Florence Diary III

Let me make another confession: I hate museums.  Oh, yes, I like to look at paintings and sculptures as much as the next man, unless the next man is some culture-vulture like Bernard Berenson, but museums, especially the great omnium-gatherum collections like the Louvre or the Met, are vast cemeteries of the human spirit.  I do not speak from ignorance:  I have, since the age of 16 or so, logged in hundreds, thousands of hours—some of them studded with a few happy minutes—in many great art museums in Washington, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, where with a good deal of time on my hands I would wander around the Legion of Honor for hours before sitting outside on the cliffs and watching for seals.

I think my rooted hatred of museums only set in after I married a confirmed art lover, who can spend three hours in a collection of junk thrown together haphazardly in a burned out Cajun village: old bottles and broken toys, third-rate suits from the 1930’s, and—this one I did like—an Earl Long Poster with the vote-getting slogan, “I’m not crazy.”

Collections of ancient art, no matter how mediocre, I always learn something from.  Hence my favorite museums include the magnificent collections in Naples and Athens, as well as the localized museums in Delphi, Olympia, and Paestum, and, if I could ever pry my wife out of one of them in less than three hours, I would even like the dreary Etruscan museums that are on the short list of tourist attractions in Chiusi, Volterra, and Orvieto.

All of this is background to explaining why, when they would not let me into the Uffizi because of my little Swiss Army knife, I cheerfully went outside to sulk.  Then I started thinking about the late Botticelli Madonnas I wanted to see, as means of testing the story of his conversion in the Savonarola years.  My nerve failed and I searched the piazza for a place to hide my knife—I was not about to go to the Guardaroba to entrust it to a flunky—and finding a row of bushes, I wrapped it up in a paper napkin and surreptitiously hid it in the shrubbery.

If you go in for Tuscan painting, there is no place even close to the Uffizi, and, having visited the miserable place on several occasions, I was able to focus on just the painters I wanted to look at:  Simone Martini and Botticelli, in particular.  As I was sounding off on Botticelli’s spiritual evolution to a captive student I had cornered, a man with a cultivated face asked me an intelligent question.  Although he spoke with an untraceable accent, I brilliantly intuited he was Russian.  “But how did you know?” he asked in astonishment, and I pointed out the Cyrillic printing on the cover of his guidebook.  We agreed that Botticelli had changed somehow and I began explaining my theory about the Neopagan Renaissance until he cut me off with that great conversation terminator, “Very interesting.”  A few days later I ran into him at the Brancacci Chapel, where I could not see Masaccio’s frescos for all the blinding flashes from our students’ cameras.  Perhaps this is not the time to explain why I hate cameras, though I carry one on these trips to take pictures of people taking pictures and to remind me of this or that detail.  No one every likes my pictures because they usually portray some piece of rubble like an almost entirely ruined temple of Venus in the Roman Forum.

Like our friend Michael Morrow—quite a good photographer, by the way—I prefer the age of Dante to the age of Lorenzo, but I talked myself out of a week in Florence devoted exclusively to Dante.  It is a question not just of marketing but of fairness.  First-time visitors should get a more general overview, though next time I think we shall concentrate exclusively on the wicked Renaissance.

In the afternoon after the Uffizi, we did take a “Dante walk” over to Orsanmichele, the grain market turned into a guild church, dotted with niches holding great statues (mostly copies now) of saints dear to the various guilds.  We then walked by the house they call the Casa di Dante.  It is a fiction not so transparent as the house of Juliet they show in Verona, complete with added balcony, as if Shakespeare’s heroine actually existed.  Dante, after all, did actually exist and lived in this very neighborhood.  Why not in this house, which they have turned into a Dante museum?  After the walk, we make our way back to the Mediterranéo (note the accent) for our first set of lectures. My wife closed the session with a very clear presentation of the development of Romanesque and Gothic church architecture, which came as a relief after my petty exploration of Dante’s prejudices against Lucca, Arezzo, Pisa, Siena, and his partisan enemies in Florence.

Here is the beginning:

In book 14 of Purgatorio, Dante meets two blind spirits who ask him where he comes from.  The poet is modest, saying his name is not known far and wide, and he refers obliquely to the Arno Valley: “Through the midst of Tuscany there wanders / A streamlet that is born in Falterona,/ and not a hundred miles of course suffice it.”  The spirits are from the Romagna, and one of them asks why he is so coy, hiding the name of the river as a man does with “orribili cose."  The “shade” comments that it is right that the name of this valley should perish, and launches into a diatribe, describing the various peoples that live beside the Tuscan river, from its sources in the Casentino down to where it flows into the sea—“virtu cosi per nimica si fuga."

