ciotoli – d.s. butterworth, american poet, fiction and essay author, professor of creative writing and literature at gonzaga university collaborates with florence newspaper - the florence newspaper

CIOTOLI – D.S. Butterworth, American poet, fiction and essay author, professor of creative writing and literature at Gonzaga University collaborates with Florence Newspaper

D.S. Butterworth, American poet, fiction and essay author, professor of creative writing and literature at Gonzaga, Spokane. His work Waiting for the Rain was published by Algonquin Books. Our newspaper will publish one of his works every Sunday.

Trying on Lorenzo

We’re told that Lorenzo the Magnificent felt the cold from the blade first, the dagger came so close to his neck, that and the hand on his shoulder meant to steady the blow. By the time the assassins struck, he was the head of perhaps the richest family in Europe, and even though banking was the mainstay of the family wealth, the great coup that cemented their fortune was the acquisition and control of mining—and not the usual or expected mines of gold or silver or salt, but of alum, an essential ingredient in the dying of clothes, softening of leather, the clothier’s chief delight. Alum is a hydrated double salt used in the manufacturing of medicines, sugar, paper, matches, paint, deodorant—but in Lorenzo’s day it was biggest in textiles where it was used as a binder for dye.
And that is what Lorenzo de Medici and I had in common as we stood in the sacristy of the Duomo with over 500 years separating us. We both had problems with clothes. Now it’s true that his life in grave peril and he wanted to survive, and he had a lot to live for: the world was his oyster. I simply wanted clean clothes, to remove the oyster from the cloth.
April 26, 1478 when the bell rang at the consecration of the host, the moment the bread is transformed to flesh and blood, the body of Lorenzo was to loosen its hold on his spirit and Florence alike. But by chance or fate or providence Lorenzo survived, and by the time he took refuge in the sacristy he didn’t know it, but his brother Giuliano and his friend Francesco Nori lay dead on the floor of the church. Lorenzo himself had been wounded in the neck, and as they hid in the sacristy his friend, Antonio Ridolfi, sucked the blood from the wound in case the dagger had been poisoned. There was no one to suck my neck in the sacristy, but as I say, I wasn’t in danger of having been poisoned. I just wanted a pair of clean trousers and a clean shirt.
It seems to be the structure of things that the good and bad are inextricably wed, and so it was that Alum was where it all started to go wrong for Lorenzo. For over a hundred years the Medici had been the bankers of the popes, and the precious alum mines of Persia had been taken over by the Ottomans, creating a scarcity that made alum even more precious than before. Alum created a headache for Lorenzo in two phases. The first had to do with the conflict with Volterra—when the Medici contract leases on the alum mines came up for renewal, Volterra set new terms the Medici found preposterously high and refused to meet. As you visit Volterra, note the dusty silver and ochre cliffs below the town as you approach from the north, and think of alum. Volterra closed the mines and the Medici opened them by force. Although the Medici managed the alum business on behalf of the Pope, the Medici action went against a strong papal ally, leading the Pope to withdraw his alum accounts from the Medici and to shift his banking in favor of the rival Pazzi family. The Pope also initiated an audit of the Medici accounts, an enormous insult to the family. But the alum that had been made scarce by predations of the Turks was now glutting the market and declining in value, giving Pope Sixtus the pretext for his investigation. Within the web of these tensions the chief competitors of the Medici, the Pazzi family, formed their plot to assassinate Lorenzo in the Duomo at Florence.
There were other tensions building as well, including the Pope’s desire to acquire Imola along an important trading route, the defense of Niccolo Vitelli in Cittas Castello, the appointment of Archbishop Salviati to Pisa and Lorenzo’s barring him from Tuscany, the proposed alliance between Florence, Milan, and Venice, and the assassination of his friend and ally Galeazzo Sforza. And perhaps more important than the economic and political motives leading the Pazzis and Salviatis to hatch their plot to overthrow the government of Florence were the personal ones, the petty jealousies and contempt; despite feeble efforts by the pope to ensure there would be no actual assassinations in the coup, the families seemed bent on letting blood.
