The Hungry Gap by Susan Price

I was having a bit of a discussion with my editor, Matrice, who is working on

A Sterkarm Tryst by Susan Price

A Sterkarm Tryst.

She wanted to know what season of the year the book was set in, because my descriptions confused her. Sometimes she thought it sounded early in the year, and sometimes it sounded late.

It's set in late summer, or early autumn, I said. Crops are almost ready for harvest but not quite yet. Some leaves are starting to turn, but there are still late flowers. Some berries are ripe, many still unripe.

This season was always a good time to fit in a bit of swift aggro. The fiercely cold winters of the 16th Century hadn't set in yet, and if you acted quickly, you could clobber your opponents during 'the hungry gap.' And perhaps be a little less hungry yourself.

The Hungry Gap fell around July or August and reminds us how seasonal life was in the past, and how much we've lost touch with that seasonality.

The harvest was gathered in roughly around the end of August and into September. Hay was made and grain was cut, threshed, stored. Fruit, nuts and mushrooms were gathered and stored. Throughout the summer, cows had been milked and the milk turned into butter and cheese for storing. Eggs were preserved.

It was expensive to keep animals alive through the winter - you had to shelter them and feed them. So most unwanted animals were sold earlier in the year, when they were young and, of the rest, only the best were kept alive. The rest were slaughtered around mid-October, and the meat smoked, salted or dried.

All the hard work was celebrated with a party - and most other big parties, such as weddings, were also held at this time of the year, because there was plenty of fresh food. You had a blow-out at Christmas, of course, to help everybody get through that cold, dark part of the year. And then you carefully tended what you had in store to get you through the rest of the year until the next harvest.
    

 God bless the master of this house,

The mistress also.

And all the little childer that round the table goo -

God bless the house, the barn, the byre

The dog outside the door.

God bless what'er you have in store -

And give you ten times more!

The Soul-Cake Carol.

Smailholm Tower, wikipedia - click for credit

Households like the Bedesdale Tower in the Sterkarm books wouldn't have been small. 'Family' at the time was often understood to include servants as well as blood relatives, and the family living at the tower would have included men at arms, many maids, cattle men, kennel men, stable boys and so on. Most of them would have expected to be fed from the tower's stores as part of their wages. That's why the tower's yard is crowded with storehouses, the upper storeys of which serve as dormitories.

Every large farmhouse would have needed to feed a crowd every day, too. Imagine being the women who had to oversee those stores and manage them. That's why, from the Viking Age onwards, the sign of a woman in charge of a household was a large bunch of keys hanging at her waist - to keep those stores locked up!

The stores dwindled day by day with every meal served. That Christmas feast had to be planned. As the year turned into spring, the level of grain in the bins dropped. The cheeses and blocks of butter were eaten up. The barrels of salted meat and fish were emptied. The flitches of bacon were carved up.

By the time July was reached, there were far more empty barrels than full and people were heartily sick of dried, salted and smoked food - but nothing in the fields or hedges or woods was yet ripe.

People ate the first hawthorn leaves, calling them 'bread and cheese.' The harvest of fresh food must have been looked forward to so keenly.

Today, when we can nip out to the supermarket and buy fresh food regardless of the time of year, and keep bags of frozen (and almost fresh) food in our home-freezers, we have forgotten 'the hungry gap.' Imagine standing in a summer field - wheat or oats tall and waving, hedgerows thick with flowers and leaves, little garden brimming with greenery - and nothing ready to eat.

If the weather was poor and held back the harvest, then the wait was longer - and the food in store still went on dwindling, day by day. The gap in those years was wider and hungrier.

If you struck at your enemy at this time of year, burned and trampled the crops standing in their fields - burned or stole what they had left in store - burned their houses - then you ensured that they had a miserable, hungry winter ahead of them. 16th Century winters weren't like ours have been of late. At that time, the Thames was expected to freeze solid every year - and the Sterkarms live much further north, on the Scottish borders.
  
Matrice was not altogether convinced by my talk of the hungry gap - she's a good editor and it's her job to question. She said that her Irish ancestors didn't have a hungry gap because they planted relays of potatoes and other vegetables from early in the year, to take them through summer.

 Yes, but the Sterkarms would never have seen a potato or heard of one. The historical parts of the books are set, roughly, about 1520. This is something like 200 years before potatos became a staple crop in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands.