The people of the mountainous Casentino are swine living on acorns (in truth, they did raise pigs up in the hills); the Aretines are “curs, snarling more than their power justifies”; as the Arno approaches Florence the dogs turn into wolves—Florentines were proverbial for savage greed—and descending further the “cursed ditch” runs into the land of foxes “filled with fraud,” namely the Pisans who were known for their cunning and treachery.

Dante had to leave out Siena and Lucca, because they are not in the Arno Valley, but he had equally nice things to say about them, too.  Dante was first and foremost a Florentine, then a Tuscan, and more remotely, and as a patriotic Florentine, he had strong views not only on his native city’s foreign rivals and enemies but also on the Florentines who, as he believed, were corrupting and destroying their city.

After describing Dante’s background and a bit of his career as politician, love-poet, and intellectual, I went on to take up his dislike for Florence’s rival cities, one by one, ending with Siena, which we would visit a few days later:

The official Florentine view of Pisans was that they were thieves and cheats as well as being dangerous.  The Sienese fared even worse: they were despised as fools.  In Inf. XIX.109 ff., we encounter an alchemist from Arezzo burned for swindling Albert, the natural son of the Bishop of Siena.  Dante asks Vergil (121 ff): “Now was there ever so vain a people as the Sienese?”  Or "fu gia mai/ Gente si vana come la sanese?”  Later when Florence ruled Siena, a governor of Siena going through the streets of Florence in his carriage was chased by exultant little boys shouting, “the governor of the crazies.”

In Purgatorio XI (58 ff.) Dante encounters Omberto Aldobrandeschi, a great nobleman of the Sienese contado.  Like other members of his family, Omberto was often at war with the city, and like all Sienese he overvalues whatever it is he has.  In this case, Omberto boasts of his noble lineage: “The ancient blood and deeds of gallantry of my ancestors made me so arrogant, that not thinking of the mother who is common to us all, I held all men in scorn to such extent I died for it, as the Sienese know and every child in Campagnatico.  I am Omberto and not to me alone has pride done harm but all my kith and kin.” Dante has little patience with people who confuse nobility of character with noble descent, and he devotes several chapters of the Convivio to debunking pride of birth.

The arrogance of Tuscan—especially Sienese—nobility gives Dante an opportunity to talk of fame and pride, and of the vanity of artists.  He meets the painter Oderigi, who tells him: “In painting Cimabue thought that he should hold the field, now Giotto is cried up, and the other’s fame grows dim.”  When Dante was young, Florence was so mad over a painting of Cimabue that they paraded it through the streets with a great procession.   The same eclipse will happen to poets, predicts Oderigi, like Dante’s friend Guido Cavalcanti, who had put an earlier Guido in the shade.  Then—to conclude with another example of the arrogance of Sienese nobility—Oderigi points out a spirit approaching, “who now takes so little of the road” but once “all Tuscany resounded with his name, and now he scarce is lisped of in Siena, where he was lord at the time when the Florentine delirium was overthrown.”

The haughty lord was Provenzano Salvani, who is being punished in Purgatory for his pride, “because he presumed to bring all Siena into his hands.”  Provenzano had led, remember, the Sienese troops in battle at Montaperti (where the Ghibellines trounced the Florentine Guelphs), and Dante cannot help gloating over his discomfiture later at Colle Val D’Elsa, where he was taken prisoner and his head was cut off and carried through the camp on the end of a lance for the crime of defending his city against Florence.  According to Florentine chroniclers, he had been misled by the devil, who told Provenzano that his head would be highest in the camp if he went out to fight.

How did such an arrogant man make it into Purgatory, asks Dante?  The artist tells him that when Provenzano lived in great splendor, he went “freely out on the Campo of Siena, laying aside all shame, and put himself there to draw his friend from the duress which in the prison-house of Charles he suffered.”   In plainer words, this haughty nobleman, in order to raise money to ransom a friend who had been jailed by Charles of Anjou, humiliated himself by setting up a table in the camp and begging for donations. Dante cannot see kindness and humility, only the shame!

The Florentines always remembered their victory over Provenzano and the Sienese at Colle Val d’Elsa.  It was the vindication for Montaperti, where the Sienese had joined forces with the Ghibelline exiles from Florence to inflict a stunning defeat on the Florentines.   In Purgatorio XIII (106 ff.) Dante meets an exiled Sienese lady.

Sapient I was not though I Sapia
Was called and I was at another’s harm
More happy for than at my own good fortune…
My fellow-citizens near unto Colle
Were joined in battle with their adversaries
And I was praying God for what we willed.
Routed were they…
And I the chase beholding
A joy received unequalled by all others;
So that I lifted upward my bold face
Crying to God, Henceforth I fear thee not,
As did the blackbird at the little sunshine.