It must be said that alum may be all Lorenzo and I had in common, that and a deep appreciation for the splendid wood walls of the sacristy. Lorenzo would have appreciated the thickness of the doors which secured his refuge, and while I admired the art of the intricate wood inlay, and the sink that showed two mischievous angels urinating—a sink that post-dates Lorenzo’s desperate moments there—my concerns weren’t for security. Far from being the head of the richest family in Europe, I was a professor who had come without his family to Florence, the Manhattan of the Middle Ages, to teach literature and writing to American students from my own and other universities in my country. My fortune was small indeed, the portable wealth of my entire city of 300,000 easily surpassed by the treasures in a single Medici palace. And the power I wielded was scarcely enough to control myself, appetites for dolci and cappuccino often getting the better of me, and rarely did my power extend beyond myself, outside the occasional decision to order a cappuccino at the scandalous hour of noon, or to throw caution to the wind and purchase another bottle of Chianti for 5 Euros. That’s about as bad as it got—not that things could ever get much worse, unless you were one of the conspirators of such a failed assassination.
But I had spent the night before undertaking the washing of my clothes in a machine which bore every letter of the alphabet on its operating dial. Hardly assassins’ weapons, each represented a keen decision nonetheless. The apartment’s cryptic, hand-written instructions were to start at the letter P and wait for two to three hours; this had been the conclusion of a previous tenant’s experiments, and along with a warning that the water would turn the clothes pink constituted the total of the apartment’s institutional knowledge of the washing machine.
As someone who often winces at the blunt exercise of American power through-out the world, and keenly aware that one of the prevailing images of the American is that of the morally righteous doer of good who knows the best way for things to be accomplished, I was willing to entertain the notion that the Italian washing machine was superior to the ones in my country. The differences were clear enough—the door opened from the front rather than the top, the detergent went directly on the clothes, the drum itself was remarkably small—but weren’t professional washing machines constructed the same way, and hadn’t I heard something about the superior cleaning offered by a front loader? And perhaps the design of these professional machines followed the path of high fashion from Milan across the ocean, right?
After a half hour of waiting for the water to begin to run, it took another half hour for water to begin to run inside the machine, and after that half hour, nothing else happened. I could only imagine mysterious processes of fermentation, of calibrating water temperatures and pressure to the exquisite peak, the cleaning point. And then, as I marveled at the clothes sitting dry and self-possessed through the fish eye glass of the washer door, the drum turned over once. Once. The machine appeared to operate by the same slow determination of an assassination plot. I decided to remove the jeans—for jeans must not belong in an Italian washing machine, must, in fact, constitute an American offense against a more refined sensibility. But the door was locked, which meant I had to push through the cycle to unlock the door and start all over again. That this amounted to a frustration probably means I am an impatient man. And then I removed half the clothes, convinced I had broken the machine with my stupid clothes, clothes as heavy-handed and ungainly as American foreign policy, clothes that did not even speak the language.
After many successful laundry loads, I wonder at what went wrong that night, an anomaly in my experience of washing clothes in Florence. Perhaps the same poltergeist that dwells in the shower haunted the washing machine that night. I have my theories. Now I know that my machine at home is not necessarily better, just less mysterious. As the dial moves through the alphabet I speculate like an unschooled philosopher about what’s happening inside those panels. I have more theories: water from the river Arno is filtered and cleansed into clarity, mills grind alum down into the wholesomeness of that clean feeling, unseen switches connect the wiring of my machine to basement rooms where indifferent bureaucrats flip secret circuits on and off at whim . . . Drying clothes is a much more renaissance experience. Thoreau boasted of having a grand library of his own unsold books, and I boast a three-room palazzo, walls tapestried with my own clothes hanging about to dry—another story better told on a less humid day.
