full of magic and demonic forces.

The experience of a compatriot of mine comes to mind.
Perhaps they’ll appreciate it if I tell it?

I apologize for my imperfect Italian, but their patient eyes encourage me.

I sit by the fire.

I begin to speak.

The flames flicker.

The shadows breathe on the walls.

Sparks rise and dance like little, crazy stars.

Insects with golden wings emerge from the corners, tracing invisible maps in the air, following the movements of my hands like brushes of light.

Even the mountains outside seem to bend toward us, drawn by the sound of words, their mysterious echoes, their hidden sighs.

The boundaries between me and the world dissolve.

I am no longer Freddy Peters, the solitary entomologist.

I am a narrator suspended between dream and reality.

Weaver of lights, shadows, sighs, and silences.

Every sound, every smell, every spark becomes part of the story.

My skin vibrates from the cold mixed with the heat of the fire.

My hair rises in invisible currents.

My heart beats in unison with the fire and the mountain itself.

When I hesitate to speak, the silence is not empty.

It is filled with invisible presences, luminous echoes, wonder suspended in the air.

The mountain listens.

The refuge responds.

I no longer belong only to myself: I belong to time, to light, to the magic that breathes in every breath, in every spark.

I am Freddy Peters…

But I have become much more: a storyteller, an explorer, a weaver of dreams.

Between the fire and the fog, my story and the magic merge, inseparably, as if they had always been one.

The Ghost Bridge of Borgo Giannotti

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The Serchio moves slowly through the northern quarter of Lucca, brown and heavy with silt, as if reluctant to leave the city it once destroyed. Where the river bends beneath Borgo Giannotti, the new bridge arches like a blade of pale concrete. But locals remember another bridge of rough stone, washed away in the flood of 1812. They say its arches still dream beneath the current.

I. The Engineer

Lorenzo Bardi came from Pisa to oversee the new span’s completion. He was a rational man, allergic to superstition, but the river unsettled him. On his first inspection he found that the instruments—levels, gauges, even the electronic sensors—failed each dawn between three and four, as if time itself hiccupped over the water.

An old woman who sold flowers at the corner told him, “That’s when the Bride walks.”

He laughed, politely. “A ghost?”

“She crossed the old bridge the night it fell. Every year she comes again, looking for the man who broke his vow.”

II. The Flood

The archives yielded a story: a mason named Matteo Bardi—Lorenzo’s own ancestor—had been contracted to reinforce the medieval bridge. But he delayed the work, spending his nights with a young seamstress from San Concordio. When the river burst its banks, she was the first to die, swept away in her bridal gown. Matteo vanished soon after; his name was struck from the guild rolls.

Lorenzo felt the coincidence gnaw at him. At night, he dreamed of stones tumbling in slow motion through black water, of a woman calling his name from beneath the surface.

III. The Apparition

On the eve of the bridge’s opening, fog thickened along the Serchio. Work lights burned like floating suns. Lorenzo remained alone to calibrate the final instruments. Near midnight he saw her.

She stood at mid-span, veiled, luminous in the mist, her feet barely touching the concrete. The veil streamed like smoke in an unseen current. When she lifted her face, the features were clear: calm, sorrowful, utterly human.

“Matteo,” she said—or perhaps Lorenzo; the name blurred in the air.

He stepped forward. Beneath him the river murmured, not in water but in words, syllables older than Italian. Through the mist he glimpsed another bridge overlapping the new one—its arches of stone, its lamps of oil, its roadway crowded with shadowed figures carrying candles that burned blue. The dead were crossing: peasants, priests, soldiers, each turning once to look at him before vanishing into the opposite bank.

The veiled woman reached out her hand. Beneath the veil her palm glowed faintly, showing the print of a ring. “Keep the vow,” she whispered. “Finish what was begun.”

Then the fog collapsed into rain. She was gone.

IV. The Offering

At dawn, the workers found Lorenzo kneeling at the water’s edge, soaked and shaking. He would speak of nothing except that the bridge’s foundation was incomplete. When they investigated, they discovered a cavity beneath the central pier—a void where the sonar had always failed.

Lorenzo ordered it filled with stone from the ruined monastery upriver, the same that had once provided blocks for the medieval bridge. When the last stone fell into place, the sensors stabilised. The air above the river grew clear.

That evening, the wind carried the scent of lilies across Borgo Giannotti, though none were in bloom.

V. The Crossing

Each year, on the anniversary of the flood, the citizens of Lucca cross the new bridge at dawn. They say if the mist is thick enough, the old arches appear beneath their feet, and a faint procession moves alongside them—candles of blue flame gliding just above the water.

And sometimes, among the watchers on the bank, a veiled woman stands with her head inclined, as if counting the living and the dead to be sure the bridge now carries them both safely across.

