Deborah Stott  Letter from Rome, 26 - 27 May 2001
 

 

Interior of Pantheon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Urbania document

Reference to Ser Bartolommeo Cappello in Urbania document

 

 

 

Piazza Navona

Piazza Navona

 

 

Santa Maria della Pace

Here is my second stab at a group letter, though as I begin it, I don’t feel as though I have very much of interest to recount.  Perhaps I’ll begin with today, Saturday.

 During the morning, I spent some time working on translations of Cornelia’s letters, but around 11, I had to exit the apartment to accommodate its cleaning, (Yes, a very nice aspect of this apartment is that someone comes every day except Sunday and cleans, empties trash, and makes the bed. And once a week he changes linens.)  As I said in my last report, I’m having to learn new bus routes, both because I’m in a different part of town and because even the ones I knew all seem to have changed significantly since I was last here, and there is as yet no new bus map.  (Some of you will be making rude noises about Italian efficiency, but shush.)  So I decided to take one of the buses from my neighborhood, the 492, and find out where it goes.  It turns out to be an absolutely lovely bus, with a wonderful meandering route that zigzags through Rome on a sort of diagonal from upper left to lower right and back again, in the course of things going right through some of the most desirable parts of town. I love it!  Not only that but, since it’s not on the main tourist track, it is almost never crowded and I can usually get a seat, unheard of in Roman buses. I love it!  Today’s driver for my little jaunt was a young woman, still pretty unusual in Rome, and, since I was sitting near the front, I could see many of the men do a double take as they boarded.

After all that riding, I thought I should walk some, so I got off in the middle of town and strolled for awhile, after which it was lunch time and my stroll took me to one of the restaurants that used to be a favorite, with outdoor tables in an out-of-the-way and relatively quiet piazza. I have to say that this is only the second time I’ve eaten in a restaurant since I’ve been here – it being pretty expensive – and it was lovely: pasta with tomatoes and olives and then a nice dish of veal sauteed with sage, lemon, and capers. And of course some white wine. Delightful and well worth the expense.

This was one of my more interesting days. My library and archival research hasn’t yet yielded any exciting discoveries and probably won’t.  I’ve spent time at both the Vatican and American Academy libraries reading about women’s letters and related topics, such as what did it mean to be able to write in the 16th C.?  It turns out there is some very interesting work on this, centering on the work of Armando Petrucci, analyzing the nature of a writer’s education by the mode of handwriting.  He has also worked on the topic of delegated writing - when a writer who either couldn’t write him or herself or couldn’t write well enough, used someone else, either a professional or a friend or relation – which is what Cornelia did.  I am also trying to track down the notarial records of Ser Bartolommeo Cappello, who worked in Rome. He acted in his notarial capacity for Michelangelo at least once, when he processed the final payment of Cornelia’s dowry from her first husband’s estate to her second husband – the original document certifying this transaction is in the Buonarroti archive in Florence – and there is a reference in a notarial entry in Urbania to an act processed by him by which Cornelia’s father was named an official guardian of her sons.  That notary must have had a copy of the actual document, since he refers to Cappello by name and gives the date of the transaction. So I would love to find Cappello’s books and the original record of this action, but so far no success. They should be in the State Archive (the Archivio di Stato), but they are not.  In the index there is a notation to try the communal archives, but I did this the last time I was here, and they aren’t there either.  This time, I asked for help at the Archivio di Stato, and one of the personnel came up with a publication on the archives in Rome, in which it states that this particular notary’s books are at the archive of the Confraternity of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini (the church of the Florentine nation in Rome).  So I trotted over there (this was Tuesday, I believe), and was told by the custodian that the archive is only open Fridays 9:30-12.  OK. 

Friday 9:20, I was there, magnifying glass and Latin dictionary in hand. (That morning I had lost a contact lens, but no matter.)  From the interior of the church, I was directed up a stairway, past a priest absorbed in a computer, up to a tiny hallway preceding a tiny room full of old books.  Inside was a young woman, unidentified at first, who informed me that I would have to present a precise request from whoever had sent me.  Eventually, an extremely elderly man with the thickest glasses I’ve ever seen – in fact, a second set of glasses was overlaid on the first, like the ones surgeons wear when they’re doing microsurgery – arrived and told me to follow him into another tiny and crowded room. He asked me what I wanted and, since I didn’t know exactly who he was and how formal I should be, I launched in on a detailed description of my project and its implications for the human condition.  He bore with me for a few minutes and then made one of those universal gestures – a circling hand movement indicating `wrap it up’.  So I did and he gave me a piece of paper, told me to write my name and address on it, along with a brief statement of why I wanted to consult the archive, and I did.

The woman in the archive room turned out to be a scholar named Julia, who is working on the architecture of the church, and she was obviously very much at home there, with her Apple laptop all set up beside a pile of documents.  She was also very friendly once I had been admitted, and showed me what passes for an index to the material in the archive.  I did find a few acts by this notary – he was Chancellor of the confraternity for about 30 years – but they were not his notarial records, nor did I find anything in the index that provided a clue to where they might be. Julia said that she thought she might have some notes that would be helpful, and she will have a look and bring them next Friday.  So I’ll try again, but I’m not as hopeful as I was. I’m pretty new to this documents and archive stuff, so I don’t know whether my feelings about this are common.  It’s really not that important to the project as a whole that I find this record: it’s enough that the other notary made reference to it and finding it won’t provide necessary proof or even any other information.  But finding it would be so neat!  It’s something about fitting pieces together and the more you have the more satisfying it is.  It’s also possible, of course, that there might be other entries pertaining to Cornelia’s story.


It’s Sunday morning, and I’ve just finished translating the long and dramatic letter Cornelia wrote to enlist Michelangelo’s help in refusing the proposed second husband her father had selected.  The reading I’ve been doing on writing has been a big help, and I find that I’m more aware of details that might point to the influence of the person to whom Cornelia was probably dictating the letter.  In this letter and the one previous, for example – both of which are in a handwriting different from that of most of her early letters, which I believe to be that of her nephew – she addresses Michelangelo by a more formal term – something like `Your Lordship’ – than she usually uses, and this is likely, therefore, to be a result of the influence of whoever was doing the writing.  It is a long and complicated letter – three pages with no corrections or changes - and it seems to have been carefully and consciously composed in order to make her argument as strongly as possible.  So it’s probably a final version that was preceded by a previous draft or drafts and in whose composition she was probably helped by someone with formal training in writing and composition.  So far I can’t identify the handwriting as that of any of the notaries the family used, but it would be lovely to discover whose it is.

As you can tell from the above, I haven’t spent much time out and about. When I have, I’ve noticed lots of changes – a lot of cleaning was done to prepare for Holy Year last year and there are lots of creamy and rose facades around.  Perhaps the most striking is in Piazza Navona, where the facade of the Pamphili palace has changed from the traditional Roman dirty brownish-orange to pearly off-white. It looks very odd and not entirely right, though presumably the color was chosen to be historically correct – I’ll have to try to get a photograph of its current condition. The other big change is in the amount of space that has been subtracted from roadways and given to pedestrians.  You can really see the effect in a greater ease in crossing the street and in some of the great piazzas, which are now unclogged of the parked cars and traffic that have obscured their beauty for years.  This is the result of the activity of the previous mayor Rutelli, of the leftish Olive party, who just lost to the very right-wing Berlusconi in the national elections. The Rome mayoral elections are today and pit an Olive candidate against a Berlusconi protégé whose program consists, according to my friend Carolyn who lives here, in abrogating everything that was done by the previous administration.  So if he wins today, Rome might see a big step backward, with public spaces given back to cars.