Veritas

An Appointment

The great room is all a-glitter, with the bronze of its furnishings and spiral decorations, and its glowing candles.

Abbot Melani keeps me waiting. It’s the first time, in over thirty years.

Until today, whenever I arrived at our appointments I had always found him already waiting, tapping his foot impatiently. But now it is my turn to gaze continually towards the severe monumental doorway by which I entered over half an hour ago. Defying the freezing, snow-laden wind that sweeps in and sets the doors creaking on their hinges, I vainly strain my ears and eyes for the first signs of the Abbot’s arrival: the drumming hooves of the four-horse carriage; the first glimpse, in the torchlight, of the horses’ plumed heads as they draw the ceremonial black carriage to the foot of the entrance staircase, where four old footmen, huddled in their snow-dusted greatcoats, are waiting for their even older master, ready to open the carriage door and help him, one last time, to descend.

As I wait, I let my eyes wander. The room is richly ornamented. From the arches hang great drapes with words embroidered in gold; the walls are swathed in brocaded mantles, and veils adorned with beads of silver form a gallery of honour. Columns, arches and pilasters of sham marble lead towards the central baldachin, which is a sort of truncated pyramid resting on a platform six or seven steps above floor level and surrounded by a triple row of candelabras.

At the top, two winged silver creatures, kneeling on one leg, their arms outstretched and the palms of their hands raised heavenwards, perch in expectation.

Twisting branches of myrtle and ivy adorn the four sides of the baldachin, each of which proudly bears the coat of arms — picked out in fresh flowers, apparently plucked straight from the hothouses of Versailles — of the Veneto nobility: a piglet on a green field. At each corner stands a flaring torch on a tall silver tripod, adorned with the same coat of arms.

Despite the grandeur of the Castrum and the splendid accoutrements, there are very few people around me; apart from the musicians (who have already taken their places and uncased their instruments) and the valets in their black, red and golden livery (who, with their freshly shaven faces, stand motionless as statues holding ceremonial torches), I can only see down-at-heel noblemen looking on enviously and a crowd of workmen, servants and gossiping women, who, despite the late hour and the icy cold of the winter night, gaze around themselves in ecstasy, waiting for the procession.

Taking its impulse from my eyes, my memory starts to wander as well. It abandons the snow and the leaden Parisian winter of the deserted Place des Victoires which lies over the threshold, where biting northern wind swirls around the equestrian statue of the old King, and it swoops back, far back, to the gentle slopes of the Eternal City on its seven hills, to the top of the Janiculum Hill, and the dazzling heat of a Roman summer many years ago. It was on that occasion, surrounded by different nobility, amid more ethereal architecture of papier-mâché, with a different orchestra trying out music for a different event and valets holding torches that would illuminate another story, that I caught sight of a carriage trundling along the driveway of Villa Spada.

How strange are the workings of destiny: at that time I had no idea that it was about to reunite me with Abbot Melani after seventeen years of silence; this time I know for sure that Atto is going to arrive, but the carriage that is bearing him towards me refuses to appear on the horizon.

My train of thought is briefly broken by one of the players, who bumps into me accidentally as he climbs down from the platform. I raise my eyes:

Obsequio erga Regem

is embroidered in gold characters on the black, silver-fringed velvet drape that adorns the tall column of false porphyry in plain style opposite me. Another column, identical to this one, stands on the other side, but the writing is too far away for me to read.

In my whole life, I have only attended one such event. Then too it was a cold night and it was snowing, or raining, I think. There was certainly cold and rain and darkness within my heart.

On that occasion too I was in Atto’s company. We were part of a great bustling crowd: people were streaming into the room from all sides. Every corner was so packed that Abbot Melani and I could only elbow forward two paces every quarter of an hour; it was impossible either to advance or to retreat and we could see nothing but the ceiling decorations and the inscriptions hanging from the arches or placed at the tops of the capitals.

