The Stones of Florence (24 page)

Eggs, cigarettes, and postage stamps are still bought cautiously, one at a time, by the poorer Florentines, and a cabbage is sold by quarters. The habit of careful division, of slicing every whole into portions, is an instinct with the Tuscans that is confirmed by their very geography. Tuscany produces a ‘little of everything’, as the Florentines love to explain: iron, tin, copper, zinc, lead, marble, hides, oil, wheat, corn, sugar, milk, wool, flax, timber, fruit, fish, meat, fowl, and water. This little, if carefully distributed, meant self-sufficiency and independence; it was a kind of proof, from the Creator, that Tuscany was a ‘natural kingdom’ or completely furnished model world which could survive, as in some fairy-tale pact, so long as a principle of limit was recognized. The idea of rightful shares has been rooted literally in the soil here since the early Middle Ages. The
mezzadria
system of farming (half to the peasant and half to the landlord), which introduced an even division into agriculture, emancipated the Tuscan peasant from slavery centuries in advance of the rest of Italy and Europe. This no doubt explains the superiority of the Tuscan peasant and the sharpness of his intelligence. Similarly, in the thirteenth century, a then-revolutionary code governing mining and the rights to mineral deposits was enacted in Massa Maríttima, in the Maremma. The
mezzadria,
incidentally, which has become the general practice throughout Italy, now no longer satisfies either the landowner or the peasant; it is not as equal as it sounds. Nevertheless, it made the peasant a free man and instilled in him those qualities of foresightedness, thrift, and neatness that are not found in slaves or serfs.

The pride of the Florentines, as proverbial as their avarice, is particularly irritating to materialistic people because it appears to be based on nothing concrete, except the past, to which the Florentines themselves seem all but indifferent or wryly jesting. What have they got to be so proud of? No money, no film stars, no big business, no ‘top’ writers or painters, not even an opera company. A few critics and professors—‘sharp eyes and bad tongues’, which was a Renaissance summing up of the Florentines.

The professor in every Florentine is a critic, and that critical spirit is the hidden source of Florentine pride.
‘O, signore, per noi tutti gli stranieri son ugualmente odiosi’,
said a manicurist, bluntly, to Bernard Berenson, who was trying to enlist her against the Germans before the First World War. ‘Oh, sir, for us all foreigners are equally hateful.’
‘Noi fiorentini’
—this phrase, so often used, grates on the nerves of many strangers, who take it to be a boast. But it is only a definition or simple statement of identity, just as the manicurist’s remark was not rude but explanatory.

The manicurist was a poor girl and not ashamed of it. This is the distinction, the real originality, of the Florentines in the modern world, where poverty is a source of shame and true natural pride, as opposed to boastfulness, very rare. Florence is a town of poor people, and those who are not poor are embarrassed by the fact and try to hide it. Professors, farmers, and craftsmen have one thing in common; they are generally short of ready money. The Milanese-type industrialist with his bulging crocodile wallet and the Roman-type speculator hardly exist in Florence. The aristocracy here is a gentry preoccupied with crops and rainfall. Every Friday during the growing season, the counts and
marchesi
gather in Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of the agricultural administration, to trade and barter and exchange information, just as the peasants do who come in from the country with their samples to meet in the square below; on Wednesday, which is market day in Siena, the Florentine nobles who have vineyards in the Chianti or the Val d’Elsa gather there as well, in the Palazzo Comunale on the square. These men, whatever else they may be—erudite archivists, amateur historians, collectors of scientific instruments, pious sons of the Church, automobile salesmen—are, above all, farmers, and their wives, too, who set an excellent table, spend a good deal of time in conference with the
fattore
(land agent) and the accountant, having inherited estates themselves to manage.

