The Secrets of Italy Page 7

  And yet, in his own way, during the suffocating years of the Restoration period that followed Napoleon’s turbulent rule, Monaldo managed to be an affectionate father, at least as much as a man of his station could; he was unabashedly pro-Church, nostalgic, and fearful of any possible future. He loved his son, but never managed to understand him. As often happens, Giacomo reacted with mixed feelings, wavering between love and hate. In the end, judging from the letters’ salutations, love won out. He addressed the first letters to “My father,” then moved on to the less rigid “Dear father,” and the last, most heartrending letters were lovingly addressed to “Dearest dad.”4

  Leopardi’s feelings toward his mother, Adelaide Antici, were much more clear-cut. When Count Monaldo married her, in 1797, the young marquise was nineteen years old. She gave him ten children, five of whom survived past infancy, and soon became one of those “ladies of the house” with jingling keys latched to their belts, keeping a close eye on how much wine was in each bottle and how much food was in the larder. Monaldo, who punctually got her pregnant each year, was soon reduced to the status of a “closely watched, penniless ward.” The prevailing atmosphere in the Leopardi household was rather gloomy. Paolina—poor, unpretty Paolina, oppressed by her parents, destined to become a melancholy old maid—saw her mother thus: “Everything I can see from my window is constantly under the surveillance of my mother, (who) incessantly roams the house, and is everywhere, at all hours.”

  In his Zibaldone, Leopardi provides an even harsher description of his mother:

  Not only was she unsympathetic with parents who lost their children in infancy, but she was profoundly and sincerely envious because they had flown to heaven without sin and freed their parents from the inconvenience of supporting them. Often finding herself in danger of losing her own children at the same age, she did not pray God to let them die, because her religion did not permit it, but she heartily enjoyed it … Nature had endowed this woman with a very sensitive character, and she had come to this [barbarous way of thinking] through religion alone.5

  So how did Pope Pius VII’s Rome look through Leopardi’s eyes? Briefly, I’d say it struck him as a vast city that was poor in every sense of the term—culturally impoverished above all, with drawing rooms full of occasionally brilliant intellectuals who were nevertheless frightfully misinformed and provincial. On December 9, 1822, he writes his father:

  Intellectuals … honestly, I’ve met very few, and those few have quashed any desire I might have had to meet others … They seem to think the height of human knowledge—indeed, man’s sole true science—is the study of antiquity … Philosophy, morality, politics, the sciences of the human heart, eloquence, poetry, literature, all such things are utterly foreign here … What’s more, there is not a single Roman who really knows Latin and Greek; without those languages, just imagine how far one can get in his study of antiquity.

  When he writes his brother Carlo about the learned historian Abbot Francesco Cancellieri, he describes him as follows: “Yesterday I went to see [Cancellieri], who is an absolute moron, a jabbering ass, the most boring, despair-inducing man on earth. He speaks of absurdly frivolous things with great interest, and of significant things with the greatest possible detachment.”

  Leopardi’s perceptive take on Rome’s cultural vacuity is even more striking than his description of the empty raving of that “jabbering ass” of an abbot. The well-informed philologist in him surfaces when he notes that anyone studying classical antiquity without a knowledge of classical languages is automatically barred from gaining any possible, true understanding of what it is he’s studying.

  That December he writes his sister Paolina:

  The frivolity of these beasts surpasses the bounds of credibility … This morning (to give you just one example) I overheard a group engaged in a weighty, long discussion of the excellent voice of the high priest who had sung mass the day before yesterday, including talk of how he carried himself with such dignity while performing his function … The high priest replied that he had learned from years of working in the chapels and just watching, and that the exercise was very useful for him, so it is a necessary education for all their peers, and that he was not embarrassed in the least, and so on and so forth through countless other pleasantries. I later learned that many cardinals and other higher-ups were as happy as he was at the wonderful outcome of his singing at mass. Bear in mind that all conversations in Rome are of this sort, and I’m not exaggerating one bit.

