When the clientele began to thin out, Ferruccio came over to our table. He was an old waiter from the coffeepot era, who wearily dragged his enormous, battered shoes. He had a huge freckle on one cheek, with a beauty spot that hung from his gray hairs. He was a great fan of Florence — though he was born in Lucca — and a great fan of tourism, because, in his view, an Italy without tourism would be a camposanto. The species of tourist he preferred were artists. Ferruccio had rushed to take up the tessera of the Fascio to stop tourism being disrupted. The towns that reacted most favorably to fascism were those most directly dependent on tourism, Florence, Arezzo, Sierra, Assisi, and Perugia. They understood that tourists don’t want noise, that trams, in their kind of town, had to run on time and that reading guidebooks is incompatible with shoot-outs on street corners. Ferruccio had grasped that fascism was pro-tourist, and carried card number 2675 of the fascio. All hoteliers and barbers, guides, sacristans, tram drivers, civil servants, clerks, and courtesans in Florence thought the same. What would the city be like without tourism? A camposanto!
From the point of view of material self-interest, the old waiter was a typical representative of the most genuine Florentine spirit. He always knew the right thing to do and to think. He was obsequious towards visitors, especially if they weren’t Italian, he respected all ideas and beliefs, the more unintelligible he found a language the more he respected it. His only ambition was to be in agreement with Signor Paolo, who was the gentleman behind the counter. “If things go well for Sr Paolo,” he’d say, “I’ll be fine too.” Sr Paolo wanted what was best for tourists even though his ice cream contained too much saccharine; consequently, he was a man worthy of respect.
“Because,” he would wonder in our presence, “what use then would be the Duomo, the Campanile, the Battistero, the Palazzo Vecchio, or the Death of Fra Girolamo? (He meant Savonarola.) What would be the point of our big museums, of Ghirlandaio and Botticelli and the marvelous afreschi if no tourists ever came? We would starve to death amidst so much beauty, and the whole Renaissance wouldn’t give us the price of a cup of coffee.” Passion had to be banned from the land, and it was vital to imitate the Swiss — gli svizzeri — who are the people who treat tourists as they should be treated. No doubt about it: Ferruccio epitomized the spirit of Florence.
The waiter had thought profoundly about tourism, and the conclusions he’d drawn had led him to admire artists boundlessly. Ferrucchio was a man of statistics and down-to-earth realities. According to him, the painter who brought most profit to Florence and the state was Sandro Botticelli.
“Does Ghirlandaio bring it in?” I asked him.
“The Ghirlandaio in the Hospital of the Innocents brought in four hundred thousand lire to the nation in entrance money last year. We can know that for sure, because there’s nothing else to see at the Innocents.”
“What about Masaccio?”
“Masaccio is a painter who generates seasonal income. When the French come in spring and the autumn, he flourishes. At other times, he dips. Botticelli doesn’t oscillate so much because the English come by all the time.”
“Signor Ferruccio, be straight with me: who do you think brings more to the state coffers: the Renaissance or the Montecatini Company?”
“The Renaissance, s’immagini!” the waiter replied, astonishingly quickly.
At twelve the quintet stopped scraping. The Mexican seemed saddened and deflated, once their outpourings were at an end. He ordered his last coffee and shot of grappa.
We said goodbye to Ferruccio till the next day and started walking. By that time, the streets were deserted and ill-lit. Some dark, severe façades, their windows fronted by huge iron-barred grilles, lent our footsteps a funereal echo. The oppressive air lightened under the lively impact of the stone. The hoofs of a horse pulling a carriage rang out as it moved over the cobblestones into the distance. We walked along the Via dei Calzaiuoli, a commercial street, which, for that reason, appeared less severe than others; we reached the Piazza de la Signoria, where we went our different ways by the Loggia dei Lanzi in front of Donatello’s Judith. I walked through a labyrinth of narrow streets to reach the bedroom I was renting in a big house in Borgo degli Apostoli.
In Florence I tended to link the city with the slenderest forms in life and art. That’s why in my own private mythology I consider Donatello to be the quintessence of the Florentine spirit; in the terrain of writing, of style, I find Niccolò Machiavelli to be a fine representative of someone with the airiest, lightest language.
In that cool, ill-lit ramshackle house in Borgo degli Apostoli I read Machiavelli a lot. The more I read, the more he fascinated me as a writer and the less I felt drawn to the man who grasped that magnificent goose quill.
I found the following among my jottings from the year. It schematically outlines my reading and thoughts that lean towards childish naïveté rather than wisdom.
“It can help to place Machiavelli,” I comment, “if one always bears in mind that he was neither Ghibelline, Petrarch Guelph, or Boccaccio, and that all Leonardo is summed up in that declaration that rings so true: Io servo chi mi paga. The words “Guelph” and “Ghibelline” shouldn’t be interpreted in a simplistic, primary way, because they are hugely complex words when projected onto the politics of the time. On the Ghibelline side there is respect for Empire, the aristocracy in their castles, and the plebs — the populino. On the Guelph side stands the bourgeoisie, submission to the Church, and a longing for peace and quiet. When one scrutinizes this struggle, one acknowledges yet again how even the greatest of men are mere puppets driven by political passions that are always tied to individual self-interest. When glossing, for example, Dante’s line about “l’avara povertà dei catalani,” one shouldn’t forget that the poet supported the most fanatical wing of the Ghibellines and that the Catalan rulers in Sicily were stalwart self-confessed Guelphs. It is also extremely helpful to place Machiavelli against the background of contemporary politics and see him against the horizon of the savage internecine struggles that constituted Italian life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: wars between factions of the citizenry and wars between cities, wars between cities and castles, Ghibellines and Guelphs, wars between tyrants, wars between the chiefs of different cities, of the condottieri … When Machiavelli appears, a contemporary of Signor Ludovico (in Ariosto), in the fifteenth century, passions seemed to have calmed down slightly. The formula of the principalities had been agreed. Violence, for the most part, had waned. Brute strength was no longer worthwhile. The courtier puts in an appearance, the nauseating courtier described by Castiglione.
“Macchiavelli is fully a courtier. However, there are different kinds of courtiers. The rich courtier knows when to bow, rides on horseback, is discreet, self-effacing, and simply aspires to occupy a place in society. The poor courtier, if he wants to advance himself, must have ideas, that is: he must be able to find suggestions to furnish the imagination, intellect, and feelings of the prince. Macchiavelli puts himself forward. Passionate by temperament, in amoral times — three centuries without morality in public life — he thinks of himself as a politician. He offers his services. He is no jester. He is a serious fellow — a man who worries away. It is completely wrong to minimize the role of jesters in politics. Jesters have been highly influential in the history of Europe. Jesting is one of the most practical instruments for wielding influence, the flattery of the man who entertains the man in power. Machiavelli wasn’t in their ranks. He was a poor, sharp-witted courtier, a powerful, elegant writer, ready to furnish the mind of his prince. He hired out his services to their Lordships, like a second-rate secretary.