Among all the Major Arcana of the tarot, the Emperor is without doubt the one I feel the least sympathy for.
Because he represents “Law,” “Order,” and the temptation of control — in a word, the pillars of what gender studies call male power, or patriarchy.
To tell his story, I chose Cassandra as the narrator: the unheard prophetess, condemned to speak the truth without ever being believed.
Through her, I tried to question the founding myths of Mediterranean patriarchy — the Olympian gods — guided by the conviction that structures of domination cannot be dismantled by analysis alone.
Imagination is needed — though it rarely pleases Emperors.
In this “banquet of the dead and the gods,” Cassandra asks not for vengeance but for recognition.
She is accompanied for a while by Salimbene de Adam and Lorenzo the Magnificent, who here take their leave, and by the beloved Don Giovanni — who will return en travesti for the card of the Hermit.
(For episode 4, “A pilgrimage for power“, see here )
(For episode 3, “Lou’s dream and the two songs” , see here )
(For episode 2, “God’s Jongleur“, see here)
(For episode 1, “At Henri Toulouse Lautrec’s table“, see here)
In the Boboli Gardens, the night is a black velvet studded with silver.
The air smells of damp earth and jasmine, and a light wind stirs the trees like the curtains of a theater.
I walk in silence along the cypress avenue, followed by Brother Salimbene, who crosses himself every three steps.
Ahead of us, a lantern sways — held aloft by Lorenzo de’ Medici, disguised as a wandering minstrel, a hurdy-gurdy slung across his shoulder and a smile stolen from a fallen angel.
Waiting for us on the chestnut lawn, seated on a stone bench, is Don Giovanni.
The moon strikes his splendid, pale, arrogant face; his brocade cloak looks like a night folded within another night.
“Ah! The mystic traveler!” he exclaims as he sees me. “And her saintly secretary! Come, come. I’ve invited an extraordinary guest to dinner, though he seems in no hurry to appear.”
Salimbene mutters under his breath, “If it’s who I think it is… may God protect us.”
“Relax, Leporello,” says Lorenzo teasingly. “The dead only come when summoned by music.”
We sit around an improvised table — a marble slab, three goblets, and a loaf of bread that seems freshly broken by invisible hands.
Lorenzo tunes his hurdy-gurdy and murmurs softly, almost only for me:
“Never forget, Lady Margherita — the people who talk to trees, to walls, and to the dead have always been the first to know which way the wind is blowing. Most men, alas, only feel it when it’s already a storm.”
Don Giovanni laughs bitterly. “Ah, what a delight, your lucid madness! The world fears you, you know? Those who speak with spirits terrify because they prove the spirit exists.”
“And because they carry the unbearable message,” I add, “that the spirit obeys no one.”
I notice my voice trembles — as though something ancient inside me had answered that echo.
A sound of stone shifting breaks our words.
The statues of the garden begin to move — first imperceptibly, then with growing speed — until they gather around us:
Aphrodite rising proud from her bath, Dionysus with his long braids and his herm, then Apollo, Ceres, and finally Pan — the satyr from the Fountain of the Artichoke — breaking free, laughing, from his prison of stone.
The white marble of their bodies glistens with life: it sweats, it breathes, and at last, it opens its eyes.
“Mercy!” cries Salimbene. “The garden is possessed!”
“Quiet, Leporello,” says Lorenzo, smiling. “They’re only gods — remembering they were never truly dead.”
“If they ever were,” I murmur, tracing the rim of my glass.
Aphrodite approaches, her body shimmering with a milky light, and lays a hand on Don Giovanni’s shoulder.
“You, child of desire,” she says, her voice flowing like water, “have defied death with love. Is that not, perhaps, the secret of the gods?”
Don Giovanni falls to his knees, enraptured, and begins to improvise a new rhythm to his usual song:
“O most gentle statue, though made of marble —
I came not to repent, but to invite you to supper!”
The statue smiles. And behind her, from the end of the path, another figure advances — half stone, half shadow: the Commendatore — or perhaps Zeus? I cannot tell.