  But many other tales about Rome during that same period take a rather different tone. Stendhal, for one, who visited Rome a good six times, writes: “In Rome, spirited people have real zest … I can think of no other salons, in all of Europe, that I’d rather frequent than those in Rome.”6 So who is right, Leopardi or Stendhal? Is it possible, as nineteenth-century Italian critic Francesco de Sanctis maintained, that Leopardi’s dark worldview was what tinged his Rome with such funereal overtones? Stendhal certainly provides proof of Romans’ sense of humor, which Leopardi completely missed.

  Stendhal, for instance, relates an amusing anecdote about an English tourist who rides into the Coliseum on horseback and sees a bunch of construction workers reinforcing its walls. That evening he tells his friends: “The Coliseum is the best thing I’ve seen in Rome thus far. I like it, and when they’re finished building it, it will be truly magnificent.”

  But Leopardi occasionally speaks kindly when describing the people of Rome, the “hoi polloi” so dear to his fellow poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli. In a letter to Carlo dated February 20, 1823, Leopardi describes this scene as he climbs the Janiculum to the tomb of Torquato Tasso and the church of Sant’Onofrio al Gianicolo:

  Even the road leading up here prepares your spirit for emotional impressions. It is lined with craftsmen’s houses, and is filled with the clamor of looms and other such instruments, as well as the songs of women and laborers hard at work. In this city—which is as lazy, wasteful, and unorganized as any capital—it is nevertheless nice to contemplate the idea that life can be collected, organized, and occupied by useful professions. Even the physiognomy and manners of the people as they meet up on the street have a certain something that makes them simpler and more human than others; they exhibit the habits and characters of people whose lives are based on truth, not on fiction—that is, they live by hard work, not by the scheming, posturing, and deceit practiced by most of this city’s populace.

  In a city where the poet sees “scheming and posturing” prevail (and he wasn’t the only one either), he chooses to talk about the people he sees as dedicated to living a collected life devoted to “useful professions,” people whose existence is based “on truth, not on fiction.” This was certainly a conscious choice, since the great theater that is Rome offers onlookers a peek of absolutely any and everything.

  The 2,279 sonnets penned by Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, which I briefly referred to above, deal with neither the city’s intellectuals nor its bourgeoisie. He describes only Rome’s commoners—indeed, he goes so far as to say he’d like to erect a monument to those commoners and their degraded, corrupt dialect. In the introduction to his sonnets he writes: “The form and matter herein will appear neither chaste nor occasionally pious, albeit undeniably devout and superstitious: but these are [Rome’s] people, and it is they that I copy—not to offer up as a model, but rather to give the reader a faithful image of that which already exists and, moreover, has been abandoned to its own devices, with no betterment.” This poor populace “abandoned to its own devices, with no betterment” is the flip side of the coin, the lesser relative of the bigoted, reactionary, equally superstitious, highly ignorant, neither chaste nor pious bourgeoisie that Leopardi found so displeasing. On December 16, 1822, he writes Carlo:

  Cardinal Malvasia laid his hands on ladies’ breasts during confession, he was a debauchee of the highest order and sent the husbands and sons of the women who refused him off to the inquisition. Cardinal Brancadoro did similarly, as did al
l the cardinals (who are the most revolting people on earth), as did all the high priests, none of whom have any luck except with the help of women. Holy Pope Pius VII owes his rank as cardinal and pope to a Roman coquette … and currently enjoys rambling on about the love affairs and other lascivious actions of his cardinals … Some artist’s daughter, I’m not sure whose, who was already [Count] Lebzeltern’s favorite companion, used their relation to her advantage and now enjoys an annual pension of 800 scudi … And Madam Magatti, the famous whore of Calcagnini, receives a pension of 700 scudi from the government.

