Tarantasio

Hanging from a beam in the apse of a small Romanesque church at Almenno San Salvatore is a curved bone two and a half metres long. For centuries the people of the valley knew exactly what it was. It had come out of the water, and everyone knew what had lived in the water.

The water was the Gerundo, a shallow inland sea of reed and silt that once spread across the middle of Lombardy, fed by the flooding of the Adda, the Serio, the Oglio and the Brembo, reaching from Cassano d’Adda almost to Cremona. Calling it a lake flatters it. It was a drowned country of stagnant channels, sandbars and willow scrub, navigable enough that dugout canoes still turn up in the riverbeds, unhealthy enough that the abbeys and the men of Lodi spent centuries cutting it away with drainage works and the widening of the Muzza canal until it was gone. What survived was the place names and the dragon.

They called him Taranto, more often Tarantasio. The description everyone still quotes is credited to a monk named Sabbio, writing his memories of Lodi around 1110: a serpent-shaped creature, the head enormous with great horns, with a tail and webbed feet, fire from its mouth and smoke from its nose. It swam the Gerundo, it fed above all on the flesh of children and of men, and the moment it saw a boat it threw itself at it and broke it apart. Its breath alone brought pestilence and killed women with fevers. Nobody has ever produced Sabbio’s manuscript, which is worth saying plainly, but the portrait held. Five centuries later the Lodi poet Filiberto Villani was still working from it, giving the beast a triple tongue flickering between great teeth and a gilded crest set between two long horns, and grass that yellowed wherever its breath had passed.

Morning on the shallows, and a flat-bottomed boat pushed out through the reeds, the pole sucking as it came free of the mud, mist lying on the water at chest height. Then a long ridge of movement crossing the channel with no sound at all, and afterwards nothing on the surface but split planking turning slowly in the current.

The people of the marsh had a name for what the breath did to them, and the name was febbre gialla, yellow fever. What actually came off the Gerundo was the ordinary lethal chemistry of a warm swamp: mosquitoes and malaria through the summer, and pockets of methane and hydrogen sulphide in the ground beneath, which meant the smell of rotten eggs rising out of the earth for no reason anyone could see. The marsh was killing them and it needed a face. At Calvenzano the villagers are said to have raised a wall three metres high and fifteen kilometres long to keep the thing off their fields, and the main street of the village was called via della biscia, snake street, long after there was anything left to fear.

On where he came from the stories disagree. The most gruesome tradition has him generated out of the putrefying flesh of Ezzelino III da Romano, the Ghibelline warlord who died of his wounds in those lands, which gives a man already remembered as a monster a second career as an actual one.

Every version of the ending pairs the same two events, the death of the dragon and the drying of the lake, and the versions differ only in who swings first. Some give the credit to Saint Christopher, some to Frederick Barbarossa. The one Milan preferred gives it to the founder of the Visconti, who killed the beast and then took it for his own, which is how the biscione, the blue serpent with a human figure in its jaws, came to sit on the arms of the family and then on the arms of the city. In the early 1300s, with the drainage well advanced, a skeleton was pulled out of the ground near the Adda at Lodi and carried whole into the church of San Cristoforo, where the townspeople could go and stand under the proof.

The emblem, awkwardly, is older than the story attached to it. Bonvesin de la Riva, writing in the 1280s, knows only that Milan grants one of the Visconti a banner bearing a blue viper swallowing a red Saracen, and ties the privilege to campaigns in the East. Galvano Fiamma, half a century later, fills in the detail: Ottone Visconti stripping the device from a Saracen giant named Voluce outside Jerusalem. Michel Pastoureau’s reading is drier than either. The family were lords of Anguaria, a name close enough to anguis, snake, to be embarrassing, and the heroic origin was assembled in the middle of the fourteenth century to cover something duller. The dragon may have been recruited to explain the serpent rather than the other way round.

The bones outlasted the argument. The full skeleton stayed in the church of Sant’Andrea at Lodi, probably into the eighteenth century. A rib kept at San Cristoforo survived until the Napoleonic occupation and then disappeared. Around 1800 a Lodi doctor named Gemello Villa examined a supposed rib and recorded, with the flat disappointment of a man who wanted it to be ancient, that it had the translucency of fresh bone. Three ribs still hang where they were hung: 170 centimetres at San Bassiano in Pizzighettone, 260 centimetres in San Giorgio in Lemine at Almenno San Salvatore, 180 centimetres in the sanctuary at Sombreno.