And although improvements in technology and agriculture were being made, the developments that really changed things came later. The north country reivers didn't go in much for arable farming - they were, as their ancestors had been for centuries, practicers of 'transhumance.'  That is, they were cattle-farmers who moved their animals between sheltered lowland pastures and higher meadows for summer grazing.

They grew oats for grain, because it was the only cereal that grew at all well so far north, and such fruit and vegetables as they had would have been much closer to the wild variety - or actually were the wild variety, gathered from woods, moors and hedgerows.

Some of my Scottish friends have doubted this since, for them, the 'Kingdom of Fife' is 'the UK's bread-basket' with its wide and beautiful fields of wheat. But Fife only became so productive of wheat after the agricultural revolution of the mid to late 1700s, when more intensive and scientific methods of farming were introduced, together with the development of hardier and/or more productive strains of wheat.

wikimedia: wild strawberry - click for credit

For instance, I have strawberries in my garden that ripen early in the
summer, and some that ripen in the autumn - but these are varieties that have been bred by intensive modern agriculture. The Sterkarms' strawberries would have been wild ones. They flower, fruit - and that's your lot until next year. Wild strawberries are doing it for themselves, not for us.

It reminds me of my beautiful dog-rose, which has a brief burst of flowers every year. They last about three weeks and then - no matter how much I dead-head - they're gone. Everything about life in the past must have had the same aching transience - Come and kiss me, Sweet and Twenty, Youth's a thing will not endure!

Their warm, light summers were brief and followed by a long, dark and grindingly cold winter, in dwellings which were hard to keep warm. How they must have longed, even more than us, for spring and summer, and how they must have tried to enjoy every warm day - every snowdrop, every violet, every hedge rose.

Wild rose, wikipedia - click for credit

For the Sterkarms, after the relief and joy of harvest, would have come October, November, December, January, February... with the weather becoming more flesh-nippingly cold all the time.

Then April, May - things are beginning to leaf and flower, but there's still nothing much you can eat. 

Then June, July - it's warmer and lighter, but still nothing's ripe - and your stores are running very, very low. August must have been torture! Everything visibly ripening but still not quite there.

And this was in a good year. In the modern West, we don't know how lucky we are.

(Many thanks to Susan Price, one of our History Girls Reserves, for this post. Katherine Langrish will be back next month)

Historian of the soul, by Vanora Bennett

Sometimes I want my history brave. Dangerously brave. Also full of integrity, thoughtfulness, passion and poetry. That’s when I’m glad there are women like Svetlana Alexievich in the world.

When this Russian-speaking author won the Nobel Prize for Literature last autumn, for non-fiction writing exploring the pain in Soviet and post-Soviet history, from the Second World War to today, I had never read her work.

I knew I’d have to. I am a Russianist, after all. But when I first read the citation from the Stockholm judges for “polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time” – her books are compilations of the individual testimonies of the thousands of people she has interviewed since 1980 – I'm afraid I had a mental picture of a sort of enormous choir of depressed people in nasty clothes shouting, in dirge-like unison, about how awful everything was. It made me feel tired in advance. I didn’t much want to try.

Until very recently, it would have been all but impossible, anyway, since it was a challenge even to find her work. In her home country of Belarus - to which she returned in 2013 after more than a decade away, in France and Germany, avoiding the Soviet-style rule of its strongman president - her books used to have to be smuggled in from more adventurous Russia. (Things have eased slightly since she went back to her two-bedroomed flat in Minsk). The five-volume Russian-language set is hard to get, even in London, a city stuffed with Russian émigrés; English translations have been done piecemeal by small presses.

But now, in the wake of her Nobel win, a coherent English-language canon is coming into existence at last. In April, Penguin brought out a new translation by Anna Gunn and Arch Tait of Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future, Alexievich’s account of life near the nuclear power station whose fourth reactor blew up in 1986, 30 years ago. Penguin will have new translations this October of Boys in Zinc (about the Soviet war in Afghanistan) and War’s Unwomanly Face (Alexievich’s first book, on women in the Second World War) and finally – appearing for the first time in English – Last Witnesses (on the legacy of the Second World War), due in September 2017. Meanwhile, Second-hand Time, her most recent work – a searing examination of ordinary lives from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the chaotic Nineties and the rise of Putin after 2000 - got its first English-language publication in May with Fitzcarraldo Editions, in a translation by Bela Shayevich.

