Tag: Iris Origo

And the candle cures the seems

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

I found this passage in an anthology of Iris Origo’s creation, The Vagabond Path (pg 39). It is attributed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge but without specific reference and google returns no results. I imagine it comes from his notebooks – only because the full edition begun in the 50s isn’t in public domain so likely wouldn’t be indexed anywhere online.

A little boy, lying in bed one night in the year 1802, was feeling unhappy. He called for a candle – the seems, he said, were troubling him. “What do you mean, my love?” “The Seems, the seems. What seems to be and is not, men and faces and I do not know what – ugly and sometimes pretty and those turn ugly, and they seem when my eyes are open, and worse when they are shut – and the candle cures the seems.”

Surely no more peculiar consideration has ever helped to save a man’s life!

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Iris Origo’s biography of Cola Di Rienzo, Tribune of Rome (~pg 220).  Cola, fallen from power and transferred from imperial prison to papal prison, chances into a curious pardon:

If, however, we are to believe Petrarch’s account, Cola’s preservation from death was owed to an entirely different – and surely very odd – circumstance.  A rumour was current in Avignon that the man who lay in prison, awaiting his trial before the Inquisition, was an illustrious poet; and such was the honour paid to this calling that to execute a man dedicated to it appeared nothing less than sacrilege.  Surely no more peculiar consideration has ever helped to save a man’s life!

Nam pauperes habent mores corvinos

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

Found in Iris Origo’s Tribune of Rome: A Biography of Cola di Rienzo (pg 59-60) but lifted From Ch 10 of Ludovico Antonio Muratorio’s Historiae Romanae Fragmenta.  I don’t back the sentiment but it felt apt when both my and the opposing metro trains were held today for ten minutes as a single officer wrangled down eight or so teenagers for assault and robbery – most of whom had stamped through my car a moment before discussing the crime and their chances of being caught (plus the knives they were all carrying).  But then it is an insult to crows to call them corvine.

So wretched and insatiable were the poor that when the Queen of Hungary … came on a pilgrimage to Rome, her generosity was soon exhausted.  The first man to beg of her … persuaded her to supply the funds required for rebuilding the Milvian bridge.  But, as soon as this became known, “so great was the importunity of the beggars that they turned the Queen out, and she was obliged to leave.  For the poor,” adds the chronicler sententiously, “have the mannners of crows.”

I still feel a very great satisfaction when I find myself alone in a street, without a tutor by my side

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Iris Origo’s Leopardi: A Study in Solitude (my page numbers are from the original printing, though there is a recent reprint by Pushkin Press).  Vignettes of Giacomo Leopardi’s father, whose own autobiography – surprisingly still in print, blessed be small Italian publishers – I’m now trying to obtain of a copy of.

…And a few days later Napoleon himself rode through [Recanati], on his way to Rome.  He rode hastily, Conte Monaldo related, surrounded by guards with their hands on the trigger of their muskets, and all the population turned out to see him. “But I”, wrote the Count, “refused to approach the window, thinking it too great an honour for such a villain, that an honest man should rise to see him pass.” (pg4)

 

…When barely eighteen, he assumed, as head of the family, the complete management of the whole property – yet he was still forbidden by his mother to go out of the house, unless accompanied by his preceptor.  This restriction, although not unusual in families such as his, was particularly galling to Monaldo. “To this day,” he wrote in his Memoirs, “although I am the father of twelve children (living and dead), a magistrate of the city, and forty-eight years of age, I still feel a very great satisfaction when I find myself alone in a street, without a tutor by my side.” (pg5)

 

Conte Monaldo himself, when he required a little pocket-money [from his wife, who controlled the purse strings], was forced to resort to subterfuge; he would plot with the bailiff, to sell a barrel of wine or a sack of wheat behind his wife’s back, or he would take to her two books from his own library, saying that he needed a few scudi to pay for them. “Thus,” he remarked, “I used to steal from myself.”

It must be added that often these subterfuges were practised by Conte Monaldo in the cause of charity: the cloister, for instance, of the monastery of the Minori Osservanti was built entirely at his expense, but, to avoid his wife’s vigilance, the building materials had to be carried there at night.  And the story is even told that on one winter’s evening, on being accosted by a half-naked beggar, the Count retired into the shadow of a doorway, took off his trousers, gave them to the wretched man – and thus, wrapping himself in his cloak, made his way home. (pg14-15)

The radio has made fools of us all

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment
An again relevant observation from Iris Origo’s A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939-1940.

April 8th 1939

The ultimate result of unceasing propaganda has now been to cancel out the effect of all news alike.  One man said to me, “The radio has made fools of us all.” Late last night a further Italian bulletin stated that the accounts given in anti-Fascist countries of the Albanian operations “are so fantastic that it is not worth while to deny them – as they follow the same methods adopted during the Ethiopian war.  It is now known and proved that the Fascist regime uses one method only: always to tell the truth.”

I still feel a very great satisfaction when I find myself alone in a street

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Iris Origo’s Leopardi: A Study in Solitude (pg. 5)- recounting the life of the poet’s father.  I haven’t looked into whether the elder Leopardi’s Memoirs were ever published.

Two years later, when barely eighteen, he assumed, as head of the family, the complete management of the whole property – yet he was still forbidden by his mother to go out of the house, unless accompanied by his preceptor.  This restriction, although not unusual in families such as his, was particularly galling to Monaldo.  “To this day,” he wrote in his Memoirs, “although I am the father of twelve children (living and dead), a magistrate of the city, and forty-eight years of age, I still feel a very great satisfaction when I find myself alone in a street, without a tutor by my side.”