Imprimatur (82 page)

I know, dear Alessio, that you are concerned to respect the sched­ules which your office lays down. For that very reason, I trust that you will transmit these papers to His Holiness with all diligence, so that he may weigh up whether to order a late, yet still timely,
imprimatur.

Notes

The Donzello

The Locanda del Donzello all'Orso ("The Squire with the Bear") really did exist. I was able to find its precise location thanks to the
Status Animarum
(the census carried out each year at Easter by the parishes of Rome) of the former parish of Santa Maria in Posterula, the little church which was once near the inn. In the nineteenth century, the church and the
piazzetta
in which it stood were demolished to make way for the construction of the new embankments of the Tiber. Yet the yearly censuses have been preserved and may be consulted in the historical archives of the Vicariate of Rome.

The former inn was situated exactly where the apprentice said: in a sixteenth-century house at the beginning of Via dell'Orso, where numbers 87 and 88 now stand. The main entrance is a fine studded
portone
; nearby, one can see the broad doorway with an oblong arch which in 1683 led to the dining room of the inn, and which today is the entrance to an antique shop. The building was acquired a few decades ago and renovated by a family which still lives there and lets out a number of apartments for rent.

By means of a series of searches through the cadastral records, I was able to verify that the building has undergone a number of changes between 1683 and the present day; without, however, radically altering its original appear­ance. The ground-floor and first-floor windows, for example, no longer have grilles; the attic has become the third floor, above which there is now a ter­race. The order of windows facing onto the alleyway at the corner of the Via dell'Orso has been completely bricked up but is still visible. The little tower which was supposed to house the courtesan Cloridia has been extended and now forms an extra storey. Of the other storeys there remain only the struc­tural walls, all partition walls having been changed several times over the centuries. Not even the little closet which hid the secret stairway giving ac­cess to the underground galleries has survived; in the place where that stair­way was, a series of apartments have been added on in more recent times.

In other words, the inn is still there, as though time had stopped. With a little imagination, one could hear the voice of Pellegrino or the mutterings of Padre Robleda behind those ancient windows.

Time has mercifully spared other documents, which have proved decisive for my research. In the Orsini section of the Capitoline historical archives,

I found a precious register of the guests at the Donzello up until the end of the year 1682. The volume, in a rough parchment binding, was entitled, in a shaky hand:
Book in which are noted all of those who came to lodge at the Cammera Locanda of Sigra Luigia de Grandis Bonetti, at the Bear.
A manuscript note within confirms that the inn was known as the Donzello.

From the register of guests, surprising coincidences emerge. According to the apprentice, the proprietor of the Donzello, Signora Luigia, died a violent death caused by an attack by two gypsies.

Well, the register of the inn breaks off suddenly on 20th October, 1682. It seems that, around that date, the innkeeper Luigia Bonetti met with a serious accident; we hear nothing of her until the date of her death on 29th November of the same year (I was able to verify this in the register of deaths of the parish of Santa Maria in Posterula).

But that is not all. I could not believe my eyes when, in the register of guests at the Donzello, I found a number of familiar names: Eduardus Bedfordi, twenty-eight years of age, Englishman; Angelo Brenozzi, twenty-three years of age, Venetian; and lastly, Domenico Stilone Priaso, thirty years of age, Neapolitan; all had lodged at the inn between 1680 and 1681. The three young men were, in other words, people of flesh and blood, and had really stayed at the Donzello at the time when it was kept by Signora Luigia, before the arrival of the apprentice.

I therefore searched also for traces of the apprentice himself, who unfor­tunately never reveals his name in his memoir, and for information concern­ing his master, Pellegrino de Grandis.

The boy said he was taken into service by Pellegrino in the spring of 1683, while Pellegrino had, on his arrival from Bologna with his wife and two daughters, taken up temporary lodgings near the Donzello, "waiting for the few passing guests to vacate the premises".

So, all that is borne out. In the
Status Animarum
I discovered that the
palazzetto
of the Donzello housed several families of tenants that spring: a few pages further on, I first found mention of a certain Pellegrino de Grandis, from Bologna, a cook by trade, along with his wife Bona Candiotti and two daughters. They were accompanied by a twenty-year-old apprentice called Francesco. Was he, perhaps, the young dwarf at the inn?

In the following year, new lodgers were again to be found at the Donzello: a sign that the damage described by the apprentice at the end of his account had been repaired, but Pellegrino did not continue his activity as innkeeper. Nor are there any further traces of him or his young helper.

Personages and documents

The physician from
Le Marche
—the Marches—Giovanni Tiracorda, was born in the village of Alteta in the province of Fermo and was one of the most noted
Archiaters
(or physicians to the Pope) of his time, caring for Innocent XI on several occasions. As I have been able to ascertain (again through the
Status Animarum
of the church of Santa Maria in Posterula), he really did live in the Via dell'Orso, near to the inn, with his wife Paradisa and three servant girls. His plump and jovial figure, just as the boy described him, corresponds exactly to a caricature by Pier Leone Ghezzi preserved in the Vatican Li­brary. The books, the furniture, the ornaments and the plan of the interior of Tiracorda's house, as described by the apprentice, all correspond down to the last detail to the inventory of goods attached to the physician's last Will and Testament, which may be consulted in the State Archives of Rome.

Even the capricious character of the doctor's wife Paradisa seems to cor­respond to the truth. In the Archives of the Pio Sodalizio dei Piceni (Pious Association of Citizens of Ascoli Piceno) in Rome, there are to be found the few documents of Tiracorda's which escaped the ravages of the Napoleonic troops stationed in the Holy City. Amongst the remaining papers, I consulted a series of legal cases brought against Paradisa after her husband's death. From a number of expert opinions, it emerged that the lady was no longer in possession of her mental faculties.

