Ducal Palace, Urbania

My street

The wonderful library team

Light and shade in Urbania

Gallerie along the streets

My view

After the excitement of my arrival in Rome - minus the suitcase that had most of the materials for my work in it - nothing particularly dramatic has happened. Picking up the rental car went without a hitch, though driving it back through Rome did provide an adrenaline rush. An aside: since cars do differ in such things as clutch feel, layout of crucial instrumentation, and even steering, why do rental companies simply give you the keys, open the door, and send you out into the traffic of a place you don’t know? Why don’t they have a little practice ring, where you can drive around a bit and get the feel of the car? I do know Rome, of course, but I really don’t drive there enough to retain a good sense of routes and anyway, these change from one hour to the next. Since the last time I drove much in Rome itself, most of the center of the city has been declared off-limits to all but public transportation and residents, so the route I took when I last picked up a rental car there several years ago was no longer possible. The people at the rental agency were very helpful and I was directed to drive around the outside of the city walls. This seemed promising, since the fellow who was instructing me in this was illustrating it on a city map, but at a certain point he stopped drawing arrows and just said that there was construction there but I should be okay. Uh. . . . That sounded ominously like `there be dragons’ on old maps. The car is a step down from the Citron I had last summer; it’s a white Fiat Panda, the smallest thing they rent. On the outside, it looks like a tiny van. And it’s just fine. I can’t go quite as fast on the autostrada as I did last summer and it doesn’t have a real trunk, just a hatch, but the fact that it’s smaller is really better in cities and towns. Nostalgia-wise, I figure it is the 1998 equivalent of the little red Fiat 850 I bought in 1968 when I first went to Italy. At the time, that model was the second step up from the Fiat 500, the smallest car they made, and it was the smallest car I could import back to America at the end of my stay in Italy.

So, I hopped into this little vehicle, managed to get it up the rather steep ramp and poke its nose out into traffic without stalling - though I came close a couple of times, hence my comment about a break-in period for clutches - and took off. Everything went fine until the point where my map-maker had thrown up his hands: the dragons turned out to be detours because of construction - there is construction everywhere in the city as they try to get ready for the big, BIG Holy Year of 2000. It’s particularly bad around the Vatican, where they are actually supposed to be constructing some pedestrian underpasses for the pilgrims, and that’s where any plans I had for navigating dropped off into unknown waters. I just followed traffic, though in Rome, you don’t really stay in lanes and follow along in orderly fashion, so following traffic meant edging up behind whatever car looked as though it might be going my way. I had crossed the river before getting to the construction, and at one point, we crossed it again, went on for awhile, and then recrossed to get back to the Vatican side. At another point, I found myself driving up to what looked like a solid barrier across the road and got a little worried. Only at the very last minute did I find that there was a tiny hole in it where you could turn left to get back onto the road that runs along the river. I did eventually get back to where I needed to go, found a parking spot after only about 15 minutes, and happily let the car rest until it was time to go north.

I stayed in Rome from Tuesday until Friday - my missing suitcase was finally delivered on Thursday afternoon –and, early Friday morning, drove north to Urbania. It was nice to feel that I knew the route and what to expect, but I rather missed the excitement of going to Urbania the first time, going to the city of Cornelia and finding it so lovely. The landscape, however, is still extraordinarily beautiful and I still find myself very moved by it. I moved into the apartment I’d rented with no trouble and it’s quite serviceable. For those of you familiar with Italy, it is absolutely typical in that there isn’t a single comfortable chair in the place - the only way I can relax is to recline on the bed - and the lighting is just barely adequate. On the other hand, the bed is quite comfortable, a double bed that is fairly firm, and there is a sort of kitchen table in the living/bedroom that provides a good surface for my books, papers, computer, printer, and now, a rented TV. Yes folks, I found a place that would rent me a little table model TV - with remote no less - for less than $2.00 a day. It only gets the three state channels - none of the zippier private channels that have sprung up in recent years - but that gets me news (a fair amount of Sexgate, though less, thank god, than in the U.S.), some of those wonderful Italian variety shows that remind one vaguely of the less successful aspects of American TV in the ‘50s, but in color, and movies, usually American movies dubbed into Italian. Actually, last night I watched "Muriel’s Wedding," a wonderful recent Australian film, and the other night, it was "Free Willie." But they’re often fairly dreary.

