Life becomes a time warp in Cornello dei Tasso, a golden stone medieval hamlet of unusual beauty perched on a cliff in the Brembana Valley at 800 m above sea level. Only eight kilometers north of San Pellegrino Terme and thirty kilometers from the city of Bergamo, it portrays Italy how it used to be.
Cornello dei Tasso seems to have stood still, unruffled by the national and transnational events over the centuries.
Something about the landscape moves me these days of fall- the stone houses huddling together, the fog, the resisting isolation redolent of a poetic genius.
No cars have access to the Bergamask beautiful borgo of thirty souls. You can park down near the main road in the municipality of Camerata Cornello and climb a pretty path among vegetation.
A historic international family whose specialty was logistics originated from this closed-off tiny place still today frozen in time. It was the family of the major Italian Renaissance poet and playwright Torquato Tasso. His roots were here even if born (March 11, 1544) in Sorrento, the Kingdom of Naples. His father Bernardo, a poet and a man of letters himself best remembered for the epic, long narrative poem Amadigi, was then occupied as secretary to the Prince of Salerno. The young, talented, and handsome Torquato studied with the Jesuits in Naples, and from his letters, we know he appreciated the Jesuit education he had received. Later, he studied law and philosophy at the University of Padua and terminated his studies at the University of Bologna from where in 1565 was invited to join the magnificent Este court at Ferrara. Duke of Ferrara Alfonso I, a Renaissance prince of the House of Este, an engineer and patron of the arts, hired him as a court poet.
A devout Catholic, Torquato Tasso developed a guilty obsession with his work. In 1575 after writing other books, he completed his masterpiece in ottava rima entitled Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) and then spent several years revising it. But, by the time it appeared, he had repudiated the text because it was immoral and irreligious. Set in 1099 during the final months of the First Crusade and culminating in the conquest of Jerusalem by Christian armies led by Godfrey of Bouillon, the heroic epic poem of 600 pages remained one of the most influential books in European literature until the beginning of the 20th- century. It fuses metaphysical depth with psychological profundity.
Soon the extraordinary writer began to exhibit signs of mental disorders. Then one day, out of the blue, he drew his dagger to stab a servant he thought to be one of his secret enemies capable of denouncing him to the Inquisition. Symptoms of paranoia, the irrational and persistent feeling that people were out to get him, continued. In 1579, on the day of his 35th birthday, he lost control again: he showered invective on his boss Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara to whom he dedicated the Gerusalemme Liberata. The duke arrested him and had him locked up in St.Ann hospital, the local mental asylum. The internment ended in 1586. Torquato spent his last years feverishly rewriting his masterpiece, which he retitled Gerusalemme Conquistata – Jerusalem Conquered. Prematurely aged and sick, he was feeling the death was approaching and therefore resolved to spend his last few days in a Rome monastery, St. Onuphrius al Gianicolo. There he was taken with a violent fever and died finding hope and comfort through prayer and the three sacraments for the dying– Absolution, the Anointing of the sick, and Holy Communion. Torquato passed away the evening before Pope Clement VIII was supposed to crown him as King of Poets or Poet Laureate on the Capitoline Hill on April 26, 1595.
His work was one of the most widely translated. And until the beginning of the 20th century, he remained one of the most widely read poets in Europe. He fascinated the Romantics, included Leopardi and Goethe, for traits that anticipated those of modern poets: a pathological sensibility, extreme self-consciousness, and martyrdom at the hands of a philistine society.
As a student, I was both intrigued by his biography and haunted by his obsessive personality. I was also delighted by the different voices of his cast of characters, the shadings between glory and tragedy.
Torquato had a special bond with his family in Cornello and nearby Bergamo, a city the Tassos made more interesting in terms of cultural and economic dynamism. According to historian Tarcisio Bottani, Torquato visited Bergamo on at least two occasions, when he stayed with his relatives in Borgo Pignolo, an ancient district located between the upper and the lower city dotted with beautiful Renaissance palazzos.
“He was a 13-year-old boy when stopped by,” says Bottani. “He and his father were on their way to France.”
The second time was after being discharged from Saint Ann’s Hospital. “He never forgot Bergamo,” Bottani remarks. “In a letter addressed to the governors of Bergamo to solicit his release from the mental asylum, he described himself as “a citizen of Bergamo not only by descent but also by affection.”
