Category Archives: Italy

Book Review: The Bookseller of Florence

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Four hundred and eighty pages might seem a lot to fill, when one has chosen as one’s subject a man about whom next to nothing is known. But Ross King, in this ambitious book published last year, has managed to fill them nonetheless, and the result is eminently readable. 

Vespasiano da Bisticci (the eponymous bookseller) was born c. 1422 into a poor family. His improvident father died early, leaving an indigent widow with more children than it seems reasonable to expect her to have clothed and fed and educated, when all she had been left with were debts. But somehow she managed it. One would like to know more about her, but there is no more to say. Florence in the early 15th century, we learn, was a city where 70–80 percent of boys attended school but where girls were largely encouraged never to leave the house, certainly not to go ‘leaping about the piazza’ in gaudy gowns. 

Vespasiano grows up and is apprenticed to Michele Guarducci, a bookbinder and stationer. Florence at the time is enjoying its golden age and in Guarducci’s shop Vespasiano meets a number of illustrious men. He seems to have had a natural instinct for endearing himself to them. He knew how to cultivate the right people, was obviously a good networker, and though not a scholar himself, was skilful at understanding his product, at knowing how to talk knowledgeably about it and how to source exactly what his customers might want. By dint of quite a lot of obsequious fawning, he goes on to obtain important patrons such as Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence, Federico da Montefeltro in Urbino and King Ferrante of Naples, acting as their agent and procuring manuscripts for their libraries. 

As far as Vespasiano the man goes, that is just about it. The rest of the book consists of lengthy digressions on various subjects, with the persona of Vespasiano forming the link between them. There is the story of the texts of Vespasiano’s books (notably Greek and Roman classics): the means by which they were retrieved from oblivion and the part that Florence played in this fascinating saga, complete with vignettes of the misogynist scholars, cultivated thugs and dilettante noblemen who had an appetite to acquire them. Then there is the story of the manuscripts those texts were turned into: vellum versus parchment; ‘modern’ Roman versus Gothic script; styles of illumination. Then comes the wider history of 15th-century Italy: the infighting in the city states (King gives us a lengthy account of the Pazzi Conspiracy in Florence), tussles with a warrior pope and the conquest of Otranto by the Ottomans in 1480. Badly shaken by this, Italy begins a gradual descent from enlightened humanism to something more inward-looking and defensive. Savonarola makes bonfires out of half a century of learning before ending up on a pyre himself. As for Vespasiano, having been personally reponsible for the production of around one thousand manuscripts, he abandons his faith in the power of Aristotle to guide mankind and reverts to an uncompromising and depressing form of apocalyptic Christianity.

And of course, along the way, there is the elephant in Vespasiano’s bookroom: the printing press. King takes us to Germany for its invention and then to Subiaco, near Rome, for its arrival in Italy. Florence proves a late adopter of the new technology; perhaps because her high literacy rate meant that she was ahead of other cities in terms of manuscript books and thus was slower to feel the need of printed ones. Vespasiano does not seem to mind that a printing press has been set up a few blocks away from his shop; at any rate, he does not feel threatened by it. He is like one of those people who scoffed at the first smartphones, blithely certain that no one will ever really want to do anything else with their handset than make phone calls. Vespasiano was not alone in his disdain. The printing press, many believed, would spread fake news. It would turn out books that were riddled with errors. It would bring texts before the sort of people ill-equipped to digest and understand their meaning. 

There is no climactic finale, though. Vespasiano sees that business is no longer what it was and chooses to retire. He decides that he himself will become a writer and sits down to compose biographies of 103 of the ‘illustrious men’ he had known during the course of his career. He could name-drop like mad; the illustrious men of his acquaintance included popes and princes, scholars and sculptors, many of them still household names today. 