And so I’ve been catching up. And developing a big case of hero-worship.

Alexievich has been doing the authorial rounds in the UK in the past week or two, talking at Hay and Cambridge and giving interviews; a victory lap, marking her global recognition.

Having seen her at the Cambridge literary festival on Tuesday, I now know her to be a short, stocky woman of 68, with brave auburn hair, a composed manner and an orange scarf. She grew up in a Ukrainian village with few men (she cites the women’s stories as a model for her work). Her parents were schoolteachers; her father also served in the Red Army. She could never persuade him out of his Communist beliefs. She was of the perestroika generation, one of the kitchen liberals – she now calls them “romantics” – who longed for the Soviet demise before it happened, then wondered what was left. She raised her sister’s four-year-old after the sister died of cancer, as many Belarusians did after Chernobyl. That daughter now has a daughter of her own, living in Minsk too.

Both Alexievich’s low voice and her smile have sadness in (though she can be amusing). She was a journalist and is very frank; on winning, she was televised telling journalists that she loved “the good Russia” of civilization and culture, “but not the Russia of [Stalin secret police chief] Beria and Putin.”

Her subject is anything but funny - the horrors of the 20th century and the Soviet “Red empire”, “a history of how people wanted to build the Heavenly Kingdom on earth….In the end, all that remained was a sea of blood, millions of ruined human lives.”

She is influenced by the Belarusian writer Ales Adamovich, whose collective memoir of the 1941-44 siege of Leningrad was built, like her work, on multiple testimonies from ordinary people trying to survive. She quotes him as believing “that writing prose about the nightmares of the 20th century was sacrilege. Nothing may be invented. You must give the truth as it is,” she explains.

It can be frightening, even nauseating, to read her true stories. The Red empire was a terrifying place, built on mass sacrifice and multiple acts of heroic self-sacrifice for the greater good. At the beginning of Second-Hand Time, Alexievich sets the stage: “People who’ve come out of socialism … have a special relationship with death. The stories people tell me are full of jarring terms: ‘shoot’, ‘execute’, ‘liquidate’”.

Her style is to go right beyond the news story and inside the hearts and minds of her individual interview subjects, offering intensely revealing stories from hundreds of people in each book which each shed a unique light on a big subject. She has called herself a “historian of the soul”.

Into these painful individual stories, every now and then, comes a glimpse of the big history you can always feel coming into existence just out of sight. Through an accumulation of small agonies, for instance, you come to understand how the Soviet authorities’ slapdash response to Chernobyl led to a new questioning of those authorities, and, five years later, to the collapse of the Soviet empire. For one engineer at a nearby synthetic-fibre factory, the first clue was the alarm of some visiting German experts. They demanded doctors and radiation meters. Then they left.

“And how did we view their behaviour? Oh, just look at those Germans, they’re hysterical! What clowns! Look at our men, they’re real men! That’s Russians for you! Daredevils! Battling the reactor! Not afraid for their own skin! (Becomes pensive). But that is a kind of barbarism too, the lack of a sense of self-preservation. We always say ‘we’ instead of ‘I’. ‘We will show what Soviet heroism is!’ but then what about me? I don’t want to die either. I’m frightened. After Chernobyl, that happened automatically. We began learning to say ‘I’.”

I spent seven years after the Soviet collapse in 1991 living in Russia. Astonishing though her writing about that period is, in Second-Hand Time, the themes on the minds of the people she talks to in it are at least familiar. But I have never been to Chernobyl, and never been able to understand why some eccentric souls decided to go on living nearby after the nuclear plant’s reactor number 4 exploded in April 1986. I think I’d sweepingly, sneeringly assumed they must be village idiots or elderly simpletons who barely noticed that the land had emptied of all but odd-shaped animals. Alexievich took a more considered and humane view, from close up. Reading the book made me understand, from the heart as well as the head, and from many people’s points of view, and weep for them.

I almost never weep into books, especially not very large non-fiction books. This is my warmest possible recommendation. What she says is not just grandiose self-publicity - this woman really is a historian of the soul. You will be moved as well as informed. Read her books and see for yourself.

Interestingly, however, Russia’s literary establishment is horrified that Alexievich has won this international recognition.