I have found no few mentions of the surname Dulcibeni in the city of Fermo, in the Marches, during the course of the two visits which I made there; unfortunately, I did not find anyone who in the seventeenth century answered to the name Pompeo. I did, however, find confirmation of the ex­istence in Naples of an important circle of Jansenists: probably that to which Dulcibeni belonged.

In the Medici Archives in Florence, I was able to verify almost in its entirety the story of Feroni and Huygens; upon his return to Tuscany from Holland, Francesco Feroni wished to contract an aristocratic marriage for his daughter Caterina. The girl was, however, completely besotted with her father's right-hand man, Antonius Huygens, from Cologne; so much so that she had fallen ill of "continuall Fever, which has since become a tertian Fe­ver". Despite that, Huygens continued to work for Feroni, even managing the subsidiary of his business in Livorno. Here, too, the apprentice's memoir spoke the truth.

Concerning the Sienese physician Cristofano, I have traced only infor­mation concerning his father, who bore the same name, the well-known Su­perintendent for Health Cristofano Ceffini, who was indeed active during the plague epidemic at Prato in 1630. He also left a
Libro di Sanita
—a book of health—listing the rules which health officials were to observe in the event of a plague outbreak.

Luigi Rossi, the master of Atto Melani, lived in Rome and Paris, where he was young Atto's friend and mentor. All the verses which Abbot Melani sings are taken from his songs. Le Seigneur Luigi (as he is referred to in original scores scattered throughout the libraries of Europe) never took the trouble during his lifetime to have his operas printed; yet these were highly success­ful, and the monarchs of the time competed to have them performed. Thus, Luigi Rossi, while being regarded in the seventeenth century as the greatest of all European composers, had already fallen into oblivion by the dawn of the new century.

I have succeeded in finding only two recordings of his love songs, but I was lucky. I actually found the two passages sung by Atto and was thus able to listen to them, enchanted by their wonderful melodies.

The astrological almanack of Stilone Priaso, which so troubled the ap­prentice of the Donzello, was published in December 1682 and may be con­sulted at the Biblioteca Casanatense, in Rome. It was, I confess, with some disquiet that I discovered that the author really had predicted that the bat­tle of Vienna would take place in September 1683. That is a mystery and, I think, destined to remain so.

At the Biblioteca Casanatense, thanks to the professionalism and ex­treme courtesy of the librarians, I was also able to trace the astrological manual from which was drawn the horoscope of Aries that Ugonio recited to Atto and the boy during their underground peregrinations. This little trea­tise was published in Lyons in the year 1625, just a year before the birth of Abbot Melani:
Livre d'Arcandam Docteur et Astrologue traictant despredictions
d
'Astrologie.
Well, in the case of Atto, Arcandam's vaticinations seem to have been remarkably accurate, including even his life span: eighty-seven years, as foretold by the astrologer.

Atto Melani

All the circumstances of the life of Atto Melani contained in the appren­tice's account are authentic. Castrato singer, diplomat and spy, Atto served, first the Medici, then Mazarin, and finally the
Roi Soleil,
but also Fouquet and an indefinite number of cardinals and noble families. His career as a castrato was long and glorious, and his singing was celebrated—as he himself boasted to the apprentice-boy—by Jean de la Fontaine and Francesco Redi. Besides being mentioned in all the principal musical dictionaries, the name of Atto Melani appears in the correspondence of Mazarin and in the mem­oirs of several French writers.

Atto Melani was also accurately described by the apprentice-boy, both in regard to his appearance and his character; to appreciate this, one has but to stop and look at the funerary monument erected in his memory in the church of San Domenico in Pistoia. Looking up, one meets the abbot's sharp eyes and can recognise the mocking fold of his lips and the impertinent dimple on his chin. The Marquis de Grammont describes the young Atto Melani in his memoirs as "amusing, and far from stupid". And one has only to read one of Atto's many letters, scattered like
disjecta membra
throughout all the libraries of Italy, to marvel at his gay and ironic, gossipy and exceed­ingly acute style.

In his correspondence, one finds many of the teachings which Atto im­parted to the young apprentice, beginning with his learned (and eminently debatable) reasoning as to why it was absolutely licit for a Christian King to ally himself with the Turks.

Even the guide to the architectural marvels of Rome, which Abbot Mel­ani was writing in his room at the Donzello, between one adventure and another, seems to have been anything but an invention. Atto's guide is in fact extraordinarily similar to an anonymous manuscript which was first pub­lished by a small Roman publishing house in 1996, under the title
Lo Specchio di Roma Barocca (The Mirror of Baroque Rome).
The anonymous writer of the manuscript was a cultivated, well-to-do abbot, well informed about all things political and with good connections at the papal court, a misogynist and a Francophile. That sounds like a portrait of Abbot Melani.

Not only that: the author of the guide must have sojourned in Rome be­tween 1678 and 1681, just like Atto, who in fact met Kircher in 1679.

Like Atto Melani's guide,
Specchio di Roma Barocca
remained incomplete. The author abandoned the work in the midst of a description of the church of San Atanasio dei Greci. Incredibly, Atto interrupted his work at the same point, struck down by the memory of his meeting with Kircher. Is that only a coincidence?

Atto, moreover, really did know Jean Buvat, the scribe who—as we read in the apprentice's account—looked after his correspondence in Paris, imi­tating his handwriting perfectly. Buvat was a copyist at the Bibliotheque Royale, highly skilled in deciphering parchments and an excellent calligrapher. He worked for Atto too, and the latter recommended him—unsuc­cessfully—to the prefect of the Library for an increase in pay (cf.
Memoire- Journal de Jean Buvat
in:
Revue des Bibliotheques
, October/December 1900 pp. 235-236).