Ob Hispaniam assertam

Ob Galliam triumphatam

Ob Italiam liberatam

Ob Belgium restitutum

There were four columns bearing mottoes. They were of the Doric order, the symbol of heroes, and very tall: about fifty feet, in imitation of the historic columns of Rome, the Antonine and the Trajan. Between them, on the Castrum, an imitation night sky made of veils was adorned with golden flames and gathered upwards in the centre, in the shape of a crown, by gold cords and sashes tied by four gigantic buckles in the form of majestic eagles, with their heads resting on their chests.

Alongside them, Glory, with rays radiating from her head (in imitation of Claritas on the coins of Emperor Constance), held a laurel crown in her left hand and a crown of stars in her right.

Behind us, just beyond the great doorway, twenty-four valets were awaiting their lord. Suddenly the hubbub died down. Everyone fell silent and a glimmering light assailed the darkness: it came from the flaring white torches borne by the scions of the nobility.

He had arrived.

The sound of drumming hooves coming to a halt on the pavement outside jolts me from my memories. The four footmen, palely gleaming with snow in the winter night, are finally moving. Atto is here.

The candle flames flicker and blur before my eyes, while the doors of the church where I am awaiting him are thrown open, the church of Notre Dame des Victoires, the basilica of the Barefoot Augustinians. From the black carriage emerges the red velvet of the bier, glistening in the torchlight: Atto Melani, Abbot of Beaubec, King’s Gentleman, Cittadino Originario of the Most Serene Republic, many-time Conclavist, is preparing to make his solemn entrance.

The old servants bear the coffin on their shoulders; it is engraved with the piglet on a green field, Atto’s coat of arms. From beneath the gallery of honour formed by the black veils with silver beads, some mourners make their way through the two wings of bystanders: they are the few people to whom the formerly illustrious name of Atto Melani, the last witness of an age now swept away by war, still — perhaps — means something. The four footmen proceed right to the heart of the Castrum doloris, the funereal catafalque, and, having mounted the steps of the truncated pyramid, they consign the corpse of their old master to the open arms of the two silver genuflecting angels, the palms of whose upturned hands finally receive what they have been waiting for.

On the catafalque hangs a funeral drape of black velvet with silver fringes, on which is embroidered in golden characters:

Hic iacet

Abbas Atto Melani Pistoriensis in Etruria,

Pietate erga Deum

Obsequio erga Regem

Illustris

Ω. Die 4. Ianuarii 1714. Ætatis suæ octuagesimo octavo

Patruo Dilectissimo

Dominicus Melani nepos mestissimus posuit

The same words will be engraved on the sepulchral monument that Atto’s nephew has already commissioned from the Florentine sculptor Rastrelli. The Augustinian Fathers have granted the site in a side chapel close to the high altar, opposite the sacristy door. Atto will therefore be buried here, as he wished, in the same church where lie the mortal remains of another Tuscan musician: the great Giovan Battista Lulli.

“Pietate erga Deum / Obsequio erga Regem / Illustris”: the words are repeated on the two side columns, only the nearer of which I had been able to read before. “Illustrious for his devotion to God and his obedience to the King”: in reality, the former virtue is in conflict with the latter, and no one knows this better than I.

The orchestra begins the funeral mass. Wecrato singing:

Crucifixus et sepultus est

“Crucified and buried,” intones his reedy voice. I can make out nothing else, everything flickers and wavers around me: the faces, colours and lights blur like a painting that has fallen into water.

Atto Melani is dead. He died here, in Paris, in rue Plastrière, in the parish of Saint Eustache, the day before yesterday, 4th January 1714, at two in the morning. I was with him.

“Stay with me,” he said, and breathed his last.

I will stay with you, Signor Atto: we made a pact, I made you a promise, and I intend to abide by it.

It matters not how many times you broke our pacts, how many times you lied to the twenty-year-old boy servant and then to the father and family man. This time there will be no surprises for me: you have already fulfilled your obligation towards me.

Now that I am almost the same age that you were when we first met, now that your memories are mine, that your old passions are flaring up in my breast, your life is my life.