The initial response from Moscow was vitriolic. ("Alexievich is a classic anti-Soviet ... a traitor," howled one critic in the cultural weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta; author Zakhar Prilepin wrote in Izvestiya that she had been chosen purely for opposing the Kremlin and was “not a writer”; President Putin kept quiet). This was not altogether surprising. Four times out of five in the million-dollar prize’s history, Nobels to Russians have been given to Kremlin enemies, from Ivan Bunin to Boris Pasternak to Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Joseph Brodsky. Alexievich is not a woman to mince her words; one of her major themes is the abuse of power. Finally, even though she writes in Russian, she is not an insider on the Moscow literary scene, or even "properly" Russian, but a half-Belarusian, half-Ukrainian Slavic-little-sibling mashup. At a new low ebb for Russia’s relations with the West, after the outbreak of conflict around Ukraine, it was to be expected that Moscow would experience this award going to this woman at this time as a slap in the face.

She may agree. At the book event I attended, Alexievich was asked lots of questions about politics. She sidestepped them, kind of. She has said that the culture of the barricades is an intellectual distraction, and she must free herself of politics if she is to focus on her true calling, writing; yet a bit of her visibly enjoys the fight. She couldn’t quite stop phrases like “Putin’s craziness” dropping from her lips. I sensed that she was half-itching to roll up her sleeves and give battle.

There is a breed of these female intellectuals in the former Soviet world, ordinary-looking women strangely unafraid of telling truth to power. There is something in Alexievich of Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist whose astonishing reports showed the human face of the war in Chechnya; Galina Starovoitova, the liberal politician of the Nineties; and the country’s doughty, unstoppable human rights activists, from Andrei Sakharov’s widow Yelena Bonner to Svetlana Gannushkina of Memorial. They don’t always make old bones. Politkovskaya was shot dead outside her front door in 2006, and Starovoitova in 1998. Their outspokenness is feared by many in their buttoned-down homeland. But they are also reverently respected, at least by a few.

I may be more of an armchair soldier myself, but that only makes me more reverent when I come across the truly heroic type. I hope Alexievich will make old bones. And I am eagerly awaiting her next book.

Vanora Bennett's website

Diminishing vistas by Gillian Polack

I went missing last month, for I was in hospital, recovering from a major operation. I thought “How cool it would be to write a potted history of heart operations for History Girls” but when it came to writing this, I found that my world is still too small and I’m still dealing with the emotional ramifications of the operations. You’re not, therefore, getting a medical post today, however interesting such a post would be. There are family reasons why such a post would be particularly interesting – maybe one day. When one’s father is a footnote’s footnote in the history of heart surgery, it’s worth exploring.

The thing with a personal event as large as this is it shrinks one’s universe and my universe is only just now beginning to grow again. In a few weeks’ time I’ll be doing normal work and next to no time (objectively) I’ll have more energy than I’ve had for years. But to reach this stage of health, I have to take small and cautious steps. I have to walk a slow trail in a small universe.

It struck me that there is a rather important equivalent to what’s happening emotionally to me right now. In the Middle Ages, 95% of people didn’t go more than 20 miles away from their homes. Some travelled a great deal, but more did not. When they travelled, their worlds grew. When they came home again, their worlds shrank in a very similar emotional way to mine. There was one particular type of travel that most Christians were likely to have undertaken, either to somewhere close to home or to somewhere excitingly distant.

The big voyage for many people was a pilgrimage. Those who could might chose the ultimate destination: Jersualem. Santiago de Compostella, St David’s in Wales, Rome were all more achievable. All of these pilgrimages were undertaken on foot (except when water had to be crossed, obviously) and some modern pilgrims follow these routes. A friend of mine did the last few hundred kilometres of the Santiago route just recently. The pilgrimage is different these days, but it still helps people grow their worlds and discover a new world.

This piece is not, however, about the nature of pilgrimages. There are so many books and studies and pictorial essays about going on pilgrimage. Growing one’s world and exploring new places is something we tend to talk about. We talk less about what happens when our worlds get smaller.

There is a moment in a pilgrimage that matches that moment in my life when everything seemed confined and small. That shrinking of one’s life is what happens when one returns home. A good Christian soul has done their big journey to, say, Canterbury , and made offerings and achieved virtue for the afterlife and has taken the long trudge home. As they walk, they know the route for they have already travelled in the opposite direction. What was astonishing and new on the way out is familiar on the way back. It might feel smaller or might feel longer.  It might be more tiring because instead of having a marvellous and strange and beautiful destination to look forward to, there is the cycle of work. Or it might be reassuring to return to everyday life and its demands.