On the whole, stocks and shares hold little interest for the Florentines, who care only for the land, that is, for ‘real’ property. Like Michelangelo and Cellini, Florentines of every station are absorbed in acquiring real estate: a little apartment that can be rented to foreigners; a farm that will supply the owner with oil, wine, fruit, and flowers for the house. Upper-class families return from a week-end on their country estates, their
millecento
packed with flowers wrapped in double thicknesses of damp newspaper to last the week in town, just as the poor people do who go by bus on Sunday to visit their relations in the country. The aristocracy is fond of shooting, and many a handsome old villa is furnished as a hunting lodge with a gamekeeper dressed in green; fishing in the Arno and the tributary mountain streams is a passion with the artisans and white-collar workers, whose bending rods make a Sunday pattern all along the river. Both sports rest on the same principle: taking something free from Nature.

Like the wise woman who lived in the portico of Santissima Annunziata and sewed pretty patches on her clothes, the modern Florentines are extremely gifted in repair work—mending and fixing old things to make them last. The restoration of works of art, which is mending at its most delicate and perilous, is one of the great crafts of modern Florence; to the workshops and laboratories of the Uffizi, spread out through the old quarters of the city, come pictures and frescoes, marbles and wooden polychromes from the Florentine churches and from remote parishes in the
contado
to be put back into condition by Florentine specialists and professors. The Florentine ‘way’ of restoration, less drastic than the German method as practised in London and New York, is one of the new wonders of the art world; art scholars and historians of English and American universities, critics and curators come to watch how it is done. To them, the workmen in white smocks, like doctors, operating on frescoes that have been detached from damp churches and cloisters, revive the old Florence and the workshops around the Duomo. Climbing up ladders onto shaky scaffolds in the Bardi Chapel of Santa Croce, where the Giottos are being restored, the foreign professors marvel over the work and over the new, ‘modern’ Giotto who is revealed by the removal of the nineteenth-century overpainting—a resplendent, transfigured Giotto, whom Ruskin never knew, having given nearly all his praises, it is now found, alas, to the
œuvre
of the nineteenth-century restorer, Bianchi, who painted,
in toto,
the figure of Saint Louis of Toulouse, considered by Ruskin the essential Giotto. Saint Louis of Toulouse has vanished; the Victorian age has vanished, its only relic being an ironic Franciscan friar, the plump head of the Belle Arti of Santa Croce, who paces up and down the trembling scaffold arguing, with Florentine pungency, that the missing figures be painted in again, ‘for devotional reasons’.

These Giottos of the Bardi Chapel have been brought back, almost, from the dead, and the other innovations of modern, post-war Florence—the new Museum of the Belvedere with its wonderful collection of detached frescoes restored to life and the new Trinita bridge standing
come era
—appear as veritable miracles. The redemption of a work of art is a kind of Second Creation. Yet what is involved is simply painstaking repair work, not essentially different from the housewife’s darning or the furniture-mending of the small workshops of the Oltrarno. Around the saving character of the Florentines, their historic vice, cluster the local virtues: the wise division of space, substantiality, simplicity, economy, and restraint. If high-flying Daedalus is their real patron, Poverty is their attendant virtue, the home-made cross of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini that guides him, the precursor, through the desert.

The two modern writers who have best caught the spirit of Florence are Aldo Palazzeschi whose
Sorelle Materassi
tells of two old-maid sisters who have a fine-linen and embroidery business specializing in trousseaux and hope-chests—putting away for the future—and whose own bureau drawers are stuffed with ancient trim for their own Sunday wear (tassels, fringe, scarves, veils, little collars forty or sixty years old, boleros, little jackets with dangles, Spanish combs and tortoise hairpins), and Vasco Pratolini whose
Cronache di Poveri Amanti
tells of the poor people of the Santa Croce quarter: artisans, pushcart vendors, prostitutes, and pairs and pairs of young lovers. In the back streets of the Santa Croce quarter, the farthest remove from the smart linen shops of Via Tornabuoni, two characteristic sounds can be heard, when the traffic is momentarily silent, two sounds that
are
modern Florence: the clack-clack of a sewing machine and the tinkle of a young girl practising on an old piano.