There was also a single woman, Alessandra de’ Bardi. This seems exciting, not for tokenistic reasons but because so few such biographies exist and it might shed light on the lives that medieval Florentine women led and the prospects that were open to them beyond the hearth and the dowry chest. Unfortunately it seems that Vespasiano believed that no other prospects were appropriate and took the opportunity to turn Alessandra’s life into a disquisition on virtuous female behaviour, vigorously channelling his inner Cato the Elder. Interestingly, King does not actually tell us this. He remains completely silent about the single female Life, perhaps, one feels, out of disappointment and frustration that his bookseller was not more ahead of his time. What does emerge from King’s narrative is an impression that the Renaissance Florentine convent offered more scope to a lively-minded woman—of any class—than marriage did. King includes delightful details about a nun called Sister Marietta who worked as a compositor in the San Jacopo printing works. 

But what became of the text of Vespasiano’s Lives? ‘A terrible irony befell Vespasiano’s project,’ King tells us. ‘As well he knew, the fame of illustrious men was sometimes lost to history not because no one preserved their deeds but because the manuscripts that celebrated these deeds had perished or been lost. Such could have been the fate of Vespasiano’s manuscript. Since his presentation copies were all copied by hand, their readership was circumscribed, and his praises of illustrious men, as the decades passed, went largely unheard. A few more handwritten copies were made from his manuscripts in the centuries that followed, but all quickly disappeared into libraries or simply vanished from sight in a sorry reprise of the loss of knowledge during the “Dark Ages” that he had done so much in his lifetime to reverse.’ 

Ironically, Vespasiano’s text is known to us not through the offices of its own author but because a stray manuscript from the Vatican Library, rediscovered and issued in printed form in 1839, came to the attention of Jacob Burckhardt, who was electrified by it and used it as the basis of his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1878), hugely influential and still in print. It is through Burckhardt, via the printing press, that the existence of such a man as Vespasiano da Bisticci and the concept of such a thing as the Renaissance is known to us at all.

All of this must make us wonder about the technology shift that is taking place in our own time. We are abandoning print on paper and, in a bizarre about-turn, going back to scrolling. But our electronic medium is far more ephemeral and fragile than any book, either written or printed. And the risk of unedited, inaccurate, misleading information finding its way onto the internet is infinitely greater. We do not know what Vespasiano would have made of this. We do not really know what he thought about anything except that he was prudish; that he was a good businessman so long as established markets remained strong; and that he lacked vision when faced with a disruptive technology. He died in 1498 and lies beneath the floor of Santa Croce, under a worn and faded slab that bears only his brother’s name. King’s book is his eloquent epitaph.

Reviewed by Annabel Barber

Ross King: The Bookseller of Florence. Vespasiano da Bisticci and the Manuscripts that Illuminated the Renaissance. Chatto & Windus (Penguin Books) 2021.

Cobbled together: the roads of Rome

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All roads lead to Rome. And Rome still leads the world in roads. The streets of the ancient city were paved in huge, irregular blocks of stone known as basolato. Today only a very few segments of such paving survive: along the Via Appia, for example, or in parts of the Forum. But the streets of central Rome are still paved in stone: most retain their sanpietrini (or sampietrini), small, square, regular cobbles.

The skill of the ancient Romans in building roads throughout the empire was essential to their military victories. Many of the straight roads which they laid out are still used by modern thoroughfares, and are immediately recognisable all over Europe. In the Republican era, roads were the responsibility of censors and consuls, who had to see to their maintenance. Consular Roman highways were often provided with a raised kerb and sidewalks (crepidines) and good drainage. The key to a good road, however, lay beneath it, in the preparation of the bed on which the paving stones were laid. For centuries the durable Roman technique was forgotten and it was only in 1811 that John Loudon Macadam rediscovered it, noting that ‘a road made of small broken stone, without mixture of earth, of the depth of ten inches, will be smooth, hard and durable.’ He and his descendants went on to make a fortune out of designing Britain’s turnpikes, which came to be described as ‘Macadam’ or ‘Macadamised’ roads. 

In 2019 there were protests from some of Rome’s inhabitants, who complained that the streets were too uneven and were causing accidents. One can sympathise with these worries, but if ever the sanpietrini were to be replaced by the ubiquitous tarmac, as has happened in other historic towns where the ancient paving has been eliminated, the entire feel of Rome would be irrevocably changed. For now, at least, it seems the sanpietrini cobbles are here to stay, preserving the age-old appearance of the streets as a complement to the buildings at either side. 

