Page 163 of The Wrong Vintage
You’ll almost always find tourists thronged around it—phones lifted, guides whispering about severed heads and scandal. The convex shield gleams under the lights, that frozen scream suspended between myth and paint.
But it’s November now. The high season has drained away like summer wine.
Florence belongs to those of us who live here.
The room is nearly empty. No murmured translations. No elbows nudging for position. Just the faint echo of footsteps on polished floors and the quiet hum of climate control preserving genius.
The canvas is smaller than people expect, mounted on a convex wooden shield, as if it were meant to be lifted into battle.
Medusa’s head is caught at the instant of severing—eyes wide, mouth open in a silent, furious scream. Snakes coil and writhe from her scalp, each scale rendered with obsessive precision. Blood arcs outward in a frozen spray, impossibly vivid against the dark ground.
The varnish glints beneath the gallery lights; the curvature of the surface makes her expression shift as I move. From one angle she looks horrified. From another, almost triumphantly.
What I love about it is that Caravaggio painted Medusa not as a monster already defeated, but as a being mid-transformation—caught between terror and defiance. There is fear in her face, yes. But there is also fury and a refusal to go quietly.
Medusa was born of violence and exile. So was Caravaggio’s career.
Matteo once told me that great wine, like great art, is born in extremity—heat, pressure, imbalance.
“Too much comfort and nothing interesting happens.”
I move on and linger beforeThe Birth of Venus. Her pale skin glows beneath Apollonian light; her golden hair drifts like sea foam. She stands, improbably serene, arising from chaos fully formed.
I watch her, and as I do, the tension of the past weeks leaves me. Art does that. It soothes and clarifies.
I let go of the tight coil of boardroom politics, the weight of the family name, the whispered threats of Nico being fired—let them dissolve into the marble and frescoes around me.
I stop thinking about Papà, about profit margins, about Matteo leaving me alone in this big, wide world.
Even Nico’s voice fades to nothing.
Instead, I remember who I was before I learned caution. Before I folded myself down to fit into other people’s expectations, and began to mistake patience for powerlessness.
I close my eyes and breathe in the hush.
I am Alessia Alighieri.
I am a winemaker.
I am a daughter.
I am a wife.
I am a woman who knows her own worth—even when the world pretends it doesn’t.
When I open my eyes, the painting and I meet again.
I feel steadier—anchored by something older than ambition, older than fear.
Alba scowls as we wait for Toni at the Antico Caffè del Moro, a ten-minute walk from the Palazzo. We got a cryptic message from our sister, asking us to be here at this time.
“She’s really enjoying playing the little spy, isn’t she?” Alba types away on her phone.
My job has its highs and lows when it comes to how much time I spend at work.
In the winter, it’s usually quieter. There’s a lot of work to do, but it’s not as crazy as harvest time and thereafter.
For Alba, there isn’t any such respite. She manages restaurants and tasting rooms around the world, which means she’s working during all the time zones and in all seasons.