I have to say that the TV really fills a need. Tuesday through Saturday, I spend all day in the library/archives, looking at pages of handwritten Latin legal texts, and by evening, I can barely conceive of reading a mystery, not to speak on continuing to work on those texts. Actually, for the first couple of weeks, I had a wonderful little routine, which I’ve since had to change. I would get up at 7:30 or 8, get myself together and go out and buy a newspaper, take it to the best local bar, in the main piazza, and have my coffee and brioche and read the paper in the lovely early morning sun. The library opens at 10:00 but they let me come whenever they are actually there, so I can go at 9:30 and work until 12:30. Then they close up and I go home and make myself some lunch, play a little solitaire on the computer, nap, or whatever. When I first got here, I napped quite a lot, but now I’ve gotten over jet lag I don’t do that. Lately, I’ve started using this interim time to start translating Cornelia’s letters into English. So I too can become part of the great translation circle. On Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, I go to the phone store, called Prisma, that has the Internet connection for half an hour or so of e-mail. I appear promptly at 9, when it’s supposed to open, but Giovanna, who runs it with her brother, is usually a few minutes late, more so since school started last week and she now has to take her younger daughter to nursery school before opening the store. So I stand and wait. Sometimes her dog Pongo, who looks like a white Scottish terrier, has gotten out of his yard and he’s there waiting too. He runs around and sees his friends, the other loose town dogs, and then plants himself on the corner to wait for her. When she arrives on her bicycle, we both go to greet her and help open the store. Then, after establishing my continuing connection with the outside world by way of e-mail, I go to the library.

The change I spoke of happened terribly abruptly, from my point of view. It was rainy one day about a week ago, got noticeably cooler, and the chairs and tables disappeared from the piazza. Fall. So I still go to the same bar for my coffee and brioche but I have them standing at the counter and put off reading the paper until lunch. They do have some tables in a little back room, but it’s often smoky and they are usually filled by groups of ladies by the time I get there. So I just stand and talk politics with the woman who runs the place. She calls the double coffee I always have (two cups of espresso in one) "American" (caffe americano) and tells me she’s had just about enough of all this foolishness about the American president, with which I heartily agree. She thinks Italian news reports too much about it and I tell her she should see what the American media do.                                                       

The other change has to do with e-mail. As I said, I’ve been doing my Internet stuff at Prisma, which charges just under $4.00 for 30 minutes (part of the fallout of the recent stock market ups and downs is that the dollar has fallen with respect to the lira, so I’m getting fewer lire to a dollar - rats). Giovanna is very fair about it and charges me pro rata if I’m under or over. But it’s a bit steep. Well, I checked my e-mail in the afternoon last Saturday instead of morning and mentioned it when I left the library. When I got back, Anita, one of my two particular friends there, said why don’t I use their e-mail? She said that they buy a package of Internet access and never use all the time they have to purchase because they use it rarely, just for bibliographic searches and they don’t do that much. Otherwise, some of the guys there play on it. So we went to check that I can, in fact, get to my e-mail service and I can. So I can use it whenever it’s not in use, which isn’t often, and they won’t charge me for it.

I spoke about this last summer, but I must repeat it here: I am incredibly lucky to be doing a project that requires the resources of the Urbania public library/archives. Most such research institutions in Italy close at mid day and don’t reopen. Most put severe restrictions on how many items you can order at one time and the quickness with which they will bring them to you. Many do no photocopying. Here, I can have at my table whatever items I ask for, and they are open extraordinarily long hours by Italian standards. I think the longer hours of opening are probably because they are the town public library as well as the repository of an excellent collection of archival material and also early published material. In the afternoons, they are officially open 3-6, but the museum part of the building is currently hosting an exhibition that runs through October, and it is open until 7. So they let me stay on in the library as long as I want until 7.

Now, I have to say, a chink has appeared in the wonderfulness that is the Urbania library. School started a week ago and instantly hordes of young people appeared in the library in the afternoon. The lovely solitude I had been enjoying was rudely broken by groups of extremely energetic young men and women ostensibly doing their homework together. This, it turns out, is normal. They use the library as a study hall and the time there as a social occasion. They really are doing their homework, but in a very lively and boisterous fashion, and the first day I got a headache trying to concentrate. After some consultation with Anita and Laura, I can now go into the cataloguing room to work if the kids get too loud.