It was thanks to a journey that I found you again, three years ago, and now another one, the supreme journey of death, is bearing you away to other shores.

Safe journey, Signor Atto. You will get what you asked of me.

Rome

JANUARY 1711

“Vienna? And why on earth should we go to Vienna?” My wife Cloridia stared at me wide-eyed with surprise.

“My dear, you grew up in Holland, you had a Turkish mother, you came here to Rome all by yourself when you weren’t even twenty, and now you’re scared of a little trip to the Empire? What am I supposed to say, seeing that I’ve never been beyond Perugia?”

“You’re not telling me we’re going to make a trip to Vienna; you’re telling me we should go and live there! Do you happen to know any German?”

“Well, no. . not yet.”

“Give it to me,” she said, and she irritably snatched the document from my hand.

She read it through again for the umpteenth time.

“And just what is this donation? A piece of land? A shop? A job as a court servant? It doesn’t explain anything!”

“You heard the notary, just as I did: we’ll find out when we get there, but it’s certainly something of great value.”

“Right. We’ll go all the way there, clambering over the Alps, and then perhaps we’ll find it’s just another trick played by that scoundrel your Abbot, who’ll exploit you for some other crazy adventure and then throw you away like an old rag, leaving you penniless into the bargain!”

“Cloridia, think for a moment: Atto is eighty-five years old. What crazy adventures do you think he’s likely to embark on now? For a long time I thought he was dead. It’s quite something that he’s actually hired a notary to pay off his old debt to me. He must feel the end approaching and now he wants to set his conscience at rest. In fact, we should be thanking God for granting us such an opportunity when things are so hard for us.”

My wife lowered her eyes.

For two years things had been bad, extremely bad, for us. The winter of 1709 had been very severe, with endless snow and ice. This had led to a bitter famine, which, together with the ruinous war that had been dragging on for seven years over the Spanish throne, had thrown the Roman people into dire poverty. My family and I, with the new addition of a six-year-old son, had not been spared this fate: a year of bad weather and frosts, something never seen before in Rome, had made our smallholding unproductive and wiped out my prospects on the land. The decline of the Spada family and the consequent abandonment of the villa at Porta San Pancrazio, where I had undertaken many profitable little jobs over the years, had made our situation even worse. My wife’s efforts to halt our financial ruin through the art of midwifery had, alas, proved insufficient, even though she had been practising it for decades to great acclaim, and now had the help of our two daughters, aged twenty-three and nineteen. The famine had also increased the number of new mothers who were penniless, and my wife assisted these with the same self-denying spirit with which she attended to the noblewomen.

And so the list of our debts increased and in the end, in order to survive, we were forced to take the most painful step: the sale, in favour of the moneylenders of the ghetto, of our small house and holding, bought twenty-six years earlier with the little nest egg left us by my father-in-law of blessed memory. We found shelter in the city, taking lodgings in a basement that we had to share with a family from Istria; at least it had the advantage of not being too damp and maintaining a fairly constant temperature in winter, even in the hardest frost, thanks to the fact that it had been dug into the tufo.

In the evening we ate black bread and broth with nettles and grass. And in the day we got by on acorns and other berries that we scraped together and ground up to make a kind of loaf, garnishing it with little turnips. Shoes soon became a luxury and gave way, even in winter, to wooden clogs and slippers stitched together at home from old rags and hemp-twine.

I could find no work, none at least worthy of the name. My slight build often counted against me, for example in any job that involved lifting or carrying. And so in the end I had been reduced to taking on the vilest and most sordid of jobs, one that no Roman would ever dream of accepting, but the only one in which I had an advantage over family breadwinners of greater stature: a chimney-sweep.

I was an exception: chimney-sweeps and roof tilers usually came from the Alpine valleys, from Lake Como, Lake Maggiore, from the Valcamonica, the Val Brembana and also from Piedmont. In these poor areas the great hunger forced families to give up children as young as six or seven seasonally to the chimney-sweeps, who made use of them to clean — at the risk of their lives — the narrower flues.

