Well, I should spank myself for not keeping up with this when I got to Mantua. Pete keeps reminding me that blogging is about as important an activity as I can carry out on the web – certainly more important than Facebook. I think the problem was a) I was very tired and very cold, and b) I lost a beautifully constructed, thoughtful post when my MacBook crashed uncharacteristically whilst I was sitting, shivering, at a bar outside the Teatro Sociale. Somehow the combination made me languish. In Ferrara, it had been 28 degrees; two hours away in Mantua it was 14 degrees. I wore all the (summer) clothes I brought every day, just changing what went on top. I’m sure the archivisti thought I was a bag lady. Also, I was working so hard and for so long at the archive during the day, I became computer-averse in the evenings, preferring instead to read Terry Pratchett’s excellent Unseen Academicals. I even got to the point of fetching pizza a taglio and a beer into my hotel room instead of going out to eat. After two weeks, being on your own in a restaurant can get pretty old. So blogging just fell away.
But that’s not to say that Mantua was a drag, quite the opposite. Every morning I got to walk past the ex-convent of Sant’Orsola, the very community that I had come to the city to investigate.
Its tiny church is octagonal, and I felt I was getting closer to Margherita d’Este when I entered through its huge wooden doors. And I found out stuff there that I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest musicological dreams, even if it just left me dangling, wondering where to look next for my personal Grail, Luzzasco Luzzaschi’s music library. But at least I now know how and why it left his hands.
I did have time, though, to muse about the differences between Mantova and Ferrara, and to think through how those differences might have come about, especially considering how entwined their cultures were during the Renaissance. Mantova seems such an industrious, upright community, characterised by its cramped and often dark medieval centre surrounded by vast seventeenth- and eighteenth-century architecture. Everyone there is impeccably dressed and, it seems, concerned about appearing prosperous and busy. And there’s so little greenery in the centre – what there is can be barely glimpsed behind walls. Parks on the outskirts of the centre, sure, but no such frivolous use of space in the hub. Ferrara, on the other hand, has the wide open market square, the moated castello, trees, gardens…
I wonder how different they would be if Ferrara hadn’t been hit by terrible earthquakes throughout 1571? Much of the medieval centre was damaged or destroyed, and the events forced the city’s architects to think anew about quake-proof structures and planning. Many of the subsequent buildings were broader and not as tall, the roofs flatter, the streets wider. Would this also encourage the population to be a little more relaxed? Who knows, but it was something to think about in my work-addled haze.
An added benefit to the stay in Mantua was a brief visit with my friend and fellow Margherita-phile, Molly, and the opportunity to play with her beautiful little girl in one of the outlying parks. It’s always a pleasure to share down time with my academia friends and talk a mostly unintelligible mixture of mom-chat and geek-speak. It’s not as unusual as it used to be, for sure, to be a mother and a scholar, but the meeting of two such, especially that share a research interest, is still a rare enough occurrence to be noteworthy and special. And reassuring when you know that other children are also growing up drawing pictures on the back of scrapped, heavily red-lined versions of journal contributions.