Sanpietrini naturally have to be replaced from time to time, and the centuries’ old method of laying a sandy bed and hammering in each wedge-shaped piece of black basalt by hand is still the only way this can be done. The process includes the shovelling of fine sandy gravel onto the top of the stones at the end. The following series of pictures were taken in 2019, during work on the most recent edition of Blue Guide Rome. (All photos © Alta Macadam)

Pile of sanpietrini ready to be used to fill a hole. Note the specially tapered, nail-like shape of each cobble and the very simple handtools used by the workmen.
Pair of workmen painstakingly arranging the stone blocks.
Hammering down…
Aligning…
Tapping into position.
A barrowload of sandy gravel is poured onto the finished pavement.
A simple hand-held broom is used to brush the sandy gravel between the newly laid cobbles.
Job done.

Celebrating Dante

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by Alta Macadam

2021 has been a special year for Italy’s greatest poet as it is seven hundred years since his death. All over the country there have been commemorations, most of them ‘virtual’ because of the restrictions imposed by the spread of Covid-19. These have included a new edition of the Divina Commedia, conferences and readings, blogs and podcasts, and art exhibitions of works inspired by the famous poem. Notable among these was “Dante. The vision of art”, with works from the 13th to the 20th century, in Forlì, the town where Dante took refuge in 1302. In the summer, to inaugurate its “Terre degli Uffizi” cycle of small exhibitions in places in Tuscany, the Uffizi lent works connected with the poet to a display in the castle of the Conti Guidi in Poppi (Nel segno di Dante: Il Casentino nella Commedia), and sent Andrea del Castagno’s wonderful fresco of the poet to the little-visited village of San Godenzo. The Uffizi have also decided to create digital access to Federico Zuccari’s 88 illustrations of the Inferno, carried out in 1586–8. In Ravenna, where Dante died and is buried, the museum dedicated to him, in a building beside his tomb, reopened in expanded form.

Head of Dante, attributed to Giotto, in the chapel of the Bargello. Photo: Wolfgang Sauber, Creative Commons

One of the most interesting events in Florence, Dante’s birthplace, was an exhibition in the Bargello. A tiny exhibition (just two small rooms) with a mighty title: “Onorevole e antico Cittadino di Firenze; il Bargello per Dante”. The first part, “Honourable and ancient citizen of Florence”, is taken from a phrase by the historian Giovanni Villani, Dante’s near-contemporary. The sub-title, “The Bargello for Dante” is a way of suggesting atonement for the building’s grim role in condemning the poet—in his absence—to be burnt at the stake (and in a subsequent verdict to be beheaded), a sentence which forced Dante into exile from his beloved native city for the rest of his life. Almost from the very day on which the sentence was pronounced, Florentines have voiced their grief that their poet was never able to return. The declared intent of the exhibition was to reveal how closely Florence remained linked with Dante for the three decades after his death in 1321, ensuring that he lived on in the collective consciousness.

It was thirty years after Dante’s death that Boccaccio wrote his Trattarello in laude di Dante, which included a collection of his works as well as a biography (the precious first edition of which, lent from Toledo, was one of the exhibition’s central displays). Other works came from the Laurenziana and Riccardiana libraries and the Archivio di Stato in Florence, as well as from Milan (Archivio Storico Civico and the Trivulziana), from Rome (the Vatican), from Paris and from New York (the Pierpont Morgan and Metropolitan Museum of Art).