This Sapia, who may have been exiled with other members of her family, was waiting by her window, praying to see her city defeated. (The reference is to a folktale of the blackbird who sings at the first warm day, “I no longer fear thee, o Lord, for winter is over.”)

Sapia was being punished for wishing another’s harm more than her own good, and she would have gone to Hell had it not been for the prayers of Pier Pettignano, a wool-comber turned hermit who was known for his miracles at Siena.  He was only beatified in 1802 during the feast of the Assumption.

Still resentful apparently, and needing a much longer time in Purgatory, Sapia describes her people as “quella gente vana/che spera in Talamone e perderagli più di speranza ch’a trovar la Diana”—the vain people who put their hope in their port of Talamone and will lose more by that than in trying to find the Diana.  This is complex.  Siena could not expand for two reasons: no seacoast like Pisa and no good source of water as Florence had , which meant she could not develop a textile industry.  Fantasy developed that there was an underground river, the Diana, which people—even today—claim to hear.   The Sienese, eager to be a world power, were also constructing a port at Talamone, but their enthusiasm outstripped reality—as it did in the case of their attempt to make a wool industry in a drought-stricken town.  They’ll waste more money on the harbor, predicts the vengeful lady, than they have searching for the underground river of Diana.

In Book V of Purgatorio, the poet meets a more sympathetic lady of Siena: Pia, said to be of the Tolomei family.

Ricorditi di me che son la Pia!
Siena mi fe, disfecemi Maremma
Salsi colui che ‘annellata pria
Disposando, m’ avea con la sua gemma.

Pia is stuck in mysteriously as an afterthought once he has allowed Buonconte di Montefeltro to speak.

This Buonconte was the commander of the Aretines at Campaldino, where Dante was present, and unlike his father Guido, who had died unrepentant, Buonconte called upon Mary and was rescued by a good angel.

His father Guido da Montefeltro is given a long passage in Inferno XXVII (67 ff.).  He was a great Ghibelline leader, persuaded by Pope Boniface VIII (“the Prince of the new Pharisees,” as Dante calls him) to betray his allies.  “The deeds I did were not those of a lion but a fox.  The machinations and the covert ways, I knew them all and practiced the craft.”  Getting on in years, the condottiere was dissatisfied, “That which had pleased me then displeased me.”  Absolved by the Pope in advance, he advised Boniface to raze the town of Palestrina.  When Guido died in Assisi, St. Francis fought with the demons for his soul, until one of them declared, “He must come down among my servitors, because he gave the fraudulent advice… For who repents not cannot be absolved,” and seizing upon Guido, the devil leers, “Perhaps you did not know I was a logician?”  I am not so sure that Guido did not repent, and I believe that Dante puts him in Hell not for failure to repent so much as for teaching the Pisan militia how to use the crossbow and drive the Florentines out of their territory.

Buonconte the son is more fortunate: “God’s angel took me up, and he of hell/ shouted, “O thou from heaven, why dost thou rob me? / Thou bearest away the eternal part of him/ For one little tear that takes him from me.” In the contrast between father and son, the medieval understanding of repentance is set forth clearly, and it does not depend on buying indulgences.  Even a papal absolution is of less value than one single tear.

But even in allowing the Ghibelline to escape to Purgatory, Dante gives the devil the last word on the party: “But with the rest I’ll deal with in another way.”  And he describes, almost lovingly, the body of Buonconte (which was never discovered) washed into rain gullies and into the Arno.  “It rolled me on the banks and on the bottom; Then with its booty covered and begirt me.”

Without a word of introduction we suddenly hear the voice of another spirit, almost like a character in a Fellini film:

Ah, when thou hast returned unto the world,
And rested thee from thy long journeying…
Do thou remember me who am the Pia;
Siena made me, unmade me Maremma;
He knoweth it, who had encircled first,
Espousing me, finger with his gem.

Benedetto Croce said that Pia’s words are so quiet as to be a sigh.

There are different versions of her story, but all agree that she was a beautiful lady whose jealous (with cause or not) husband had dragged her off to the Maremma, a very unhealthy climate.  In one crude version, he kills her by throwing her out the window.  In another still sadder tale, the husband takes Pia to an isolated castle and watches her slowly, day by day, succumb to the poisonous air.  Siena made me, the Maremma unmade me.  Simple words but pregnant.  All that a Tuscan understood of his native place is summed up by the phrase: Siena made me, while the wild and alien Maremma undid poor Pia.  The passage impressed both Pound and Eliot.

“Trams and dusty trees,” says a ghostly character in Eliot’s Wasteland:

“Highbury bore me.  Richmond and Kew undid me.”

