Ambrogio Flecchia was born in a little place called Magnano. To Magnano’s east, a day away on horseback, lay Milan, the city of Saint Ambrosius. The boy was named in honor of that saint, too. Ambrogio. Which is what it sounded like in his parents’ language. Perhaps it reminded them of ambrosia, nectar of the immortals. The boy’s parents were wine-makers.
As he grew up, Ambrogio began helping them. He obediently did everything he was instructed to do, but there was no joy for him in the labor. The older Flecchia, who had secretly observed his son more than once, was ever more convinced of this. Ambrogio remained serious even when stomping on grapes in the vat with his bare feet (and what could be merrier for a child?).
The older Flecchia, who descended from a family of wine-makers, did not himself like excessive mirth. He knew the fermentation of wine was an unhurried, even melancholy, process, and thus he permitted a certain degree of pensiveness in winemaking. But his son’s aloofness toward wine production was something else: in his father’s eyes, it bordered on disinterest. Only a person who is not indifferent is capable of making real, true wine (the older Flecchia sighed as he brushed press cake from his fingers).
The boy’s assistance to the family business came from an unexpected angle. Five days before a big grape harvest, Ambrogio announced that the grapes should be harvested right away. He said this in the morning—after he had opened his eyes but before he had fully woken up. A vision of a thunderstorm had come to him. It was a dreadful thunderstorm and Ambrogio described it in detail. His description included a darkness that suddenly thickened, a howling wind, and hailstones the size of a hen’s egg whistling through the air. The boy told of ripe bunches of grapes that beat, tattered and soaked, against their stems, and of balls of ice that fell, drilling holes in thrashing leaves and finishing off grapes that had fallen to the ground. On top of that, a blue, ringing cold descended from the heavens and a thin coating of snow covered the site of the catastrophe.
The older Flecchia had seen a thunderstorm like that only once in his life, and the boy had never seen one. All the specifics of the story, however, coincided exactly with what the father had seen back in the day. The older Flecchia was not inclined toward mysticism but, after some wavering, he heeded Ambrogio’s advice after all and set to harvesting the grapes. He said nothing to the neighbors because he feared ridicule. But when a dreadful thunderstorm really did come down on Magnano five days later, only the Flecchia family ended up with a harvest that year.
Other visions visited the dark-complexioned adolescent. They affected various and sundry aspects of life but were fairly remote from winemaking. And so, Ambrogio predicted the war that developed between the French kings and the Holy Roman Empire in the territory of Piemonte in 1494. The wine-maker’s son clearly saw the forward French troops marching from west to east, past Magnano. The French hardly touched the local population, taking only small livestock to supplement their provisions, as well as twenty casks of Piemonte wine that seemed pretty fine to them. This information came to the older Flecchia in 1457, meaning it was far, far in advance, and would not, in essence, let him reap any possible benefit. A week later, he had already forgotten about the predicted military operations.
Ambrogio also predicted that Christopher Columbus would discover America in 1492. This event did not attract his father’s attention, either, since it would have no substantial influence on winemaking in Piemonte. The vision put the boy himself into a dither, though, for it was accompanied by the ominous luminescence of the outlines of all three of Columbus’s caravelles. This disagreeable light even touched the explorer’s aquiline profile. The Genovese man named Colombo, who had switched to Spanish service by force of circumstances, was, in essence, Ambrogio’s countryman. One would not want to think that on October 12, 1492, a person of this sort would do something unseemly, and thus the child was inclined to explain the light effects as excessive electrification within the Atlantic atmosphere.
After Ambrogio had grown up a little more, he expressed the desire to go to Florence and study at the university there. The older Flecchia did not impede him. By this time, he was already conclusively convinced that his son was not cut out for winemaking. Everyone in Magnano already knew that Flecchia the younger was, essentially, his own man, so they had been expecting his departure from the small town any day. Ambrogio himself, though, decided to postpone his departure: he was able to foresee that the plague would rage in Florence for the next two years.
The young man did finally end up in Florence. Everything was different in that city: it bore no resemblance to Magnano. Ambrogio arrived as Florence was recovering from the plague, and the city’s grandeur still mingled with dismay. Ambrogio studied seven liberal arts at the university. After mastering the trivium (grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric) he moved on to the quadrivium, which covered arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
As was often the case at universities in the olden days, the education process ended up lasting a long time. It included several years of rigorous instruction interspersed with years of similarly rigorous interpretation of what had been studied, during which Ambrogio’s attendance at the university ceased and he would set off and travel around Italy. In practice, though, the student’s ties with his alma mater were never cut, not even during his trips to the most distant corners of his native country, which, happily, was not that large.
Ambrogio came to love history more than anything else he happened to be introduced to during his studies. The university did not consider history a distinct subject: it was studied within the trivium, as an element of rhetoric. The young man was willing to spend hours sitting over historical writings. With their focus on the past, they (and this connected them with Ambrogio’s visions of the future) were an escape from the present. Movement away from the present—in both directions—became something Ambrogio needed as much as air, because it removed time’s unidimensionality, which caused him to gasp for breath.
Ambrogio read ancient and medieval historians. He read annals, chronicles, chronographs, and the histories of cities, lands, and wars. He learned how empires formed and collapsed, how earthquakes happened, and how stars fell and rivers overflowed their banks. He took particular note of fulfilled prophesies, too, and how omens appeared and came true. In this surmounting of time, he saw confirmation of the nonrandomness of everything that took place on earth. People encounter one another (thought Ambrogio), bumping into one another like atoms. They do not have their own trajectories and so their actions are random. But when taken together, those random events (so thought Ambrogio) were their own form of consistency, which could be predictable in certain parts. Only He Who created everything knows this in full.
A merchant from Pskov once came to Florence. The merchant’s name was Therapont. With a long beard split into two tails and a huge pocked nose, he stood out from the local populace. Besides his bundles of sable pelts, Therapont brought the news that Rus’ awaited the end of the world in 1492. On the whole, people in Florence took this information calmly. In the first place, Florentines were busy with routine matters galore and many simply had no time to think about things that posed no immediate threat. In the second place, very few people in Florence could picture the location of Rus’. In view of Therapont’s own unusual appearance (it was unclear if everyone in his homeland had similar beards and noses) it was presumed there was a possibility Rus’ was located outside the inhabited world. This gave the populace hope that the conjectured end of the world would be limited to just Rus’.