The Tower is perhaps the most feared of the Major Arcana: it speaks of illusions that collapse, of truths built like structures too rigid to endure, of ambitions mistaken for vocations.
In this episode, the Tower becomes a way of interrogating my relationship with my Church of belonging: the University. An institution in which I was born and raised — I am the daughter of a university professor — and within which becoming a professor myself was, for a long time, a powerful aspiration; so powerful that today I find myself wondering whether it was ever truly mine.
To give form to this tension, I stage a dialogue between Lucrezia Borgia and Girolamo Savonarola. Not as opposing figures, but as mirrored destinies: both bound to the figure of Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, and in different ways crushed beneath his power.
The bonfire of truths that gives the episode its title revisits and overturns Savonarola’s bonfire of vanities: not a pyre that purifies by destroying, but a symbolic blaze in which what burns are hardened truths — those that become instruments of domination rather than of understanding.
The dialogue ultimately transforms into a nocturnal procession, martyrs and partisans moving through Florence. I am not certain whether this procession is burying a past, lending strength to a present, or opening a future. Perhaps — like every true Tower that collapses — it is doing all three at once.
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(Florence, a stormy night)
The rain falls at an angle, slicing through the streets like shards of glass.
The sky above Florence is molten copper.
The bells are silent — they have been for hours now — and the Arno breathes with the long, measured breath of animals before the bite.
I cross Piazza della Signoria with my umbrella turned inside out by the wind.
In front of Palazzo Vecchio the stone seems to vibrate, as if beneath it there were still a heart that has never stopped beating.
I keep walking; I cross the Porcellino market — strangely empty of stalls and people — Piazza della Repubblica, Via Strozzi. I pass my childhood home and walk along Via delle Belle Donne, the ancient street of sex workers, until I reach Piazza Santa Maria Novella.
I cross it and enter the basilica, heading straight for the cloister, from which a faint light filters through.
This is where they told me to come.
I enter.
The smell is that of extinguished incense and wet books. Seated opposite each other, on either side of a marble table, are Lucrezia Borgia and Girolamo Savonarola.
She wears a cream-colored gown, her golden hair gathered into a heavy braid.
He, in a black habit, holds his hands clasped, but his gaze is open — like someone who has already seen hell and was not frightened enough by it.
On the table between them, a candle burns. It burns straight and silent, like a thread of pain.
Lucrezia speaks first, her voice low but steady:
“My father has been dead for centuries, and they still judge him. Yet no one has ever asked me how much of his sin truly belongs to me.”
Savonarola does not answer immediately. He looks at the candle, then says sharply, “Those born in the palace of power cannot claim innocence.”
She smiles, with a gentleness that is neither defensive nor posed.
“And those born in the cloister of virtue can? Your God demanded purity from you, yet gave you bodies you refuse. I merely learned to use mine without pretending it did not exist.”
A thunderclap breaks the silence.
From the bell tower comes a flash of white light.
A brick detaches and falls, without a sound.
Savonarola lifts his eyes.
“Towers collapse when sin weighs more than virtue.”
Lucrezia shakes her head.
“No, Father. They collapse when power forgets that even towers rest on foundations of flesh.”
I turn toward the entrance: behind us, the city flickers with light and fear.
For the first time, I seem to understand that the tower to be destroyed is not outside, but within each of us.
Within me, within them, within every inner structure built to defend a sterile truth against the reality of life.
The candle has burned down almost to the marble.
Outside, the thunder has grown more sporadic, but each flash of lightning illuminates the cloister like a celestial tribunal. Lucrezia and Girolamo remain still, separated by the table and by five centuries of misunderstanding.
Savonarola takes a slow breath and begins to recite his old sermon, his voice feverish:
Now that little time remains,
for the lie sharpens its swords,
I turn only to You, my God…
The words fall like altar stones.
Let my voice be free,
let me hold fast to the truth,
let my voice not become a slave,
let my voice not stoop to servitude.
Each invocation is an open wound.
Save me, my Lord:
save me from the worst of abysses:
normality, half-tones, moderation, compromise.
Sweep away every measure that is only censorship.
Why must evil not be shouted?
Why can an accusation not be loud and clear?
Why is injustice treated with respect?
When he reaches “Only truth is asked to whisper. Evil is not. It is allowed to scream,” a gust of wind throws the windows wide open.
Lucrezia does not flinch. She rises, with the calm of women who have learned to carry the weight of others’ purity.
“Father,” she murmurs, “your prayer is beautiful. But it is the prayer of someone who has never given birth to a child, and has nothing to lose.”
Savonarola looks at her, almost scandalized.