The text of the Commedia itself (for which no autograph copy exists) was copied out in Florence by scribes (almost always notaries), only one of whom signed his name, Francesco di Ser Nardo da Barbarino. One of his codices, dated 1337, has a frontispiece showing Dante wearing a crown of laurels: the first time he is shown as poet laureate. The illuminations are by an artist known as the “Master of Dominican Effigies”. By the middle of the 14th century, Dante’s work had been copied more times than that of any other medieval author, and some 70 of these manuscripts have survived. Since the 15th century they have been known collectively as the “Danti del Cento”, as traditionally one scribe is thought to have made a hundred copies in order to provide a dowry for his daughters. Almost all of them were illustrated by the Master of Dominican Effigies and Pacino di Bonaguida. One of their collaborations on display at the Bargello was a tome from the Laurenziana library showing the effects of good and bad government: on one page a famine-racked Siena expels its starving citizens through the town gates, and on the facing page prosperous Florence opens her doors to welcome them. The two towns are easily recognisable by their buildings.

It was not long before commentaries on the Commedia were being produced in Florence. In the very first in Italian, dated around 1334, the anonymous author makes notes in the margin to guide the reader, even telling us that he actually met Dante outside Florence and questioned him about a legend which the poet includes in one of the cantos. The oldest surviving paper version of the Commedia dates from around 1341 and the pages are covered with notes and comments which almost become scribbles. Another volume of the poem is a manual for illuminators suggesting where would be a good place to add an illustration and describing the subject matter.

The Palazzo del Bargello is also an appropriate place for an exhibition on Dante since it has a chapel with frescoes traditionally attributed to Giotto which include a scene of Paradise in which the figure of Dante himself appears. Although many portions of the frescoes are almost totally obliterated, the portrait of Dante dressed in red is easy to identify. The sensation caused in 1840 when it was discovered beneath the whitewash is described in Blue Guide Florence. Although art historians in the 20th century tended to dismiss these frescoes as workshop productions, it is interesting to note that today they are considered by some to have been begun by Giotto himself (on the vault and upper part of the Paradise wall) and left unfinished at his death in 1337, when they were continued by his pupils. Below and to the right of the lancet window a bishop kneels beside Dante, and in front of the poet the standing figure dressed in yellow looking straight at us is identified as the Emperor Trajan. It has been suggested that the scene of Hell on the opposite wall may even have been inspired by Dante’s description.

Today on display in the chapel is a register which records the verdicts pronounced by the Podestà Gabrielli from Gubbio open at the page in which Dante’s name appears, condemned because his appointment as Prior of the city appeared to be the result of corruption, and accused also of manipulating the election of his successor. Here, too, have been placed a panel painted on both sides, showing the Beheading of St John the Baptist, a touching work shown to those condemned to death just before their execution, and a small processional Cross painted by Bernardo Daddi, of the type held up to criminals as they were led to their death in a last attempt to make them confess and repent.

It is comforting to think that despite the fact that the Bargello building was later used as a prison, it was also the place where instruments of torture were burnt in the courtyard in 1786, after Grand Duke Peter Leopold abolished the death sentence. It remains one of the best-loved museums in all Florence for its sculptural masterpieces of the Renaissance. And Dante will continue to be celebrated every year from now on, on 25 March, Dantedi.

Keats and Rome: 200 years

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The poet John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome, in February 1821: two hundred years ago exactly. The apartment on the Spanish Steps that he had rented with his friend, the struggling painter Joseph Severn (who nursed him faithfully to the end), is now the Keats-Shelley Museum. The Life and Letters of John Keats, by Lord Houghton (1867), contains a moving account of the poet’s last days, including letters written by Keats and Severn. The following is probably the last letter that Keats wrote:

Rome, 30th November, 1820

My dear Brown, ’Tis the most difficult thing in the world to me to write a letter. My stomach continues so bad, that I feel it worse on opening any book,—yet I am much better than I was in Quarantine. Then I am afraid to encounter the proing and coning of any thing interesting to me in England. I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence…I cannot answer anything in your letter, which followed me from Naples to Rome, because I am afraid to look it over again. I am so weak (in mind) that I cannot bear the sight of any handwriting of a friend I love so much as I do you. Yet I ride the little horse,—and, at my worst, even in Quarantine, summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of my life…Dr Clark is very attentive to me; he says, there is very little the matter with my lungs, but my stomach, he says, is very bad. I am well disappointed in hearing good news from George—for it runs in my head we shall all die young…Severn is very well, though he leads so dull a life with me. Remember me to all friends, and tell Haslam I should not have left London without taking leave of him, but from being so low in body and mind. Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess;—and also a note to my sister—who walks about my imagination like a ghost. I can scarcely bid you good bye, even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow. God bless you! John Keats

