Lifting the shroud on a very Tuscan murder

Australian author Lisa Clifford. Picture: Dave Tacon An Australian writer has unravelled an enduring mystery that has gripped her husband's family for more than a century. LATE one winter's night in 1907 in the Tuscan Apennines, Artemio Bruni, a hard-working farmer, husband and father of seven, was bludgeoned to death. His murder was unreported and hence never investigated. But for nearly a century, the story was passed through generations of the family until it met the ears of Australian journalist-turned-author Lisa Clifford, who is married to Bruni's great-grandson Paolo. Clifford's novel Death in the Mountains, an investigation and imagining of Bruni's murder now in its second printing, recalls a time when 70 per cent of Tuscany was farmed under the mezzadria system, in existence since mediaeval times. Under this system, abolished in 1982, farmers had to give half their produce and profits to landowners. They were left with barely enough to avoid starvation. Failure to deliver according to the strict quotas often resulted in eviction and greater poverty. ''[In those days] you put your baby in the rabbit cage because you had to go out and farm the land,'' Clifford says. ''You brushed your teeth with sage and coal, washed your hair with vinegar. All of those things were fascinating to me.'' Advertisement: Story continues below A century ago superstition coloured all aspects of Tuscan life. Families lived in fear of the malocchio (evil eye), the devil and witches. Death in the Mountains mentions myriad rituals believed to ward off evil, including attaching a fir branch to the front door. Witches supposedly had to count each fir needle before entering a house, but would soon lose patience and move on. Such superstitions were not enough to save Artemio Bruni. Clifford had originally planned to write the story of her mother-in-law and her six sisters. ''I was going to call it The Seven Sisters,'' she says, ''but when I sat them down to talk about their lives, all of them would talk about the murder of their grandfather. They couldn't really get past it and still wore the shame.'' She was incredulous when she heard that the murder was never reported, but was always offered the same explanation: ''The life of a Tuscan farmer was cheap in those days.'' Her initial thoughts were that the murdered farmer might have run foul of the Mafia, but all seven sisters insisted he was an honest and hardworking provider. When pressed for a motive, they could provide none. CLIFFORD'S Canada Goose Sverige mother is deportment expert and former model June Dally-Watkins, and Clifford looks the part, dressed all in white in her spotless kitchen, in a gated community at the foot of the hills that surround Florence. Her seemingly idyllic Florentine life could hardly be a more jarring contrast to the grim poverty meticulously described in Death in the Mountains. The disparity is not lost on Clifford, a one-time crime reporter for Channel Ten. She was driven to investigate Bruni's murder not only by a sense of injustice, but to take some of the glamorous sheen off Tuscany's image. She was particularly irked by the seemingly endless stream of English-language books and magazine articles that espoused the joys of buying and renovating a casa colonica, a traditional Tuscan farmhouse. In her eyes, the history of the region was being brushed aside. ''There are thousands of abandoned country homes in Tuscany. I wanted my readers to feel, smell, touch and taste the grimness of life for the Tuscan in 1907. I wanted to show why those homes had to be abandoned,'' she says. Clifford first visited Italy as a 16-year-old straight out of convent school. She was terrified of her impending exams and persuaded her parents to allow her to take a gap year in Florence. While 16 might seem young for such an undertaking, Clifford says hers was an unusual upbringing for 1970s Australia. She was a ''latchkey kid'' from the age of 12, and was no stranger to international travel, joining her mother twice yearly on trips to fashion shows around Asia with models from Dallys Model Management. Nevertheless, Clifford was at a loss when she arrived in Rome and tried to catch a train to Florence. Speaking no Italian, it was several panic-stricken minutes before she discovered that Firenze was Italian for Florence.

Posted in: Rosetta Stone,Rosetta Stone Outlet,rosetta stone software,Rosetta Stone V3