Having the build of a child but the strength of an adult, I could offer the best guarantee that the job would be done properly: I would screw myself into the narrow openings and clamber up agilely through the soot, but I would also scrape the black walls of the hood and flue with greater skill than any child could apply to the job. Furthermore, the fact that I was so light saved the tiles from damage when I climbed onto the roof to clean or adjust the chimney pot, and at the same time there was no risk of my dashing my brains out on the ground, as happened all too often to the very young chimney-sweeps.

Finally, as a local chimney sweep, I was available all year round, while my Alpine colleagues only came down at the beginning of November.

I myself, to tell the truth, was often obliged to take my lively little son along with me, but I would never have made him clamber up a flue; I merely used him as a small apprentice and assistant, this being a job that requires at least two people.

To reassure the customers of my skills, I would boast a long apprenticeship in the Aprutine Mountains (where, as in the Alps, there is a long tradition of chimney sweeping). Actually I had no real experience. I had learned the rudiments of the art only at Villa Spada, on those occasions when I had been asked to climb up the flues to solve some unexpected problem, or to repair the roof.

And so, every night, I would load my barrow with tools — rasp, palette knife, wire brush, butcher’s broom, a rope, a ladder and counterweights — and set off, never without first seeing my consort give her sleep-befuddled child a loving hug. Cloridia detested this risky trade, which kept her awake at nights, praying that nothing would happen.

Wrapped in my short black cloak, by the first light of dawn I would have reached the outlying areas of the city or the nearby villages. And here, uttering the cry “Chimney-sweeeep, chimney-sweeeeeeeeep!”, I would offer my services.

All too often I would be greeted with hostile words and gestures; the chimney-sweep arrives in the winter, bringing bad weather with him, and so is considered a figure of ill-omen. When people did open their doors to us, if we were lucky my son would receive a bowl of warm broth and a scrap of bread from some kindly housewife.

A black jacket buttoned on the left, below my arm, to prevent the buttons from snagging on the walls of the chimney, and closed all the way to the top, the sleeves tied tightly at the wrists with string, to stop the soot entering; knee-length trousers of rough moleskin, which did not hold the dirt, with protective patches on the knees, elbows and bottom, the points of greatest wear when clambering up the narrow flues: this was my uniform. Narrow and black, it made me look only a little less tiny and scrawny than my son, so that I was often taken for his slightly elder brother.

As I wormed my way up the flue, my head would be swathed in a canvas sack, hermetically sealed at the neck, to save me, at least in part, from inhaling the soot. Hooded like this, I looked like a prisoner condemned to the gallows. I was completely blind, but in the flue there was no need to see: you worked by touch, scraping with the rasp.

My son would wait down below, trembling with fear lest something should happen and he should be left all alone, far from his dear mother and sisters.

In the fireplace and on the roof, however, I would climb up barefooted, so as to be unimpeded and thus able to brace myself and push more efficiently. The problem was that it reduced my feet to a mass of bruises and sores, and so throughout the winter, the period when I had most work, I would walk with a limping, unsteady gait.

Working on the roofs was often extremely dangerous: however, it was a mere nothing to someone like me, who had once climbed the dome of St Peter’s.

The most painful aspect of our poverty, however, was not my wretched job, but our two girls. My daughters, unfortunately, were still unmarried, and everything indicated that they would remain so for a long time. The Lord God, praise be given, had endowed them with an iron constitution: despite their privations, they were still beautiful, rosy and florid (“Thanks to their three years of breast-feeding!” their mother would say proudly). Their hair was so gorgeous and glossy that every Saturday morning they would go to the market to sell the hair that got caught in their combs during their morning toilet for two baiocchi. Their health was a real miracle, as all around us the cold and famine had taken a heavy toll.