How one undertakes that return journey depends on one’s personality. It’s documented far less than the outgoing journeys, for it’s less important in a religious sense. Less important in so many ways. One builds up to the pilgrim dictation and then the return walk is merely a gap between that event and everyday life. It’s dangerous. It’s no easier than the route out. But there are no religious rewards at the end, no special once-in-a-lifetime emotional joy. So how pleasant the journey home is depends on how the traveller loves the voyage itself and how much he or she wants to return to the safety and predictability of home.

This is just as important a voyage. Finding the small world again is critical to our happiness if we can’t live in the big world. Returning home has to be done in the right way. Otherwise we are, as Frodo and Bilbo were, unhappy and restless and fidgety and listening for sounds and people that have no part in our lives. As I turn to Tolkien for my example I wonder what type of stories pilgrims tell as they return home. Not at all the same kind of story s they tell on their way to their place of pilgrimage. And I wonder if they slot themselves into the agricultural year while they’re still on that journey, anticipating the tasks ahead and mentally preparing themselves so that they fit into their old lives.

We don’t have as many stories telling us how to safely return to smaller existences. Our fiction would rather tell us how to meet the challenges of the larger world. Yet we all have return journeys at some stage in our lives. Or we find ourselves living smaller lives while we handle health and personal problems. This is where history is stronger than fiction. There are far more novels about lives that grow than about lives that shrink. What our fiction doesn’t tell us, our history can. I suspect that my recent experiences will persuade me to write about coming home and discovering the small life, one day. And I suspect that my future will involve some research into return journeys, to fuel this story.

Finding Michelangelo by Mary Hoffman

Every now and again in a writer’s life there comes an experience that you have just exactly because you are a writer. You are doing your research and you stumble across something you didn’t know or someone tells you something unexpected. And this might lead to something amazing.

I’ve been lucky enough to have many of these, most of them in Italy, the land of my heart, but this post is specifically about two connected to Michelangelo.

The first happened in my first “Long Vacation” which is what they call the summer holidays at the University of Cambridge. It was a very long vacation indeed and my boyfriend had gone to India. I, on the other hand, had been given a bursary to spend a month in Florence, learning the language ay the British Institute.

Only in the mornings; the rest of the day was my own. It was not my first visit to Italy but it was my first to Florence. I arrived by train. My father was a railwayman and I never went anywhere you couldn’t get to by train.

I was staying in a pensione overlooking Piazza San Lorenzo, where there were three other students. The two men were also from Cambridge, a medical student and another reading English like me. Of the two women, one was reading English at Bristol and the other was an American of German origin on what we would now call a gap year.

Creative Commons: Saiiko

None of us was an art student and yet we all became passionate about art in that month, spending every afternoon exploring museums and galleries with our sketchbooks and meeting up for a cheap dinner every evening to share our discoveries.

One afternoon all five of us showed up at the Casa Buonarroti with our sketchbooks and 2B pencils but, alas, it was closed for renovation. “But we love Michelangelo!” we said. “And we are students here for only a short time.” We never actually claimed to be art students but our long faces did the trick and we were let in.

We saw Michelangelo’s two early marble relief panels: first The Madonna of the Stairs with the BVM represented as a strong peasant woman, who has just finished feeding her child. If she stood up, she would be a giantess. Then the Battle of Centaurs and Lapiths in which the artist discovered what would be his main theme for the rest of his life: depicting the athletic forms of naked young men.

Crative Commons: Carulmare

The third object I remember was a painted wooden crucifix with an almost childlike Christ, the whole thing about three-quarters life size. At that time there was a dispute about whether it really was an authentic Michelangelo early work. We were all very moved by it and quite convinced that it was.

The experts later agreed and it was returned to the church of Santo Spirito, Oltr’arno, where it had originally hung as a thank you from Michelangelo to the Prior Bichiellini, who had let him dissect unclaimed corpses that had been brought there from the hospital.

Scroll forward many decades and I am again in Florence in April of this year after more visits than I can count – more than thirty at least. This time I am a woman on a mission. I have been writing the story, In the Footsteps of Giants, that forms the basis of the app being developed for Time Traveler Tours & Tales and I am there with Sarah Towle, the American publisher and writer who set the company up.

