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NICOLA CHIAROMONTE
she had a change of linen and a brush for her clothes; she toted a
washtub
a:bout
with her, for her laundry, and a little
caldanotte,
or
stove, to do her cooking. Under her skirt, she kept saucepans and
plates in sacks and whatever leftovers she had with her. When she
wanted to change her clothes, she would go to the house she had
once owned, where her sister and nephew lived, but she would
never consent to sleep there.
Nihil nimis;
at the end of the week
what she had left from the alms that had been given her she would
distribute to poor nuns. This remarkable person evidently had re–
duced bodily life to its essentials without compromising her stan–
dards of propriety and decorum. She was a sage of the antique
stamp, conducting her little affairs according to the tidy principles
of reason, unlike the filthy anchorites of the Christian tradition.
Even beauty received her due allowance; her clothes were full of
patches, which were sewed on prettily, like ornaments."
. One thinks of some such artistic image as Botticelli's
Derelitta,
stranded in reality; or more pathetically, of a symbol of Florence
itself, in the period of her decadence. There, in any case, stated
even more clearly than when she is speaking about art, we have
what has made Florence so endearing to Miss McCarthy. It is all
those features of Florentine civilization that are opposed to the
modern world, the world of confusion, senseless prodigality, intellec–
tual profligacy. As Brunelleschi and Uccello, with their clarity of
mind and definiteness of purpose, represent the opposite of the
contemporary artist, so the Florentine way of life, reduced to a
kind of Dickensian absurdity in the image of Donna Maria Ciliego,
is a sober comment on the world of "affluent economy" we are
living in. In Florence, no doubt, Miss McCarthy found a happy
escape from "the groves of Academe." She is too much of a
modem intellectual to let herself 'be carried away by nostalgia for
a past "golden age." What she sees expressed in the monuments of
Florence is a certain number of human virtues which once had the
chance to flower, and can never be recalled from the past. Yet they
remain forever examples of possible achievements. Florence is to
her a mirror into which we can see for a moment our own features
straightened out, as it were. A Utopia that lasts as long as one stays
there, and need last no longer.
Nicola Chiaromonte
