16th Century Maiolica plate, from Casteldurante

Il Torrione of the Ducal Palace

I spent four days last week back in Cornelia-land, Urbania, which is as charming as ever and perhaps even more enticing. It still takes almost exactly four hours to get there, though this time the route was more familiar. But it's now the full heat of summer and my car, alas, doesn't have air conditioning. (Ugly American capitalist pig that I am, I do miss it.) The landscape around Urbania is still remarkably beautiful, but with some changes: a fair amount of harvesting had been done since I was there last and so a lot of fields were yellow, with the whole a bit less lushly green. And the heat and humidity of summer create what Italians call afa, summer smog. It's comforting to know at least that it's not car or factory emissions. Though I learned on this visit that the area is not as thoroughly agricultural as I'd thought: the local economy is fairly industrialized, with the production of jeans one of the largest elements. So much for romantic notions of detachment from the crass mercantile world of today!

Last Sunday, two days before I went up there, was the opening of an exhibition of maiolica - that colorful Renaissance ceramic ware - in the Palazzo Ducale, home of the communal library and archives - this was what they'd been preparing for so frantically when I was there before - and it is really very nice. When Urbania was Casteldurante in the 16th century, a little city of some 3,000 people, there were 39 maiolica-producing shops, so you have an idea of how important this craft was to the town in the Renaissance when Cornelia lived here. The show also allowed me to see the rest of the palace, which had been off-limits before. The people who had helped me before in the archives, chiefly Laura, were now assigned to exhibition duty and so there was a similar amount of running back and forth. By the way, Italy is into the Internet bigtime and every exhibition, museum, what-have-you, now has, or shortly will have, a site. There is a computer set up in the exhibition in Urbania with an interactive site, though just at the moment they were accessing it only on the hard drive.

Anyhow, I set myself up at my old table and Laura brought me a stack of those bound notarial records, and I spent the next 3 days poring through them. I'm getting much better at reading both the handwriting and the Latin, though I do think that when I get back I'm going to have to do some concentrated Latin study to be sure I'm reading them correctly. It's probably important to know who's the buyer and who the seller, for example. I've found that the "index " or summary of these books I mentioned before is very incomplete, so I spend a lot of time just going through them page by page looking for any references to Cornelia or to members of her family, including extended family such as uncles and brothers-in-law. Her father, who was most probably a contadino, or farmer, seems to have been fairly well-to-do and figures in the notarial records frequently buying and selling parcels of land. Quite often, he buys or sells from, to or with members of his family as well as with his son. He seems to have been ambitious for at least two members of his family, his only son, Aurelio, and Cornelia. Aurelio must have been the oldest or nearly the oldest, since in 1533, he opened up shop as a practicing notary. His notarial books are there too. This means he had to have training in Latin as well as specific notarial training in law and procedures so this represents quite a step up from his father's station. In documents, when they are mentioned together, as they frequently are, Guido, the father, is identified only by his name but Aurelio is always entitled Signore, an honorific. He married a local girl with a quite good dowry, again surely a sign of status. But in 1548, he was killed in some kind of altercation involving swords. There were 5 daughters. In a will Guido made in 1548 just after Aurelio's death, he mentions that three were married and two – Tarsia and Cornelia - were not. In another will a few years later, one of the older married sisters has died and there is no mention of Tarsia, so 3 sisters remained.

Cornelia's marriage, in the late summer of 1551, with her dowry of 1000 florins, also represents, I think, upward aspirations on Guido's part: her sisters had received dowries of only 200 florins each and her dowry was larger than that brought by Aurelio's wife. Her husband, Francesco Amatori, called Urbino, was a local boy made good, whose house in Casteldurante was next door to the Colonelli, but who lived mainly in Rome with Michelangelo, where he was the trusted and well-paid assistant to the world-famous artist. I say it this way because by this time, this was how people thought of Michelangelo: in documents related to this case, he is always identified with the most honorific titles and laudatory adjectives, as though he were nobility. So this was a very good match for the daughter of a farmer. In turn, Guido helped Francesco buy more land in Casteldurante and part of the dowry was in the form of half a house, presumably to allow him to enlarge his own.

Oops, I've gotten more detailed than I'd intended. Back to ambience etc. As I described before, the archive is part of the town library, so as I sit there with my nose in these dusty records, people of various ages are coming in to borrow books. I'm clearly the unusual element in all this - the foreigner immersed in these old records - and two little girls, on separate occasions, liberated themselves from their mothers to come and stand behind me to see what I was doing. They were very polite but very curious and fortunately, someone eventually came to collect them. One asked me where I was staying and I said, "a hotel," and she said, surprised, "oh, there is a hotel here?" In addition, there seem to have been a fair number of honored visitors come to see the exhibition and then given a tour of the facilities, so every so often, the director would come through with a group of people. All would, of course, politely greet me and I would have to respond. I didn't really mind this at all, since having to look up now and then probably helped to keep me from going blind from staring at page after page of scribbles trying to pick out significant names and terms. And I have to say, they continued to have the same problems operating the fax machine they seemed to be having during my last visit - since it is in the same room I work in, I have a first-hand view.

As it happened, I'd come at the time of the feast-day of Urbania's patron saint, St. Christopher, so that evening I went to the cathedral to hear a rather informal service, with singing, at which the town's relic, a bone from the saint, was brought out. It wasn't actually a mass, just some readings and singing, along with the priest's admonition that we should follow St. Christopher's example: he is supposed to have carried the little child Christ across a river. No mention was made of the fact that, according to the Catholic church, St. Christopher is officially off the calendar. And at the end everyone was invited to come and kiss the relic and this seems, indeed, to have been the real reason people came, since they left immediately after. (I abstained.) That and to socialize. Urbania is the most resolutely sociable town I have ever seen, even in Italy. Everyone knows everyone, literally. At the hotel where I stay, there is a restaurant (the one that made me despair of eating in Urbania, though it seemed a bit better this time) and during the two evenings I ate there, I observed the same phenomenon: a person would be eating alone and another, or two or three, would arrive to eat, recognize the first and join him or her, with then a non-stop conversation from start to finish. And conversations also between tables. The same thing happened in the church: whoever came sat down and started talking with whoever was already in the pew and at the end, as they were returning from kissing the relic, they all got waylaid by greeting and chatting with each other. Despite the fact that the priest announced that this was a solemn occasion and those who wanted to talk were invited to take it outside. I must say that, after four days there, I recognize a lot of people just from seeing them in the piazza, the street, in restaurants and stores. The night before the celebration in honor of St. Christopher, I'd gone to a little concert given by the students at a music program here - more about that in a moment - and I recognized people from that in church. Back to the church-kibitzing, it was next to impossible to get out the door because everyone was clogged up there talking. When I finally did get out and was walking through the main piazza to go to my car, it turned out there was a band playing there (Latin music!) and the rest of the town was there, talking in large and small groups and eating ice cream. I mean, they see each other all the time! Now this all has a nice homey, manageable feel about it but it also reminds me that I grew up in a small town where everyone knew everyone else's business and I've never had any desire to return to that. In fact, New York seems a pretty good alternative. What struck me, however, was the constant chatting, apparently with whomever you find yourself next to.