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Updated: June 20, 2025
The Caprese peasant has never had time to get the fact of winter fairly into his head. The cold comes year after year, but it comes in a brief and fitful way that sets our northern conceptions at defiance. The stranger who flies for refuge to the shores of the little island in November may find himself in a blaze of almost tropical sunshine.
His madonnas, saints, and angels are holy in their effect; his representations of architecture are grand, and while his works are not strong or powerful, they give much pleasure to those who see them. MICHAEL ANGELO BUONARROTI was born at the Castle of Caprese in 1475.
Maidens with water-jars on their heads which might have been dug up at Pompeii; priests with broad hats and huge cloaks; sailors with blue shirts and red girdles; urchins who almost instinctively cry for a "soldo" and break into the Tarantella if you look at them; quiet, grave, farmer-peasants with the Phrygian cap; coral-fishers fresh from the African coast with tales of storm and tempest and the Madonna's help make up group after group of Caprese life as one looks idly on, a life not specially truthful perhaps or moral or high-minded, but sunny and pleasant and pretty enough, and harmonizing in its own genial way with the sunshine and beauty around.
The Count di Poppi advised him to halt in these parts, arguing that he might divide his people between Chiusi, Caprese, and the Pieve, render himself master of this branch of the Apennines, and descend at pleasure into the Casentino, the Val d'Arno, the Val di Chiane, or the Val di Tavere, as well as be prepared for every movement of the enemy.
Hence the father had quite different plans for the boy; but the son persisted and at last had his way. When he was still a little child his father finished his work as an official at Caprese and returned to Florence; but he left the little Angelo behind with his nurse.
His father, who was of a noble family of Florence, was then governor of Caprese and Chiusi, and, when the Buonarroti household returned to Florence, the little Angelo was left with his nurse on one of his father's estates at Settignano.
Slowly the procession winds its way through the little town, now lengthening into a line of twinkling tapers as it passes through the narrow alleys which serve for streets, now widening out again on the hill-sides where the orange kerchiefs and silver ornaments of the Caprese women glow and flash into a grand background of colour in the sun.
Measured too by our English notions the pay of the men seems miserably inadequate to the toil and suffering which they undergo. Enough however remains to tempt the best of the Caprese fishermen to sea. Even a boy's earnings will pay his mother's rent. For a young man it is the only mode in which he can hope to gather a sum sufficient for marriage and his start in life.
Probably Leonardo da Vinci was gifted in as many different ways as Michael Angelo, and in his own lines was as powerful. This Florentine's life was as tragic as it was restless. There is a tablet in a room of a castle which stands high upon a rocky mount, near the village of Caprese, which tells that Michael Angelo was born in that place.
We can trace the docks of the Roman island, the grottoes still paved with mosaic which marks them as the scene of Imperial picnics, the terraces and arbours of the hanging gardens with the rock boldly cut away to make room for them, the system of roads which linked the villas together, the cisterns and aqueducts which supplied water, the buildings for the slaves of the household and for the legionaries who guarded the shore, the cemetery for the dead, the shrines and pavilions scattered about on the heights, and a small Mithraic temple hidden in the loveliest of the Caprese ravines.
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