Almost by accident, I started spending more time in the confessional, an action that bore no relation to the sin, or lack thereof, in my life. I was not always kind to my brothers. I sometimes disobeyed my mother. I often fell asleep while at my prayers. But, fundamentally, I considered myself a virtuous person. I feared God and obeyed His commandments. Yet I found I was saying more in confession than I intended. Not that I had been hiding sins. Rather, I had settled into a habit of giving arduous explanations for my misdeeds, to the point that Father Cambio, a priest at Santa Trinita, the church where my family heard Mass, started to laugh.
“How old are you, Mina?” he asked.
“Sixteen last month. How old are you?”
“Thirty-two.”
“So ancient! I would not have guessed.”
He did not balk at my impertinence. “You’re old enough to be married. Has your mother spoken to you about this?”
“More than I would like.”
“What would you prefer?”
“I’d prefer she let me return to dining with my grandfather and his humanist friends. Is that a sin?”
He laughed again. “No, in and of itself, it is not a sin. But you ought to be careful about the company you keep, lest you be led astray.”
“So far as I can surmise, the only imminent danger I face is succumbing to boredom after repeated exposure to the minutiae of household management.”
“When you marry, your husband will rely on you to handle all such matters. It is a critical responsibility. We are not all so fortunate as your grandfather when it comes to our daily lives. Most of us will never comb the libraries of German monasteries in search of ancient manuscripts.”
“I never dared hope for a life half so interesting.”
He studied my face, his eyes full of sympathy. “I have an idea that might help. When I see you next for confession, I will have a book for you, something we can read and discuss.”
I felt a thrill of emotion as I walked up the church steps the following week. Books had always held an important place in my life, and there had never been a shortage of them in our home. My father, a wealthy wool merchant, considered them essential household objects but more out of a desire to appear cosmopolitan and educated than because they stirred his intellect. Like all successful businessmen in Florence, he cared very much about enhancing his family’s reputation, and our city valued a classical education almost as much as it did money. For me, though, books spoke to my soul. I needed them more than food or water. Or so I believed at the time. But when I saw the title of the slim volume Father Cambio pressed into my hand, I felt only disappointment.
“You do not like it?” he asked.
“It’s not that,” I said. Petrarch’s De vita solitaria—On the Life of Solitude—was not what I had expected. “Petrarch…”
“You wanted his poetry.” Father Cambio smiled. Despite his age, he was an attractive man, with dark hair and green eyes, built more like a knight than a priest. A bit of a waste, I thought. “I could hardly be the one to encourage you to drink in his adulation of the fair-haired Laura, whose own locks couldn’t have been brighter than yours.”
My face flamed. “No, it’s only—”
“We neither of us is here for poetry. Come, I shall hear your confession.”
That day, I did not speak so long to him as had become my habit, nor did I feel lighter after he granted me absolution. This left me with a lingering confusion. Back at home, I opened the book. I believe that a noble spirit will never find repose save in God, in whom is our end, or in himself and his private thoughts, or in some intellect united by a close sympathy with his own. Petrarch suggested that leaving a crowded city was an excellent idea for one seeking repose in God, no doubt a view influenced by his own family’s exile from Florence. But how did this pertain to my life? I could no more leave Florence than I could choose my own husband; what was the point to contemplating either? Furthermore, the concept of finding repose in God sounded tedious to me. I did not much care for solitude in those days. Then, the poet suggested that solitude did not preclude friendship, and as I continued to read, his prose offered a welcome balm for my turbulent emotions. It will never be my view that solitude is disturbed by the presence of a friend, but that it is enriched. If I had the choice of doing without one or the other, I should prefer to be deprived of solitude rather than of my friend.
These sentences grabbed me, opening my mind to the idea that two seemingly contradictory positions might be reconciled in a most satisfactory manner. I longed to speak to someone about this, longed for the company of my grandfather and his friends, but had no one but my brothers to whom I could turn.
Until I went back to confession, where Father Cambio awaited me, ready to discuss more than my as yet underwhelming sins.
Florence,
19033
Despite the multitudinous descriptions penned in both poetry and prose, no account of Florence can adequately capture the serene essence of the place. It possesses none of the outlandish beauty for which Venice is famous, instead sits elegantly awash in soft gold on the banks of the Arno River, its backdrop the blue peaks of the Chianti Mountains. The Piazzale Michelangelo—built above the city on a hill in 1869, when Florence was the capital of the newly unified Italy—provides an incomparable view and is where