Keats’ condition continued to deteriorate. Two months into the new year, on 15th January 1821, Severn wrote the following:

Torlonia, the banker, has refused us any more money; the bill is returned unaccepted, and to-morrow I must pay my last crown for this cursed lodging place: and what is more, if he dies, all the beds and furniture will be burnt and the walls scraped and they will come on me for a hundred pounds or more! But above all, this noble fellow lying on the bed and without the common spiritual comforts that many a rogue and fool has in his last moments! If I do break down it will be under this; but I pray that some angel of goodness may yet lead him through this dark wilderness. If I could leave Keats for a time I could soon raise money by my painting, but he will not let me out of his sight, he will not bear the face of a stranger. I would rather cut my tongue out than tell him I must get the money—that would kill him at a word. You see my hopes of being kept by the Royal Academy will be cut off, unless I send a picture by the spring…Dr Clark is still the same, though he knows about the bill: he is afraid the next change will be to diarrhoea. Keats sees all this—his knowledge of anatomy makes every change tenfold worse: every way he is unfortunate, yet every one offers me assistance on his account. He cannot read any letters, he has made me put them by him unopened. They tear him to pieces—he dare not look on the outside of any more: make this known.

Six weeks later, Keats was dead.

Feb. 27th.—He is gone; he died with the most perfect ease—he seemed to go to sleep. On the twenty-third, about four, the approaches of death came on. ‘Severn—I—lift me up—I am dying—I shall die easy—don’t be frightened—be firm, and thank God it has come.’ I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until eleven, when he gradually sunk into death—so quiet that I still thought he slept. I cannot say now, I am broken down by four nights’ watching, no sleep since, and my poor Keats gone. Three days since, the body was opened: the lungs were completely gone. The doctors could not imagine by what means he had lived these two months. I followed his dear body to the grave on Monday, with many English. They take such care of me here—that I must else have gone into a fever. I am better now—but still quite disabled. The police have been. The furniture, the walls, the floor, must all be destroyed and changed. […] The letters I put into the coffin with my own hand.

The grave of Keats in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. An ardent admirer of the poet has clearly left the scarlet imprint of her lips upon the stone.

Lord Houghton writes as follows: “Keats was buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, one of the most beautiful spots on which the eye and heart of man can rest. […] In one of those mental voyages into the past which often precede death, Keats had told Severn that ‘he thought the intensest pleasure he had received in life was in watching the growth of flowers’: and another time, after lying a while still and peaceful, he said, ‘I feel the flowers growing over me.’ And there they do grow, even all the winter long—violets and daisies mingling with the fresh herbage, and, in the words of Shelley, ‘making one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.’ Ten weeks after the close of his holy work of friendship and charity, Mr Severn wrote to Mr Haslam:—‘Poor Keats has now his wish—his humble wish, he is at peace in the quiet grave. I walked there a few days ago, and found the daisies had grown all over it. It is one of the most lovely retired spots in Rome.’” Forty years later, Severn returned to Rome as British Consul. When he died there, at the age of eighty-five, he was laid to rest by his friend. The two now lie side by side.

An extract from Blue Guide Literary Companion Rome.

The Victory of Brescia

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Remains of the Capitolium of Roman Brixia, findspot of the Winged Victory. Photo: Blue Guides.

I was last in Brescia in 2018, preparing for the first edition of Blue Guide Lombardy, Milan and the Italian Lakes which was published the following year. Apart from the extraordinary beauty and interest of her museums and monuments (which I remembered from my last visit when at work for Blue Guide Northern Italy way back in 1996), I was deeply impressed by the multi-ethnic atmosphere of the city. The local government has not only ensured the integration of a new influx of immigrants but it has seen to it that Italian citizenship has been bestowed on the great majority of these new inhabitants. I was struck by many small details which suggested how successful this policy had been, somehow summed up in the simple small ‘supermarket’ outside the station with its sign boasting ‘Food from all the world’.