  These aren’t just impressions, they’re matters of fact. And anyway, the phenomenon of cardinals’ (and other powerful men’s) favorite women earning their “pensions” in bed was nothing new; that had been the case for centuries, it’s the world’s oldest profession—power has always brought with it such privileges, nor is it a given that they invariably end up doing damage. Giulia Farnese, for example, was fifteen when she became Pope Alexander VI’s lover; he was fifty-eight. During one of their amorous encounters she put in a good word for her brother, twenty-five-year-old Alessandro Farnese, and the pope made him a cardinal. Alessandro in turn became Pope Paul III. During his reign he brought about several innovations: he agreed to recognize the Jesuit order, organized the Council of Trent, and instituted the Roman Inquisition. He also initiated the Church’s unbridled nepotism, which happens to tie in with the events we’ll read about in chapter 8, on Parma. Alessandro’s favorites included his son Pier Luigi Farnese, probably his firstborn, to whom he granted governance of Parma and Piacenza in 1545 (the same year the Council of Trent began), officially separating those two cities from the Papal States. That marked the birth of a duchy that remained in the Farnese family’s rule for over two centuries, and we’ll read about how that developed in just a bit.

  In the meantime, I’ll pose a worthwhile question: what kind of relationships did Leopardi have with women during his time in Rome? In a word, difficult, just as they were throughout his life. Although he was still young and not too ill at the time, as he later became, the poet couldn’t have been any woman’s idea of good company: he wasn’t physically alluring, and it seems he often emitted a rather foul odor. You’d have to have gotten to know the man’s immense soul before being able to love the man himself. But not many people were ready to make the effort to go beyond appearances, and fewer still were sufficiently perspicacious. As a result his relationships were primarily of the sort money could buy, and even those weren’t easy to come by. On December 6 he wrote Carlo:

  Out for a stroll, at church, and even roaming the streets you find nary a hag who will so much as look at you … I’ve wandered all of Rome in the company of very handsome, well-dressed young men … It’s as difficult to stop a woman on the streets of Rome as it is in Recanati—indeed, it’s much more difficult, given the excessive frivolity and dissipation of these female animals who … love nothing more than strolling about, having fun God-only-knows how; they don’t put out (believe me) unless you go to the same efforts necessary in any other town. It all comes down to the “public women,” the prostitutes who I find to be more circumspect now than they ever were before, and remain just as dangerous, as you are well aware.

  Being accustomed to Recanati, Leopardi was frightened by Rome’s sheer size, even if it was still a modestly sized city compared with other European capitals. His worry, mistrust, and unhappiness in Rome were such that they almost overshadowed its great monuments, even as he strolled along Via dei Condotti and Via del Babuino from Piazza di Spagna to Piazza del Popolo. One of the few places that drew his attention was the Convent of Sant’Onofrio along the slopes of the Janiculum, where sixteenth-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso is buried. Even Chateaubriand, just a few years earlier, had been so struck by this special place that in his Mémoires d’outre-tombe (“Memoirs from Beyond the Grave”) he wrote: “In case I have the good fortune of ending my days here, I’ve made arrangements to have a small chamber in Sant’Onofrio, right next to the room where Tasso died.”

  When I visited the convent, gardens, chapels, and scenic view out over Rome, I was overcome by a similar emotion, drawn in by the allure that, even today, remains almost fully intact. It must’ve been the same for Leopardi during his discouraging stay in Rome, when Sant’Onofrio made him, too, feel one of life’s few true emotions. In a famous letter to Carlo dated February 20, 1823, he writes: “On Friday, February 15, I went to visit Tasso’s tomb and wept. That was the first and only pleasure I felt in Rome.” He goes on: “Many feel a sense of indignation when they see Tasso’s remains, covered up and marked by nothing more than a small stone plaque measuring about a foot wide and high, set into a small side chapel … You can understand the mixed rush of emotions that comes about as you contemplate the sharp contrast between Tasso’s sheer greatness and the utter modesty of his tomb.”

  Leopardi’s time in Rome was troubled, and in late April, feeling defeated, he headed home. On April 26 he confided to his friend and fellow writer Pietro Giordani: “I’m no longer good for anything in this world.”