The Sombreno rib came down on 13 September 2018, lifted off its eighteenth-century chain while scaffolding stood in the church, and went to the natural history museum in Bergamo. Cleaned of a century of grease and rust it measured 169 centimetres, and a five-gram sample went to the University of Salento for radiocarbon dating. The animal it belonged to was alive between 1432 and 1591. Its cross-section is round, like a sperm whale’s, not flat like an elephant’s. Enrico Caffi, the museum’s first director, had pronounced it the left rib of a mammoth and dismissed the local legends with some contempt, and he was wrong. Ultraviolet light on the old lettering showed the initials A and M with a cross set between them, and in the same sanctuary hangs an ex voto fresco commissioned by one Antonio Moroni on 15 May 1580, from a Sombreno family with shipping interests in Venice. Sailors gave whale ribs to churches after deliverance at sea.

What Tarantasio could do was almost entirely a matter of bulk and air. He could break a working boat with his body, take a grown man off the wreck, and sour the ground he swam past so that the fevers followed. Nothing in the stories credits him with cunning, speech, shape-changing or any of the bargaining that dragons elsewhere go in for. He is a weight in the water and a smell on the wind. His limit is the water itself, since he belongs to standing water and never leaves it, which is why nobody needed a saint’s sword to be rid of him in the end. Drain the Gerundo and there is nothing for him to be.

The name outlived the swamp anyway. A hamlet of Cassano d’Adda is called Taranta. A scrap of land in the Adda by the bridge at Lodi is pointed out as the dragon’s tomb, tended since 2016 by a local heritage association. His likeness was painted into the cloister of San Marco in Milan in the thirteenth or fourteenth century with the lake behind him, drawn again by Ulisse Aldrovandi in the sixteenth, and taken up in the twentieth by the sculptor Luigi Broggini, who used him as the model for a six-legged dog breathing fire, first for Agip and then for Eni. The marsh gas that people once blamed on a monster’s breath turned out to lie under the whole plain, and to be worth a great deal of money.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Tarantasio?

Tarantasio is a dragon of Italian folklore said to have lived in Lake Gerundo, the vast marshy water that once covered part of Lombardy between Lodi, Bergamo and Cremona. He is described as serpent-bodied with a huge horned head, a long tail and webbed feet. The oldest description credited to him, attributed to a monk called Sabbio writing about Lodi around 1110, has him breathing fire from his mouth and smoke from his nose.

What did Tarantasio do to people?

Tarantasio was blamed for capsizing and smashing boats on Lake Gerundo and for eating the people aboard, children above all. He was also held responsible for a sickness the locals called febbre gialla, yellow fever, which they believed came from his pestilential breath. The real culprits were the malarial mosquitoes of the marsh and pockets of methane and hydrogen sulphide in the ground.

Who killed Tarantasio?

The tradition splits three ways. Some accounts credit Saint Christopher, some Frederick Barbarossa, and the version favoured in Milan credits the founder of the Visconti family. Every version links the dragon’s death to the draining of Lake Gerundo, so the beast dies when its water does.

Is Tarantasio the origin of the Visconti biscione?

The legend says the Visconti took the defeated dragon as their emblem, which is how the blue serpent swallowing a human figure came to stand for the family and then for Milan. The historical record is less tidy. Bonvesin de la Riva records the serpent banner in the 1280s without any dragon, Galvano Fiamma later ties it to a Saracen giant at Jerusalem, and the medievalist Michel Pastoureau argues the family simply took the snake from their lordship of Anguaria and invented a heroic origin in the fourteenth century.

Are the dragon ribs in Lombard churches real?

The bones are real, but they are not a dragon’s. Ribs long shown as Tarantasio’s still hang at Pizzighettone, Almenno San Salvatore and Sombreno. When the Sombreno bone was taken down in 2018 and radiocarbon dated at the University of Salento, it turned out to come from a cetacean alive between 1432 and 1591, almost certainly a whale rib brought home as a votive offering by a seafaring local family.

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