Ezra Pound used "Siena mi fè, disfecemi Maremma" as the title of one of the sections of his greatest poem, the Ode to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, the passage in which an old Strassbourg aristocrat describes the English decadents of the 1890’s.

Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died
By falling from a high stool in a pub…
But showed no trace of alcohol
At the autopsy, privately performed—
Tissue preserved—the pure mind
Arouse toward Newman as the whiskey warmed.

I have never known quite what Pound was driving at with the Dante reference, except perhaps a hint at how destructive London had become for artists.

Dante’s little world of Tuscany—a series of towns and villages populated by sinners and saints at both extremes—has slowly developed into an eternal landscape, in which our own lives begin to make more sense than they do in everyday life.  It would be impossible to trace the impact of the Commedia upon subsequent writers.  Shelly was full of Dante, and our own Longfellow was an amateur Dante scholar who wrote what may still be the best translation into English verse.  The very title of Pound’s Cantos is borrowed from Dante, and Pound himself remarked dryly that he had put into his own poems everything that Dante had left out—except Pound inserted a great deal of Dante.

Great poets and novelists do not typically turn to alien mythologies for their art; they look in their own backyard, as Dante did—and Shakespeare and Faulkner and Manzoni—and find what is eternal lurking beneath the surface of the everyday.  Though Dante’s poetry has a very lofty theme, it is also rooted in the everyday experiences of his native Tuscany, and what seem to us to be historical references to obscure persons and events were in Dante’s time as highly topical as George Bush’s military record or Bill Clinton’s love life.  For the most part he does not tell the story fully because he assumes we know it already.

Let me take one small example as a concluding anecdote, also from Siena.  At the beginning of Purgatory VI Dante is surrounded by spirits.  One of them is an Aretine judge, Benincasa of Laterina, of whom he says: “He met his death from the strong arms of Ghino di Tacco.”  That’s it.  The murder took place in 1282—when Dante was 17.  It was one of the big stories of late 13th century Tuscany.  As a judge in Siena, Benincasa had sentenced a nephew (or brother) of Ghino di Tacco, a well-known highwayman to death.  Afterwards, serving on the Ruota, Benincasa was suddenly confronted by Ghino, who seized the judge, drove a dagger into his heart, and escaped by leaping off a balcony.

This Ghino was no ordinary bandit but an impoverished nobleman of the Sienese contado, and tales were told of his sense of humor and fairness.  He would ask some rich victim how much he could afford to pay and then give back half of what he received.  Boccaccio tells the story of the fat Abbot of Cligny whom the Pope had ordered to go to the Baths of Siena to take the cure.  Ghino attacked his party, took all the property and imprisoned the abbot, only allowing him a plain diet.  Every day Ghino, disguising his identity, would go to have serious talks with the abbot who, despite his gluttony, was a good man and sound thinker.  When the abbot’s health was restored, Ghino, who threw off the mask, gave back his money—though he more than hinted that a voluntary contribution would not be unwelcome.  In the end, the abbot sought and gained a pardon—and an income—for the outlaw from Boniface VIII, one of Dante’s least-favorite Popes.

In the Commedia, Dante often may strike a reader as very modern, with his subtle allusiveness, his sudden and dramatic shifts.  Eliot in The Wasteland and Pound in The Cantos did their best to imitate this manner, but, as brilliant as the effect is, I fear they got poor Dante wrong.  In one important respect, Dante is less like a learned poet and more like a village gossip or storyteller, who is not being mysterious when he expects us to know the stories he is alluding to. I am reminded of the obscure (in both senses of the word) Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker, whose work baffled her neighbors, and yet, she wailed, it was all about them!

For Irish nationalists in Florence like our friend Sam, I will close with a poem by Patrick Kavanagh, a poet who does come close to seeing, with Dante and Homer, that the gossip of the tribe and village can be the stuff of great art.

EPIC

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffeys shouting "Damn your soul"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel—
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

I cannot close on this high note.  A week later, after we had moved into a beautiful apartment on Piazza Santa Croce, our landlady’s daughter exclaimed over the pleasant sunshine.  “We call this weather ‘I giorni della merla [the days of the blackbird], because it is when the blackbird is not afraid to build her nest.”  Aha, I said, so that is what Dante was referring to.  Probably because she was speaking English, she did not make it clear that the blackbird was duped into thinking spring had come because January was ending and the sun was out.  In fact, winter returned with a vengeance, and most Italians believe that the last days of January are the coldest days of the year. I may never understand Dante’s metaphysical geography, but I am beginning to make sense of his provincial mentality. Perhaps that is as much as I am up to.