Author’s Note

Florentines assure me that the Florentines are stingy and inhospitable; in the text I have taken their word for it and cited examples they have given. If they are right, then all the Florentines, born and naturalized, whom I came to know well are exceptions. The list of these exceptions and an account of my indebtedness would make a short chapter in itself, and I name only those who were of direct help in the work of this book. First of all, Roberti Papi and his wife, Vittorina; their quick kindness and perceptive generosity would stand out even in Heaven, among the angels. Also my affection and thanks go to Aldo Bruzzichelli, Miss Nicky Mariano, Dr Hanne Khiel, Signora Titina Sartori, Countess Cristina Rucellai, Professor Ulrich Middeldorf Bernard Berenson, the Reverend Mr Victor Stanley, and Sabatina Geppi.

My thanks finally go to the city of Florence and to all the Florentines, past and present. I agree with that pope who called them the fifth element.

The reader, I hope, will overlook a few inaccuracies in the description of present-day Florence. The incessant changes of modern Florence keep it always ahead of the author.

MARY MCCARTHY

A Biography of Mary McCarthy

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) was an American critic, public intellectual, and author of more than two dozen books, including the 1963
New York Times
bestseller
The Group
.

McCarthy was born on June 21, 1912, in Seattle, Washington, to Roy Winfield McCarthy and Therese (“Tess”) Preston McCarthy. McCarthy and her three younger brothers, Kevin, Preston, and Sheridan, were suddenly orphaned in 1918. While the family was en route from Seattle to a new home in Minneapolis, both parents died of influenza within a day of one another.

After being shuttled between relatives, the children were finally sent to live with a great-aunt, Margaret Sheridan McCarthy, and her husband, Myers Shriver. The Shrivers proved to be cruel and often sadistic adoptive parents. Six years later, Harold Preston, the children’s maternal grandfather and an attorney, intervened. The children were split up, and Mary went to live with her grandparents in their affluent Seattle home. McCarthy reflects on her turbulent youth, Catholic upbringing, and subsequent loss of faith in
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
(1957) and
How I Grew
(1987).

A week after graduating from Vassar in 1933, McCarthy moved to New York City and married Harold Johnsrud, an aspiring playwright. They divorced three years later, but many aspects of their relationship would resurface in the unhappy marriage of Kay Strong and Harald Petersen in
The Group
. In the late 1930s, McCarthy became a member of the
Partisan Review
circle and worked actively as a theater and book critic, contributing to a wide range of publications, such as the
Nation
, the
New Republic
,
Harper’s Magazine
, and the
New York Review of Books
.

In 1938, McCarthy married Edmund Wilson, an established writer; together, they had a son named Reuel, born the same year. Wilson encouraged McCarthy to write fiction, and her first book, a novel entitled
The Company She Keeps
(1942), satirizes the mores of bohemian New York intellectuals from the point of view of an acerbic female protagonist. Her second book,
The Oasis
, a thinly disguised roman à clef about the
Partisan Review
intellectuals, won the English monthly magazine
Horizon
’s fiction contest in 1949.

Soon after her divorce from Wilson in 1945, McCarthy married Bowden Broadwater, a staff member of the
New Yorker
, and also taught literature at Bard College and Sarah Lawrence College.
A Charmed Life
(1955), a novel about the rollercoaster experience of a shaky marriage in a quirky artists’ community, is based on her life with Wilson in Wellfleet, Cape Cod.
The Groves of Academe
(1951), a campus satire informed by her teaching positions, casts an ironic gaze on the foibles of academics. Randall Jarrell’s novel
Pictures from an Institution
(1954) is said to be about McCarthy’s time at Sarah Lawrence, where he also taught.

In the 1950s, McCarthy took a strong interest in European history. Her two books about Italy,
Venice Observed
(1956) and
The Stones of Florence
(1959), combine art criticism, political theory, and reportage to bring the two cities’ histories to life. While on a lecture tour in Poland for the United States Information Agency in 1959 and 1960, McCarthy met the public affairs officer for the US Embassy in Warsaw, James West. McCarthy and West left their respective partners and were married in 1961.

McCarthy’s most popular literary success came in 1963 with the publication of her novel
The Group,
which remained on the
New York Times
bestseller list for almost two years, and was made into a movie by Sidney Lumet in 1966.