Salimbene nearly faints. “It’s him! The damned one! The walking anathema!”
Lorenzo laughs softly. “And yet look,” he says, “even he has come to supper. Perhaps forgiveness is nothing but a banquet we all arrive at too late.”
The Commendatore (or Zeus?) takes a seat, and the table fills by itself — bread, wine, figs, and a harp that plays without hands.
I meet Lorenzo’s gaze as he raises his goblet.
“To the living who refuse to become relics,” we toast.
Then I speak — to the statues, to the men, to the dead, and to the winds of Florence:
“We are here to transcribe what the spirits say
when no one listens to them anymore.
Not out of fear, but for memory.
Not out of blind faith, but compassion.
And if they call us mad — so be it.
For madness is only the language
the gods sometimes remember to teach mortal souls.”
A long silence follows.
Dionysus sets a brimming cup before me.
“Drink,” he says. “And sing.”
Lorenzo’s hurdy-gurdy begins an ancient melody — the echo of Don Giovanni’s overture, a tune made of guilt and desire.
The statues answer in chorus, until the Commendatore, in a voice of thunder, whispers:
“Amen.”
__________________________________________________________________________
The garden falls silent.
After the Commendatore’s Amen, a hush descends upon us — like a curtain lowered between two acts of the same cosmic play.
Lorenzo sits again, eyes half-closed, his face dimly lit by the lantern hovering above the bread and wine.
Don Giovanni drums his fingers on the marble, as if only music — not faith — could keep him safe from Hell.
Brother Salimbene crouches behind a marble basin, fingering his rosary like a soldier polishing his weapon during a truce too brief to believe in.
And then the great statue of Ceres begins to move.
Her motion is not human — her form seems to glide across the ground, like the breath of a monk at prayer.
Her gown, woven of gold and grain, rustles with the sound of ripened fields, leaving behind a scent of fresh bread and rain-soaked earth.
She stops before me and smiles — with that compassionate benevolence gods sometimes grant to those who still believe they are free.
“Margherita,” she says, her voice as steady as an equation,
“you have transcribed the words of the dead,
but you have not yet heard the words of fire.
Every discourse on men — and their excesses — must pass through the sun,
for the sun is not only light, but judgment.
A lofty and perilous dialogue awaits you.”
Apollo, who until then had watched in silence, lifts his head.
His face is beautiful — cruelly beautiful — sharp as a truth spoken too late.
In his hand he holds a blazing torch.
“We shall speak,” he says, raising an eyebrow,
“of what you call male power — the form of hybris you seem most eager to fight.”
A wave of heat passes over me.
I half-laugh, trying to shield myself behind irony.
“A difficult conversation, I fear. And there will be offerings, I presume?
Gods don’t grant audiences for free.”
Ceres laughs, and from her hands fall ears of wheat that, upon touching the ground, turn into ancient gold coins.
“One florin — not more,” she says. “You don’t have it, and yet you will.”
Lorenzo — the minstrel of both worlds — draws from his hat a handful of coins, disks of copper and silver of every shape and age.
“Hungarian forints,” he proclaims solemnly.
“The poets’ gold is universal. And there’s always room for hermeneutics,” he adds, winking at me.
Apollo takes the coins, lets them chime between his fingers, then casts them into the flame.
They do not burn — they melt into pure light.
“That will suffice,” he says. “Now, ascend.”
But Ceres stops me for a moment, placing a hand on my arm.
“Be careful what you accept up there,” she whispers.
“Every fruit of heaven contains a promise the earth cannot keep.”
I turn — the statues are watching, their empty goblets glimmering with milky light.
The Boboli Gardens breathe with me.
Then the Sun’s chariot — invisible until now — appears, drawn not by horses but by the sound of dawn itself.
Apollo extends his hand.
And I, without further questions, take it.
The chariot rises without noise.
Florence recedes beneath us, a ribbon of light over red roofs.