Sure. So I really had nothing more in common with Lorenzo the Magnificent than being for a few moments in the same place in the same cathedral in the same city, having walked the same stones of the same streets, sharing with him the familiarity of shadows from the same buildings, hoping, maybe that like the shadow of St. Peter their shade might fall with a blessing. Lorenzo commissioned the art I study in order to write poems that will never be as famous as his poems. Nonetheless we have moved about in churches and streets under the same fell sentence of mortality.
But I still think of the cloak Lorenzo wrapped around his arm as his only shield against the blows of his enemies, and think of the sad clothes of Giuliano. The blood leaking from Lorenzo’s neck would have dribbled down his shirt and eventually stained the brocade of his waistcoat. This the citizens of Florence clearly observed when he stood before them outside the Medici Palace. They needed the reassurance of Lorenzo’s appearance, despite the display of blood on Lorenzo’s clothing. I think of Lorenzo standing in front of Florence with his blood-caked clothes, and I think of the clothing of Salviati and the other conspirators, of the dried blood and nervous sweat that would have very soon made their clothing uncomfortable as, trapped in the home of Cesare Petrucci, they awaited their own beheading. Soon the Archbishop would be hung, and Francesco Pazzi stripped, then hung, then thrown in the river. I think of the clothing that became the record of those bodies, that defined them, gave them their recognizable shapes, that gave age, status, family, tribe. Our clothes know us best. Very quickly our actions performed in fear, blood, and labor take their toll on clothes which become historical documents until worn to rags and dissolved to filaments, and all in the service of the body where life writes its hardness.
If Paul Ginsborg, author of a recent history of contemporary Italian society, is right, and the labyrinthine and tortuous bureaucracy that by all accounts dogs Italian society is the consequence of legislative efforts to prevent another flowering of fascism, if all the laws and regulations and policies are designed to distribute power so that it cannot be abused by any one authority, then I am all for it, as we all should be. And if the Italian washing machine is what it is and does what it does, grinding the dirt away through the slow machinery of policy and regulation and committee work that made it so, then so be it. The wait is worth it. We’re lucky enough to be on this earth at all, let alone in a place like Florence where the strangeness and beauty of life wells up on every street and around every corner, nested as we are in the social fabric, the way we are nested in our clothing.
Think of the many things that must have run through Lorenzo’s mind—would he ever again see his brother, would he behold a favorite view or chapel, would he live to see his household out of the troubles, would he ever learn the lesson that it just doesn’t do to anger a Pope? His moments in the chapel as the priest still stood stunned on the altar would have been characterized by the rush of adrenaline, by the red of blood against the red of the chermisi, itself dyed with millions of the bodies of the kermes shield louse, another precious commodity made more rare by the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453.
So even though my laundry problems sorted themselves out that night, should they recur I won’t mind waiting. Nor will I presume to ask how the Medici dried their clothes in an era before water-circulating radiators, but I trust they commanded fires enough to do the job.
Despite the hundreds of years that separate the Medici and those of us who presently walk the earth, we have much in common. Who doesn’t relish the experience of putting on clean clothes? And the colors those Medici alums made possible, radiating from the frescoes of the city tell us the Renaissance was assembled fabric by fabric. Who hasn’t experienced a personal renaissance, especially while away from home, at the feel of clean cloth against limbs wearied by the long and uncertain walks through foreign lands? And later that night when Lorenzo was busy cleaning up after the near-assassination, before he had the thought of placing the tomb of Fuori, the man who saved his life, in Santa Croce, I would bet that he put on a clean set of clothes, and breathed deeply of the evening wind off the Arno, completely renewed, because with that fresh feeling next to his skin, he must have felt grateful to be alive.

Sources:
Lauro Martines, April Blood, Oxford U. Press, 2003.
Michael Levy, Florence: A Portrait. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Christopher Hibbert, The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall, New York: William Morrow, 1974.

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