Let me just say a little bit about what I’m actually trying to do here and then I’ll go back to local color. Right now, I’m collecting whatever material I can find that concerns Cornelia, her family, and her relation with Michelangelo. I’m starting where I left off last summer, going through all the notaries’ books page by page to find references to them. These entries are in script, of course, and are more or less legible, depending on the notary. They are also in Latin, though a weird kind of legal Latin that uses a lot of abbreviations and shorthand symbols, so the difficulties of understanding them are considerable. One of the notaries, Benedetto Perugino, is my favorite. He is exceptionally neat and careful and dedicated to getting it all just right. His writing is clear, he makes sure that he gets in all the required information, and by the straightness of his lines, you’d swear he used a ruler, though there are no signs of any actual lines. He was an active notary for 50 plus years and his later notebooks are almost as neat as the first. In the front of his first book, he made autobiographical notes, sort of like what people used to put in the family Bible: he notes the date on which he brought home his first wife, the dates of birth of four sons (and dates of death of three of them), the eventual death of his first wife, with a little paean to her piety and virtue, his second marriage and the abrupt death of the second wife. He began that book in 1533 and notes that he made his last entry on this autobiographical page in 1588, at which time he had just one surviving child. I love him, of course, because I can actually read his writing and because he provides a model of what the others should do, or perhaps are doing, if only I could read their handwriting. Some are truly terrible. Added to this are the accidents human and natural, like paper damage from tears, water, and corrosive inks that literally eat holes in the paper or bleed through to the reverse, making it almost impossible to distinguish the writing on one side of the paper from that on the other. The opposite of this is ink fading to almost nothing on the page. And there are other frustrations, as when one notary makes reference to an action by another notary on a topic I’m interested in, but I find no such entry when I go to the second notary’s book. Such is the joy of research.

What you get out of this is a mixed bag: I did find the marriage contract for Cornelia’s second marriage and also a multi-page account that I haven’t quite figured out yet. It’s by one of the notaries who is hardest to read and in addition, the ink is very light, but it seems to be either another will by Cornelia’s father, made not too long before he actually died, or a kind of reckoning of accounts among the surviving sisters and their husbands. I’ve found lots and lots of entries that have to do with financial dealings - land sales, dowry payments, and the like. Cornelia’s father bought and sold lots of pieces of land, and in this he was very typical. Her mother seems to have been in charge of the goats, since there are several entries that refer to her purchasing goats. Presumably the milk from the goats was the source of the cheese that Cornelia sent Michelangelo as presents. People sued each other regularly, and there were some disputes between Cornelia’s father and his sons-in-law, though there seems to have been no problem with her first husband, probably because they were living in Rome and then he died. But even while he was living in Rome in Michelangelo’s house, her first husband made sure that his affairs in Casteldurante (original name for Urbania) were looked after by naming legal representatives to make and receive payments for him. The things you find are both terribly personal - what could be more personal that a widow’s legal application for custody of her children, for instance? - but also very impersonal, in the sense that it’s difficult to connect the actions that are recorded with a personality or an ongoing personal narrative. The upside to this in Cornelia’s case is the existence of her letters, which give a voice and a context to dry legal notices of her collecting rental fees in the name of her sons, their father’s legal heirs.

But for those of you who would like a more concrete sense of place, let me tell you more about Urbania as I experience it today. As I’ve mentioned to most of you already, it is very small. When I go to get my paper in the morning, it’s perhaps the equivalent of a two-block walk. Prisma is just across the street and the ducal palace, home of the library and museum, is just up the street afew feet. And the street we’re talking about isn’t an American street: it’s probably as wide as two of those large vehicles that so many Americans are driving around now, but if you put them side by side, they would be so jammed together they wouldn’t be able to move. On one side of the street, the side opposite the ducal palace, the shops are set back under arched porticos, very handy on the rainy days that are becoming more frequent. To walk up to the main square, where my breakfast bar is, is about one long New York block, if that. So far, I’ve done almost all my shopping in this area: bread, cheese, mineral water, and stuff. About 50 feet from my apartment is the SPM Supermarket, which is probably about the size of a Braums. I get stuff there such as mineral water, toilet paper, laundry soap, pasta, and, a novelty this year, diet Coke. Bread, cheese, fresh pesto, fruits and vegetables I get from shops that specialize in those things, though I don’t really prepare anything beyond very basic stuff. The cheese that Cornelia sent to Michelangelo is still the local specialty - cacciotta - from either goat’s or sheep’s milk and I like it a lot. When I first got here, I asked Laura whether there was any large supermarket in the area where things cost less, and she directed me to Joyland - yup, that’s the name - which turned out to be about an hour away towards the coast, near Fano. It is an attempt at a mall: Joyland itself is basically a big grocery store, though it also has clothing and some appliances, but there are also some other stores, including an electronics and appliance store and I remember seeing luggage too. I went on a Sunday - it is very new for anything to be open on Sunday in Italy - and it was packed. I did get a six-pack of two-liter bottles of mineral water, some cans of tuna fish, mayonnaise, toilet paper, clothes hangers, and some other stuff, but the prices weren’t low enough to merit driving that far. Still, it was a novel experience in Italy.