The hamlet of Cornello dei Tasso lies along the Via Mercatorum, an ancient road used by merchants when traveling from the valley to the Swiss and German cities and fairs. Not only the notable family was a family of noblemen and intellectuals, but also a family of smart business people and entrepreneurs. “They managed to develop a business empire by establishing the European postal service and running it for centuries,” reveals Bottani.
Omodeo Tasso gave rise to the family line in the 13th-century Cornello del Tasso. While remaining in the borgo, the progenitor Omodeo was the first to provide postal service for la Serenissima (Venice). In the 15th-century, the Tasso family served as couriers for the pope. “Managing the papal postal service yielded great economic resources for them to the extent that they were able to open a bank in Rome that remained operational until 1518,” Bottani explains.
From the year 1490 onwards, their business got bigger and bigger. The Bergamask family established an efficient postal system at the behest of the House of Habsburg that was represented by the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. They appointed them as managers of the Postal Service of the empire because of their rich experiences in the courier services of the pope and Venice. “Janetto Tasso was the very first member of the family to serve the Habsburg Empire,” says Bottani. “Janetto came into contact with the imperial court while working as a postal courier in the Papal State. His name appears numerous times in the documents in the Papal court registers, together with the names of the other couriers in the family.”
But it was Francesco Tasso, who later set up the first cross-border messaging system, that paved the way for today’s postal service. In Gand, Spanish Netherlands, on March 1, 1501, he was appointed “Chief et Maistre des Postes.” Francesco is considered the real inventor of the modern system for delivering mail and the concept of a courier service.
The Bergamask family advanced their postal service to its highest level under Emperor Charles V when they organized a capillary network of state postal routes based on a sequence of horses ridden by a single rider via a series of organized stages across Europe.
“The family members involved in the operation were brothers Janetto, Francesco and Leonardo, and the nephews Giovan Battista, Simone, David, and Maffeo,” says Bottani. “Their names appear in hundreds of documents detailing their work (and payments received) in various European cities. In Brussels, Innsbruck, Fussen, Milan, Paris, Venice, Trento, Rome, and Naples, they set up new headquarters and branch offices, perfecting the service by opening a network of local links with smaller cities.”
The couriers had to keep pace to meet travel times on various routes, explains Bottani. “The schedule was 44 hours from Brussels to Paris, four days from Brussels to Innsbruck, 10 days from Brussels to Rome, etc.”
Bottani confirms that the Tasso family soon became one of the most relevant European dynasties, a real multinational family firm to hold the monopoly on the imperial postal service for three centuries. In the 17th-century, after being granted the title of princes, they Germanized their name to become von Thurn und Taxis. They were also the first to issue stamps.
The family maintained their steady commercial and financial role until 1867 when European countries nationalized postal services due to new postal laws and regulations introduced by the Napoleonic regime. Today, it is a billionaire family whose assets include real estate, art, and 36,000 hectares of woodland in Germany, one of the largest forest holding in Europe.
In Cornello dei Tasso, ruins of their oldest residence are still visible today. The Tassos had other homes, in both Cornello and Bretto, a nearby hamlet, and in the city of Bergamo as well.
“Other signs of their power are visible in the hamlet, such as their family coats of arms painted on the facades of houses that served as their residence from the 15th to 19th centuries,” says Bottani. They also funded the construction of the local Saints Cornelius and Cyprian Church. “However, the ruins of their first home are the most eloquent mark of their presence,” he says.
Two other historic buildings are worth a visit as they house a fascinating museum dedicated to this unique family and the history of postal services in Europe. The museum preserving many documents and artifacts of the time is located in a little piazza siding the Via Mercatorum next to one of the Tassos’ homes, a hand-painted post horn on the facade indicating their past business. “The postal services played a great social role in the evolution of mankind,” explains Adriano Cattani, director of the Museo dei Tasso e della Storia delle Poste and co-author with Tarcisio Bottani of the book Cornello e i Tasso.
The family name Tasso or Taxis evokes a type of vehicle and a transport concept that started only in 19th-century Paris. I refer to the taxicab. The colligation is not difficult to imagine if we think that up to the 1860s, the Bergamask entrepreneurs were dominant in the European communications sector with offices in Paris as well. In the time, the Tassos’ fast and reliable postal services conveying letters had required some post routes that transported people.
In 1891, with the invention of the taximeter (the Latin word taxa translates as tax or charge), an instrument to calculate the fare based upon the distance traveled and waiting time, a new type of vehicle for hire with a driver started to thrive. The first American taxicabs were imported to New York from Paris in 1907.
But no doubt, the Tasso family dynasty was into letters and avant-garde logistics.
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