“The body is weak, madam. All the ruin of the world is born from the worship of the flesh.”
She smiles, like someone who has already forgiven a man who cannot understand.
“And yet God, they say, became flesh. Perhaps not to condemn it, but to experience its vertigo.”
A thunderclap answers, deep. Rain runs along the columns of the cloister like tears of stone.
“You speak like your father,” Savonarola grumbles, “of forgiveness and power together. Of grace and dominion. But sanctifying worldliness inevitably leads to destruction.”
“And you,” Lucrezia replies, “you speak like a man who is afraid of his own shadow. You wish to save us from corruption, but the fire you invoke burns the righteous as well. Don’t you see it, Father? Your God did not ask you to purify — but to understand.”
Savonarola stands up, and the flame — or what remains of it — trembles.
“I do not claim to understand what God has commanded, but to judge according to His judgment.”
“That is your failure,” she says, almost tenderly. “You wanted to turn Florence into a bastion of absolute truth. But every tower is also a prison.”
The words hang in the air like ash. Then a lightning bolt splits the night.
A piece of cornice breaks loose from the basilica roof and falls into the cloister with a dull thud.
Savonarola closes his eyes, whispering, “The sign… it is the sign!”
Lucrezia approaches the fallen stone and lays her hand on the cracked surface.
“No, Father. It is only the weight of time asking for space to be reborn.”
It is then that I realize that true failure does not come from the collapse of our defensive walls, but from our inability to listen to the vulnerabilities they conceal.
Over the cloister opens a calm night, lucid like the back of a mirror.
The rain has stopped, but the streets of Florence are still steaming, like wounds that breathe.
Lucrezia, Girolamo, and I walk out together — an ill-matched allegory of heaven, earth, and hell.
In the square, a crowd is waiting for us.
Not of the living, but of the returned: partisans, peasants, nuns, anarchists, weary saints. Their faces are lamps lit in the fog.
At the head of them all walks the partisan Bruno Fanciullacci, with the elastic stride of one who died while running. He keeps a sheet of paper in his pocket — his last leaflet — and laughs with the air of someone who never asked for forgiveness.
Beside him, a tall man with the beard of a vision and a cross that looks like a plough: the people’s prophet David Lazzaretti. His voice is that of the mountains, deep and light at once.
“Do not be afraid, sister,” he tells me. “No tower ever falls by chance. I saw the sky split open on Mount Amiata, and I thought God wished to descend. Instead, it was humankind that had to rise, with hands still dirty with earth.”
And among them, barefoot, her hair scorched by wind rather than by fire, advances Margherita of Trento, the companion of Fra’ Dolcino, a penitential hymn resting on her lips.
She bears not the face of a martyr, but of a woman who loved too deeply to remain silent. She carries a basket of living embers, and offers them to every passerby, like bread.
“They said I died at the stake,” she whispers, “but I do not burn — I blaze. My faith was a body, and my body a prayer. If the world did not understand, it was not the fault of the fire, but of the fear of touching it.”
Lucrezia takes her hand — two women divided by centuries and by different destinies, yet united by the same guilt: having loved and affirmed themselves without asking anyone’s permission.
Girolamo Savonarola lowers his gaze, like someone who recognizes in that gesture his own lack of compassion.
The procession moves toward the Lungarno.
The banners unfurl — red, dark, worn. A song rises, first subdued, then powerful:
We will burn the palaces and the royal courts,
we will burn the churches and the altars,
with the guts of the last priest
we will hang the pope and the king…
But nothing burns.
The flame is in the voice, not in the hands.
It is a liturgy of rebellion and resurrection at once.
The dead march as in The Fourth Estate:
at the front walk, with resolute steps, the partisan Bruno;
Lazzaretti brandishing the cross;
Margherita of Trento with her basket of embers;
and beside her, Lucrezia, smiling like one who knows that grace is stronger than history.
I follow them, feeling neither alive nor dead, along the Arno River, which reflects the lights of streetlamps and torches like a liquid gospel.
Florence no longer trembles: it breathes. And in the city’s breath the voices mingle — of saints, rebels, poets — until the end of the song, shouted as a single throat:
Rather than live like this,
better to die for freedom!
Lazzaretti stops halfway across the Santa Trinita Bridge and raises his cross, which now gleams like an antenna.
“Brothers and sisters!” he cries, his voice running along the Arno. “The Tower has not fallen! It has become a beacon!”
Margherita of Trento adds gently, without smiling:
“And its light, at last, has learned not to feel guilty for existing.”
A shooting star tears across the sky. Savonarola follows it with his eyes, and for the first time he seems happy to remain silent, without fear.
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