I want to spend a little time on the experience of being in a small town in Italy. I have to say that I think it’s probably not for me in the long run. It’s just too small and, therefore, family-oriented. For a single person, it offers little beyond interaction with friends and family - automatically excluded in my case - and a lot of time for introspection - not really one of my strong points, hence the TV. Usually when I’m in Italy, I’m in Rome, often at the American Academy, and there is no dearth of people to talk to, so I don’t feel so isolated. But that feeling is beginning to recede a bit, as I become more accustomed to the town and feel more at home. And I can imagine that when I move back to Rome at the end of October, it will seem like a major change after being here for this long a period. I’ll get a hint of this the week after next, as I’ll be going down to Rome for the weekend - the first weekend of October. I may also take some washing.

There is no washing machine in the apartment and, since Urbania isn’t really set up for transients, no public laundromat. So it’s washing by hand - yuch. There are, of course, dry cleaners and eventually I will probably have to give them a try, but for the moment, it’s back to the basics for me. This topic has gotten me back inside my apartment and I’ll try to give you a sense of what it’s like. It tells you a lot that there is no word in Italian for what we mean by privacy. In fact, in recent years, privacy in the legal sense has become an issue in Italy and they have adopted the English word. The windows in both the bathroom and the living/bedroom open onto a street and across the street, another apartment building. The one I’m in is slightly higher than the other, so, since I’m on the top floor (3^rd floor American style), I look onto the tile roof of that building. This is a good thing, since the street between us can be no more than 10-12 feet across. So buildings, and hence, people live in very close proximity. If our windows opened at the same level, it would be like living in the same apartment. (Looking out at roof level has also made me aware of a surprising number of satellite dishes - this is another item quite new in Italy and, like all such electronic gadgets, it’s catching on with a vengeance.) Given the building materials - stone, brick, tile for the most part - sounds reverberate. When my neighbors play music, it’s my music too, like it or not. And actually, they have some interesting tastes. Whoever lives just across from me but lower - and I’ve never seen any of them - plays a very interesting and eclectic assortment of music that can only, I think, come from recordings. And she/he seems to do it by genres: one morning we will have classical, another French café songs, another American big bands. I generally don’t mind at all listening, since it’s usually interesting music. Somewhere down on the first floor is someone with an accordion, or lots of recordings of accordions. Fortunately, this person doesn’t play them/it very loud and usually not for long periods at a stretch, but when he/she does, I find myself thinking of Venice. During one summer I spent in Venice many long years ago, I had an apartment along a canal favored by the tourist gondolas and evenings were filled with accordion music and, oddly, Neapolitan songs.

I try to take some little trips on Sunday and Monday, when the library isn’t open. Two Sundays ago, I went to the town of Fabriano, to the south, which was quite badly damaged by the earthquakes last September. Lots of buildings had wooden beams propping up the facades and some had netting over them to protect passersby from falling chunks of stone. The little museum of paper and watermarks was open, however, and that was what I’d gone to see. They still make paper by hand and it’s fascinating to watch the process. It’s a good example of another of those things we take for granted – plenty of cheap paper. In the Renaissance the process of making it was highly labor-intensive and paper must have been relatively much more expensive. Yesterday, Sunday, I went to Urbino, just 20 kilometers away, to see a lovely exhibition of Renaissance paintings at the ducal palace. So I am trying to do some sight-seeing too. It's’ hard, though, because I am so aware of how much I have to do and ho limited my time really is. Today, I spent all morning just sorting and checking all the notes I have been taking on my notaries’ books and I have had no time as yet to reflect on what I’ve been gathering.