Fourteen Shades of Red:
The Coral
All of it true. None of it the whole place. Drive west and Tuscany does not stop at the hills; it stops at the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Off Livorno and around the islands of the Tuscan Archipelago the landscape carries on below the surface. Rock, shade, gorgonians, and in places Mediterranean red coral.
So the coral embroidered into Collezione Toscana is not a borrowed piece of generic Mediterranean shorthand. It was already there.
It Was Already There
Corallium rubrum, Mediterranean red coral, lives on shaded rock and in crevices, and it lives off the Tuscan coast. At Calafuria, just south of Livorno, researchers have followed it directly: in one four-year study they set tiles at twenty-five and thirty-five meters and watched new colonies settle. The colonies grew, on average, six tenths of a millimeter a year in diameter.
Which is to say coral is in no hurry at all.
The park authority for the Tuscan Archipelago records historic red coral banks and caves across the islands, at Elba, Pianosa, Giannutri, Giglio, Montecristo and Capraia, and notes that the species was once reported through much of the archipelago. Its thinning out is attributed above all to indiscriminate collection.
Nobody Knew What It Was
For most of the time coral was being fished, worn and traded, nobody knew what kind of thing it was. It branches, it is fixed to rock, it has no obvious face. Everyone assumed it was a plant of the sea.
The first person on record to doubt it was an apothecary in Livorno. Cestoni was self-taught, born in the Marche in 1637, and moved to the city to run a pharmacy, where he married, took the Tuscan form of his own name, and died in 1718. In 1707, in a letter to the naturalist Antonio Vallisnieri, he suggested that coral was not a plant at all but an animal. He is generally credited as the first to have put the idea in writing.
Being right early is not the same as being believed. The demonstration came from Jean-André Peyssonnel, a physician in Marseille, in the 1720s, and it went badly for him: Jussieu and Réaumur were unconvinced, and the Marseille academy declined to print what he had written. The idea only became respectable after Abraham Trembley's work on the hydra in 1740, and Peyssonnel's treatise on coral eventually reached the Royal Society from Guadeloupe around 1751.
Forty-four years between a letter from a Livorno pharmacy and a treatise accepted in London. Cestoni had also worked out that scabies is caused by a mite, which gives some idea of the mind involved.
A branching thing on a rock, that everyone took for a plant, in a town that made its living selling it.
Then Livorno Made a Living From It
Nature is only half of why coral is Tuscan. The other half is commerce, and it lasted the better part of four centuries.
Livorno became the capital of the raw coral trade in the Mediterranean. The route in was political: with the Livornine laws of the 1590s, Ferdinando I de' Medici invited merchants of every nation to Pisa and Livorno, with the particular intention of attracting Sephardic Jewish families driven out of Spain and Portugal. Many of them came, and a good deal of the coral fished across the Mediterranean was funneled through the city by that network.
Honesty requires one qualification here. Genoa, Trapani and Torre del Greco produced the carved and artistic coral. Livorno, particularly from the eighteenth century, worked at volume: beads and spheres in graded sizes, made for export to the Middle East and beyond. It was an industry rather than an atelier, and the fortune it produced was real.
Those workshops employed hundreds of young women. They were called the corallaie, and the word survives because the job did, through generations, until the last Livorno coral factory closed after the Second World War.
Fourteen Shades of Red
In the 1740s the Florentine naturalist Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti traveled Tuscany recording what he found, and in Livorno he was shown the coral trade.
He knew nobody would believe the part that struck him most. Hardly anyone, he wrote, would credit that there are more than three grades of red. He was then shown fourteen, in ascending order of perfection and beauty, each with a name.
Schiuma di sangue, Fior di sangue, Primo sangue, Secondo sangue, Terzo sangue, Stramoro, Moro, Nero, Strafine, Sopraffine, Carbonetto, Paragone, Estremo, Passastremo.
The first, schiuma di sangue, means foam of blood.
Read those names again. This is a trade that needed to tell first blood from second blood, and had built a vocabulary fine enough to do it.
Later Livornese records associate the work of sorting those grades with the corallaie. Targioni himself records the grades and their names; the attribution of the sorting comes from the city's own account of its trade, which is a slightly different kind of source and worth saying so.
Either way, somebody in that city could look at two pieces of red that you and I would call red, and know which was which.