  An odd coincidence links Leopardi to Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, the Roman poet who had reluctantly married a rich widow fourteen years his elder and had a long love affair with the young marquise Vincenza Roberti (whom he affectionately called Cencia, a play on the pronunciation of her first name, as well as a riff on the word for rag). For several years Belli went to visit her in Morrovalle, the town where she vacationed each summer in the Marche region. She, too, was in a marriage of convenience with the municipal doctor, and could well be seen as an Italian Madame Bovary. So it’s easy to imagine what a breath of fresh air Belli was—she couldn’t have found his devotion displeasing—and the excitement he brought to town from a city like Rome. It’s no accident that the sonnets he composed in Morrovalle (in September 1831) included some openly erotic verses. Just one brief example:

  Io sce vorrebbe franca una scinquina

  Che nn’addrizzi ppiù tu cor fa’ l’occhietto,

  Che ll’altre cor mostrà la passerina.

  I’d be willing to bet a boatload of cash

  That you make more men hard with just a wink of your eye

  Than other girls do by flashing their pussy.

  (“A Nina,” September 7, 1831)7

  Morrovalle is just a few kilometers from Recanati, and young Vincenza and her family often visited the Leopardi household. Given this logistical premise, so to speak, many have wondered whether the two poets might have met each other at some point. There can be no certain answer, although it’s possible they could have met in the winter of 1831–32 when Belli lived on Piazza Poli and Leopardi lived nearby, on Via dei Condotti. If indeed they did meet it was only in passing, which is a shame, because they had so much in common.

  For starters, both were subjects of the papacy. Both were temperamentally inclined toward melancholy. Both fell victim to the narrow, backward-looking, discouraging cultural climate of papal Rome, which they sought to escape—each in his own way—through their written works. Who knows what they might’ve said to each other had they been able to sit down for a chat. But they were divided by age: Belli was seven years older, but outlived Leopardi by a quarter century. Leopardi died at thirty-nine, Belli at seventy-two. Leopardi was consumed by his sadness and illness, Belli was haunted by an oppressive hypochondria. To quote Belli: “I am as lonely here at home as time itself, which drags me with it.” In response to a distant relative’s letter that describes him as a “born poet,” he writes that he feels instead like a “dead poet.” Curiously enough, Leopardi used nearly the exact same words to describe himself, long before death freed him from his suffering on June 14, 1837. A few days later the author Antonio Ranieri wrote to a friend: “We mustn’t regret that his suffering has come to an end; rather, we must regret that he spent 40 years wanting to die—that is the pain no medicine can alleviate.”

  4.

  PALERMO, ON THE BORDER BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

  Pale
rmo is a 4-D city. In order to even barely touch upon its complexity, you have to view it in the context of its own highly unique spatiotemporal dimensions. Years ago Francesco Agnello—Baron of Siculiana, president of Amici della Musica, Palermo’s main musical association, and a veritable legend in his day, dare I say a caliph of sorts—whispered to me in a flutelike timbre: “Our association patrols the farthest borders of the well-tempered tonal scale; just outside our doorstep lies the realm of Arabian pentatonic scales.” Many Italian cities must be viewed in light of their spatiotemporal singularities, but in Palermo it’s especially true: in this city, space is actually a dividing line between two worlds, maybe even three. Floating between the West, the Near-Eastern Greek and Byzantine worlds, and Islam, Palermo has lived alongside them all, taking something from each of them while at the same time giving up a part of itself. Its customs, social organization, mistrust of government, almost always unfounded hauteur, ferocious vendettas, hardheaded reticence, obsession with secrecy, and use of a dialect that is virtually unintelligible to outsiders—these are the results of a culture that has endlessly encountered and crossbred with various populations and conquerors. Many cities and regions throughout Italy have been dominated by foreign armies (up until the mid-twentieth century, anyway), and the same goes for Palermo and Sicily even more so: this is the land that has bordered the territories (and been a colony) of the Angevins, Aragonese, Spaniards, Savoyards, Austrians, Neapolitan Bourbons, and, most recently, “Italians.”