****

Il Ponte degli Spettri di Borgo Giannotti.

Il Serchio scorre lento attraverso il quartiere settentrionale di Lucca, marrone e carico di limo, come se fosse riluttante a lasciare la città che un tempo aveva distrutto. Dove il fiume curva sotto Borgo Giannotti, il nuovo ponte si inarca come una lama di cemento pallido. Ma la gente del posto ricorda un altro ponte di pietra grezza, spazzato via dall’alluvione del 1812. Dicono che i suoi archi sognino ancora sotto la corrente.

I. L’Ingegnere

Lorenzo Bardi arrivò da Pisa per supervisionare il completamento della nuova campata. Era un uomo razionale, allergico alla superstizione, ma il fiume lo turbava. Alla sua prima ispezione scoprì che gli strumenti – livelli, indicatori, persino i sensori elettronici – si guastavano ogni alba tra le tre e le quattro, come se il tempo stesso singhiozzasse sull’acqua.

Un’anziana donna che vendeva fiori all’angolo gli disse: “È allora che cammina la Sposa”.

Rise, educatamente. “Un fantasma?”

“Attraversò il vecchio ponte la notte in cui cadde. Ogni anno torna, in cerca dell’uomo che ha infranto il suo voto.”

II. L’Alluvione

Gli archivi riportarono una storia: un muratore di nome Matteo Bardi, antenato di Lorenzo, era stato incaricato di rinforzare il ponte medievale. Ma lui ritardò i lavori, trascorrendo le notti con una giovane sarta di San Concordio. Quando il fiume eruttò, lei fu la prima a morire, travolta dal suo abito da sposa. Matteo scomparve poco dopo; il suo nome fu cancellato dai registri delle corporazioni.

Lorenzo sentì la coincidenza tormentarlo. Di notte, sognava pietre che rotolavano al rallentatore nell’acqua nera, una donna che chiamava il suo nome da sotto la superficie.

III. L’Apparizione

Alla vigilia dell’inaugurazione del ponte, la nebbia si infittiva lungo il Serchio. Le luci dei lavori ardevano come soli fluttuanti. Lorenzo rimase solo a tarare gli ultimi strumenti. Verso mezzanotte la vide.

Era in piedi a metà campata, velata, luminosa nella nebbia, i suoi piedi sfioravano appena il cemento. Il velo fluttuava come fumo in una corrente invisibile. Quando sollevò il viso, i lineamenti erano chiari: calmi, addolorati, profondamente umani.

“Matteo”, disse, o forse Lorenzo; il nome si confuse nell’aria.

Lui fece un passo avanti. Sotto di lui il fiume mormorava, non in acqua ma in parole, sillabe più antiche dell’italiano. Attraverso la nebbia intravide un altro ponte sovrapposto a quello nuovo: i suoi archi di pietra, le sue lampade a olio, la sua carreggiata affollata di figure in ombra che portavano candele che ardevano di blu. I morti lo stavano attraversando: contadini, preti, soldati, ognuno dei quali si voltava una volta a guardarlo prima di svanire sulla riva opposta.

La donna velata tese la mano. Sotto il velo il suo palmo brillava debolmente, mostrando l’impronta di un anello. “Mantieni il voto”, sussurrò. “Completa ciò che è stato iniziato.”

Poi la nebbia si trasformò in pioggia. Lei se n’era andata.

IV. L’Offerta

All’alba, gli operai trovarono Lorenzo inginocchiato sul bordo dell’acqua, bagnato e tremante. Non parlava d’altro se non del fatto che le fondamenta del ponte erano incomplete. Quando indagarono, scoprirono una cavità sotto il pilone centrale, un vuoto dove il sonar aveva sempre fallito.

Lorenzo ordinò che fosse riempito con pietre provenienti dal monastero in rovina a monte, le stesse che un tempo avevano fornito i blocchi per il ponte medievale. Quando l’ultima pietra cadde al suo posto, i sensori si stabilizzarono. L’aria sopra il fiume si fece limpida.

Quella sera, il vento portò il profumo dei gigli attraverso Borgo Giannotti, sebbene nessuno fosse in fiore.

V. L’Attraversamento

Ogni anno, nell’anniversario dell’alluvione, i cittadini di Lucca attraversano il nuovo ponte all’alba. Dicono che se la nebbia è abbastanza fitta, i vecchi archi appaiono sotto i loro piedi e una debole processione si muove al loro fianco: candele dalla fiamma blu che scivolano appena sopra l’acqua.

E a volte, tra gli osservatori sulla riva, una donna velata sta in piedi con la testa china, come se stesse contando i vivi e i morti per assicurarsi che il ponte li porti entrambi sani e salvi.