Lorenzo and Don Giovanni remain below, waving with theatrical exaggeration —
the first with the grace of a Renaissance actor, the second with the insolence of a man who never truly believed in his own damnation.
Brother Salimbene crosses himself three times, then kneels.
“Deus in adiutorium meum intende!” he shouts, his voice swallowed by the wind that lifts us higher.
Apollo holds the reins, though he doesn’t need them.
The horses are not horses — they are tongues of fire plaited together, opening fissures of light at every stride.
“Look at her,” says Apollo. “Florence — a sleeping body.
The men beneath those tiles think themselves free because they have forgotten their gods.
But the freedom born of amnesia is no freedom at all — it is fever,
like the moths that fall into fire believing they chose it.”
The heat of his chariot burns, but it does not wound.
“And the gods?” I ask. “Do they forget too?”
Apollo smiles, and his smile illuminates the sky like a newborn sun.
“No. We never forget. But we grow bored.
That is when we become human — and call our boredom desire.”
Then, from the light itself, a figure emerges — Cassandra, the prophetess doomed never to be believed.
She does not climb onto the chariot: she rises from within it, as if she had always been there.
Her gown burns and mends itself with every breath; her hair, all ash and sparks, veils her face.
Her gaze cuts through me like a flame that knows where to burn.
“I was expecting you,” says Apollo, without turning.
“I never doubted it,” she replies. “You always wait for those you’ve already condemned.”
The silence stretches taut as a bowstring.
My throat is dry; my hands, clasped over my knees, feel like the hands of a witness awaiting her turn to speak.
Then Cassandra smiles — that smile which foretells more disasters than any oracle.
“I suppose the Olympians want me to reveal some secret about their manhood.
But in this tribunal, dear god, I will ask the questions.
They are sensitive matters, I believe.
In this, you gods are not so different from mortal men and their contests over who can piss the farthest.”
Apollo inhales slowly, as though holding back both laughter and guilt.
“Size, Cassandra, does not concern the gods.”
“Oh, doesn’t it? And yet some turn into bulls, others into showers of gold, or swans…
Phallic symbols, every one of them, don’t you think?”
“Metaphors of power, not flesh.”
“Metaphors of fear,” she retorts.
“Fear that divine desire will never be enough for itself.
Zeus changes shape to possess; you change light to seduce;
Ares confuses war with orgasm — and Aphrodite watches you all, laughing,
because she knows none of you can bear the weight of tenderness.”
Apollo looks at her, and in his eyes burns an ancient sorrow too deep to be called shame.
“And you, prophetess,” he says softly, “what do you know of tenderness?”
Her voice drops an octave.
“I know that words become truth only when they stop trying to dominate.
And that your music — if it weren’t so full of itself — might still heal those who listen.”
I turn toward her, trying to ease the tension.
“Cassandra, you speak as if you’d given a seminar in Gender and Olympus Studies.”
She laughs. “Oh, I did. Only my audience was made of statues —
the ones in the Boboli Gardens listened better than most men.”
The chariot crosses the threshold of dawn, tilting in a perfect arc,
and the whole world seems to vibrate like a single string — and I with it.
My body trembles, turns almost liquid, almost transparent.
For an instant, I see the entire Mediterranean spread beneath us —
Athens, Alexandria, Rome, Istanbul, Jerusalem —
a single breath, spoken in one divine exhalation.
The chariot accelerates, and the sky opens into absolute white.
The fire of the chariot goes out in silence,
and yet the light does not fade — it simply remains,
suspended, pale and endless.
It is neither day nor night; there is no above or below —
only a milky radiance shining on an alabaster plain without end.
The gods sit in a circle, but they do not appear majestic — only very tired.
Zeus sits cross-legged, eyes closed, his sceptre laid beside him like a beggar’s staff.
Poseidon paces restlessly, fists swollen with storm.
Dionysus lies half-naked on his side, like a Bedouin prince with a lost smile.