From Sea to Stitch
Our coral did not begin on a placemat. It began on a canvas bag, hand embroidered by Ilaria before MI RE LA had a name to put on a label, and that is a story of its own.
What it is not is worth saying plainly. It is not a botanical plate, and it does not set out to be a portrait of Corallium rubrum or of any other single species. It is a stylized branch: enough irregularity that it still reads as something grown rather than drafted, enough restraint that it can sit near the edge of a placemat without taking the table over.
The three colorways are three different registers of the same coast. Orange on off-white is the bright end of it, the hour when the light is high. Orange on oatmeal stone is the same coral seen against sand rather than against glare. Aqua on dark taupe is the version that belongs to depth, which is where the actual animal lives.
Why It Stays in Collezione Toscana
The easiest mistake with Tuscany is to reduce it to its most photographed view, and a collection built only on hills would have made that mistake on our behalf.
The bee belongs there, and the lavender, and the dragonfly over water in a garden. West of all of it there is a coast with a sea that grew coral, a port that traded it, and a room full of women who could name fourteen reds.
That is enough reason. It turned out to be considerably more reason than we expected to find.
Does coral actually grow off the coast of Tuscany?
Yes. Mediterranean red coral, Corallium rubrum, has been studied directly off Calafuria near Livorno at depths of twenty-five and thirty-five meters, and the Tuscan Archipelago park authority records historic coral banks and caves at Elba, Pianosa, Giannutri, Giglio, Montecristo and Capraia.
Why was Livorno important for coral?
For close to four centuries it was the capital of the Mediterranean raw coral trade, largely through a network of Sephardic Jewish merchant families invited to Tuscany by the Livornine laws of the 1590s. Its workshops employed hundreds of young women known as corallaie, and the last coral factory in the city closed after the Second World War.
What are the fourteen shades of red coral?
Grades recorded by the naturalist Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti in Livorno in the 1740s, listed in ascending order of quality: schiuma di sangue, fior di sangue, primo sangue, secondo sangue, terzo sangue, stramoro, moro, nero, strafine, sopraffine, carbonetto, paragone, estremo, passastremo. He noted that hardly anyone would believe there were more than three.
Is coral red or orange?
Both, and the range is wider than either. Corallium rubrum runs from orange-red through deep red to a red so dark it reads as black, with pink and salmon tones on some grounds and, rarely, white. The color comes from iron oxide in the skeleton and it is never uniform: coral from Sciacca in Sicily is known for its lighter orange-salmon tones, other grounds for deeper reds. That variability is why the Livorno trade needed fourteen names rather than one.
Is coral a plant or an animal?
An animal, though it was long taken for a marine plant. Cestoni, an apothecary in Livorno, is credited with first suggesting in writing that coral was animal, in a letter of 1707. The demonstration came later from Jean-André Peyssonnel, and was only widely accepted after 1740.
Why is coral in the Tuscany collection and not the Amalfi one?
Both collections contain a coast, and the difference is scale. Collezione Amalfi comes from one stretch of it, the lemon terraces of Tramonti above the water and the fjord at Furore below, told through the work that built both. Collezione Toscana covers a whole region, which is why its motifs run from a bee to a dragonfly over a garden to coral off Livorno. Coral is the western edge of Tuscany, and it is there because that particular coast has a documented history with it rather than a general Mediterranean one.
Does the MI RE LA coral motif depict a specific species?
No. It is a stylised branch drawn from the idea of Mediterranean coral rather than a portrait of one species. What is specific is the reason it sits in a Tuscan collection, which is the history of the coast rather than the anatomy of the design.
On the fourteen grades and their names: Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti, Relazioni d'alcuni viaggi fatti in diverse parti della Toscana, second edition, cited in the Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana at volume 12, part 2, page 458.
On Livorno as the center of the Mediterranean raw coral trade, on the Sephardic merchant network and on the corallaie: Costa Ovest and Corallo Livornese, which documents the trade and its workshops.
On Cestoni in Livorno: Fondazione Livorno. On the 1707 letter to Vallisnieri as the first recorded suggestion of coral's animal nature, and on Peyssonnel's later demonstration and its reception, published work on the history of gorgonian and coral study in the Mediterranean.
On red coral off the Tuscan coast and in the archipelago: published research on recruitment and growth at Calafuria, and the management plan of the Tuscan Archipelago National Park.
Foam of blood, first blood, second blood.