We are developing an app to be used on IOS and Android phones in the city so that families with older children can take a tour of Florence, using Michelangelo as their Renaissance guide.

Creative Commons: David Gaya

A little bit of history: Michelangelo was born into a Florentine family, the second of five boys, and as a young teenager was taken under the wing of the great patron of the arts, Lorenzo de’ Medici. He was brought up with Lorenzo’s sons and nephew, two of whom later became Pope, but after Lorenzo died, Michelangelo had a fraught relationship with the family.

There were times when he worked for the Republic which had expelled the Medici and times when he took artistic commissions from members of the Medici family. As an adult he lived more in Rome than in Florence, thought the city of his adolescence and young manhood still contains some of his greatest works of art.

In 1527 he was appointed to oversee the fortifications of his home city, which was about the come under siege …from the Medici! So when the members of that family, in collaboration with the Imperial Army, attacked Florence so hard that the city surrendered in the summer of 1530, Michelangelo was a wanted man.

The New Sacristy, tomb of the lesser Lorenzo de' Medici

He went into hiding, in a place he knew well – San Lorenzo church. He had been building a chapel there to house the tombs of his old patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici and his murdered brother Giuliano, and two lesser Medici dukes who confusingly had the same forenames. These tombs were to be housed in a New Sacristy, designed to balance the Old Sacristy, which had been built earlier by one of Michelangelo’s heroes – Filippo Brunelleschi.

Brunelleschi was the gifted engineer and architect who had worked out how to fit a dome on Florence’s great cathedral and he had designed the whole church of San Lorenzo which was the family church of the Medici.

What Michelangelo knew and the Imperial forces didn’t was that there was a secret chamber under the New Sacristy. His friend Prior Figiovanni sneaked him in there and there he stayed in hiding from August till October.

And while he was there he drew on the walls with charcoal.

The room wasn’t found again until 1976, ten years after the great flood that damaged so much art in Florence in 1966. Obviously a lot more important spaces had priority for restoration over the room under the New Sacristy, which had been used for years to store coal. It was only when the walls were being cleaned up that the charcoal drawings began to emerge.

Here was the clue to where Michelangelo had been hiding in those missing weeks as summer turned into autumn in 1530. He had whitewashed the walls to cover up his drawings, we assume that he didn’t want to get Prior Figiovanni to get into trouble for showing him the hiding place.

The tour of Florence app, In the Footsteps of Giants, was loosely inspired by my novel David (Bloomsbury 2011, Greystones Press revised edition 2016) in which I imagined who the model might have been who posed for Michelangelo’s most most famous statue.

And the story of sculpting the Giant, as he was known in the earlier years of the sixteenth century in Florence, is still there in the app. But we decided to make the sculptor himself the narrator of the story, as he hid under San Lorenzo, sketching a kind of spiritual diary on the walls, looking both backwards and forwards.

So it was really important for Sarah and me to get into that secret underground chamber. The only trouble was it is not open to the public.

Without revealing any names or details, I will only say that Sarah is a very determined woman! The result was that we did in fact spend a full hour in that chilly underground room where one of our heroes had hidden in fear of his life nearly five hundred years ago. It was an unforgettable experience.

We took lots of photographs, which I can’t show you yet, because of copyright negotiations. But if you put “stanza segreta San Lorenzo” into your search engine, you will find plenty of images to give you an idea of what an overwhelming experience it was.

There is a well in one corner though the water would not have been any more drinkable than any other in Florence in 1530. You could probably have washed with it but I doubt Michelangelo bothered. One of things we know about him is that he washed rarely, didn’t change his clothes for ages and slept in his boots.

Much more interesting are the drawings on the walls, including sketches for the monument to the younger Giuliano de’ Medici, Duke of Nemours. You can tell it’s for that statue by the knees.

The funerary monuments in the New Sacristy were never completed, as Michelangelo was summoned back to Rome to work on the Last Judgment fresco in the Vatican. But he was pardoned by the Medici and his salary unfrozen, on condition he continued with the chapel. We don’t know for sure why he never returned to complete the plan.

What is certain is that visitors admired its extraordinary architecture and great sculptures for nearly four and a half centuries without knowing about that secret room under their feet, where the great man hid, not knowing if he’d ever be free to work on his art again.

(You can buy David: the Unauthorised Autobiography on this Amazon link (other booksellers are available))

And you can pre-order the story app here.