And beside them stand the goddesses:
Artemis — still as a sorrow understood too late;
Aphrodite — searching for a mirror in which to recognize herself;
and Persephone — her face divided between winter and bloom.
Cassandra surveys them one by one,
like someone leafing through a book whose ending she already knows.
I stand beside her, hands clasped, more witness than protagonist.
“Here we are,” she says. “The guilty and the survivors.”
Zeus opens one eye; his voice is rough as wet stone.
“We are not here to be judged.”
“No one ever is,” she replies.
“But someone must remember your misdeeds,
as well as your heroic deeds.”
Artemis lowers her gaze.
Aphrodite sighs.
Dionysus laughs faintly — the sound dying in his throat.
“The justice of the gods,” he says,
“is just another form of nostalgia.
We long for things to return as they were —
even those that were never just.”
Persephone rises, her gown splitting into light and shadow.
“I know a thing or two about return,” she says.
“Every return is a wound.
And yet from that wound the grain grows.”
Invisible Ceres passes beside her, touching her gently.
The air fills with the scent of soil and bread.
I feel my throat tighten — I want to speak, but Cassandra speaks for me.
“Perhaps restorative justice is this,” she says softly:
“not to go back, but to learn to grow something
exactly where we were broken.”
Apollo says nothing; his light trembles like a plucked string.
Zeus slowly raises his head — two exhausted tempests staring out of his eyes.
“So, women,” he asks, “what do you want?
That we kneel?
Do you truly believe a matriarchy would be better than a patriarchy?”
Cassandra meets his gaze; her face hardens.
“Every form of power is violent.
What we want is justice.
We want you to admit that your patriarchal strength
was never a virtue —
but the symptom of an incurable thirst for domination.
And that you were not good fathers,
but spirits sick with eternity.”
Her voice vibrates through the air like the lowest note of a cello.
I close my eyes, as if to feel her words move through my body.
Aphrodite rises and walks to Cassandra.
She touches her cheek — gently, as a sister might forgive.
“Not all evils wish to die in silence,” she says.
“Some must be loved before they can vanish.”
The light dims, turning nearly transparent.
The figures of the gods begin to fray — silhouettes dissolving against the glare.
Aphrodite smiles one last time.
The others fade away, leaving behind only a faint radiance
that smells of wet stone and autumn wine.
Only Artemis remains, holding two crowns: one of gold, one of thorns.
She holds them as if they were equal offerings —
two ways of saying the same thing.
“Choose one,” she tells me.
“It was the same choice offered to Catherine of Siena,
before she understood that sanctity is only another word for stubbornness.”
I stare at the crowns, uncertain.
Then I laugh — not nervously, but with relief.
A sudden memory comes to me —
the tender, ironic voice of Massimo Troisi,
like a small revelation whispered from a cinema seat:
“Be an orsacchiotto for fifty days — a teddy bear.
At least you stay in the middle,
not a foolish sheep,
nor a lion who lives just one day.”
The gods — or what remains of them — laugh with me.
The white of the world cracks like thin glass,
and I feel myself slipping back toward the earth.
Their voices become echoes, then wind.
When I open my eyes, there are no chariots, no alabaster plains.
I am at the Medici Villa of Castello, in broad daylight,
sitting beneath the hollow olive tree that overlooks the lemon house.
The sun stands high, but the air has a lunar glow —
as if Apollo had chosen, just for today, to hum under his breath.
On my head, light as air, rests a crown of laurel.
It neither stings nor weighs;
it smells of new leaves and iron.
Cassandra is gone, yet I still hear her voice in the branches.
The gods have returned to the stillness of statues — their marble bodies unmoving, but no longer blind.
Only the wind moves slowly through the olive leaves.
Its thin fingers lift a dust of light that sounds almost like singing.
And in that song I hear a distant voice — rough and clear —
the first notes low, then rising in waves,
as a shaft of sunlight cuts through the garden.
The statues seem to clap their hands.
The air smells of incense, sweat, and redemption.
The next encounter is about to begin.
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