Little did I imagine that in March 2020, the province of Brescia together with that of her close neighbour Bergamo would have suffered the tragic record number of deaths from Covid-19 in all Italy. That month the army had to be called in to transport the coffins to cemeteries elsewhere in the country as there was no more room for them locally. We have learnt that whole communities of the elderly (many of whom had survived the last war) were wiped out in the valleys near the two cities. The President of the Republic has made a number of visits to these areas in the past few months (both in a public and in a semi-private form) to show his solidarity. And Brescia and Bergamo together (even if traditionally rival cities) are to be the Italian Capitals of Culture in 2023, as a way of helping them forward.

Although Lombardy is still the region of Italy hardest hit by Covid-19, there has been great rejoicing in Brescia this autumn to welcome back the city’s most astounding Roman bronze statue: a Winged Victory, which has spent the past two years in the state restoration laboratory in Florence.

In 2018 I saw it without its arms and its wings, which were already in Florence (in fact when it was unearthed in 1826, the arms and wings were not attached to the statue, but found nearby). Nevertheless, the impression made on me by this over-life-size lady, despite her shorn state, was immense. She glances down, while the folds of her delicate chiton descend to touch the ground having slipped off one shoulder. A heavier cloak clings to her legs.  

The statue was found in the early 19th century in the Capitolium of Roman Brixia, together with a hoard of other bronzes including six portrait heads from the Imperial age, so it is thought that someone had the idea of burying these wonderful artefacts all together in the hope that they would survive to be found again some centuries later. During restoration the Victory has been confirmed as dating from the reign of Claudius (AD 41–54) or from that of his successor Nero (AD 54–68). It seems to have been made, using the lost wax method, somewhere in northern Italy rather than in Rome. The statue is now lighter by some 100kg, as superfluous accretions both inside and out, many added during past restorations, have been eliminated. Traces of gilding and silver intarsia have been revealed. The Victory has many close similarities with the Aphrodite of Capua, preserved in the Archaeological Museum of Naples. The position of the Victory’s arms seems to indicate that she would have been holding a shield captured from the enemy on which she was writing the name of the divinity to whom the victory was owed, but the Greek model may have been Aphrodite, goddess of beauty and love, looking at her reflection in the shield of her beloved Ares, or Venus Victrix (the Conqueror) inscribing the victories of the first Roman emperors on the shield of Mars. The shield has not survived and we do not know in what material it would have been made. Another mystery is the raised left foot of the Victory, which has been interpreted by scholars as trampling a helmet (of the enemy).

The Aphrodite of Capua, a Roman marble of the Hadrianic era (2nd century) based on a Greek original. Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen, CC by 2.5.
The Winged Victory of Brescia, photographed before its recent restoration. Photo: Giovanni dall’Orto.

When I saw the statue it was still in the superb Museo di Santa Giulia in Brescia, which has an immense number of treasures from all periods, especially the Lombard era of the 6th century and the later Carolingian age (when the monastery of Santa Giulia was founded, in 753). These include an exquisite little ivory reliquary casket and the so-called Cross of Desiderius, as well as more mundane objects such as a perfectly preserved helmet apparently of the type worn in the Alpine area of Italy from the 4th–1st centuries BC, lined in leather for extra comfort. But since this museum is so large and needs much time to do it justice, the decision to display the Victory now in the southern hall of the Capitolium temple close by is a good one. It is also most fitting since the statue was found here. The design of the display has been provided by the Spanish architect and sculptor Juan Navarro Baldeweg. The Victory will be placed in a raised position (on an anti-seismic base) lit by a light symbolising the moon and reflecting the position of the shield. Although the statue is already here, it cannot yet be visited as all museums in Italy are closed due to Covid-19. But the Victory can be seen and the opening celebrations followed on her very own dedicated website. 

Alta Macadam, November 2020