My two girls — sweet, healthy, beautiful and virtuous — had just one flaw: they had not a penny of dowry. More than once the nuns had come from the convent of Santa Caterina Sopra Minerva, which annually distributed large sums to the families of poor girls who would agree to take the vows, to try to persuade me to send them to the cloisters in exchange for a neat little nest egg. The girls’ robust constitution and perfect health attracted the nuns, who needed strong, humble sisters to do all those chores in the convent that the nuns from noble families could not be expected to do. But even at our worst moments I had politely declined these offers (Cloridia was rather less polite; shaking her breasts angrily, she would berate the nuns to their faces: “You think I breastfed each of them for three years to see them end up like that?”), and in any case my girls themselves showed no inclination for the veil.

Already fully acquainted with the joys of maternity thanks to their experience as assistant midwives, they yearned to find husbands as soon as possible.

Then the cold ceased and the famine too. But the poverty did not vanish so quickly. After two years, my daughters were still waiting.

A futile anger would gnaw at me whenever I saw my elder daughter’s face grow asbstracted and sad without a word being said (she was already twenty-five years old!). My rage was not directed against a blind and cruel fate, far from it. I knew perfectly well whom to blame: not the cold, nor the famine that had laid all Europe low. No. I had a name in mind: Abbot Melani.

A ruthless schemer, an interloper, a man of a hundred deceits and a thousand tricks; master of the lie, prophet of intrigue, oracle of dissimulation and falsehood; all this, and more, was Abbot Atto Melani, a famous castrato singer of former days, but most especially a spy.

Eleven years earlier he had grimly exploited me, even putting my life at risk, with the promise of a dowry for my daughters.

“Not just money, houses. Property. Lands. Farms. I shall make over your daughters’ dowry. A rich dowry. And, when I say rich, I am not exaggerating.” Thus he had duped me. Those words were still engraved in my memory as in my bare flesh.

He had explained that he had various properties in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany: all valuable, with excellent incomes, he had specified, and he had even set down a promise in writing, in which he engaged to establish in my daughters’ names a marital dowry, each with incomes or properties that were “substantial”, all to be defined before a notary of the Capitol. But he was never to take me to that notary.

Having made use of my services, he had gone off to Paris on the sly, and all my wandering from lawyer to lawyer, from notary to notary, in search of someone who might give me some hope, had proved useless. I would have had to file a very expensive lawsuit against him in Paris. In short, that document containing his promise was mere waste paper.

And so he enjoyed his riches, while I endeavoured to drag myself and my family from the desperate swamp of indigence.

But now I was summoned to appear before a Roman notary. He had been charged, by a colleague in Vienna, with the task of tracking me down and delivering to me a deed of donation signed by Abbot Melani.

What exactly it consisted of was a mystery. The asset, which the notary considered must be something of great value (“a piece of land, or a house”), was described by abbreviations and numbers, probably referring to Viennese registries, all of which were totally abstruse. Abbot Melani had moreover opened an unlimited credit in my favour at an exchange bank, so that I could provide for the journey without any financial hindrances.

As for me, I just had to present myself at a certain address at the imperial capital, and there all would be revealed and I would receive what was due to me.

It was not, unfortunately, a donation in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, as the Abbot had led me to believe back then, but much further off, on the other side of the Alps even.

However, in our current dire straits, it was manna from heaven. How could we refuse?

Vienna

FEBRUARY 1711

The drum roll resounded over the bare snowy plain that lay before the city walls. Its powerful thunder interwove with the silvery serpentine sounds of the parade trumpets, the military pipes and horns. This martial commotion was redoubled by the echo that bounced off the massive walls, amidst fortifications, ravelins and earthworks, so that it sounded as if there were not just one line of players, but three or four, or perhaps even ten.

While a military regiment drilled outside the city walls, from within the ramparts we felt upon us the severe gaze of church spires and palace pinnacles, belfries crowned with crosses and castellated towers, serene domes and airy terraces — a host of sacred and profane rooftops that warn the traveller: what you have reached is not an anonymous cluster of men and things, but a benign cradle of souls, a powerful fortress, a protector of trade, blessed by God.

As our carriage drew close to the Carinthian Gate, the entrance to Vienna for travellers from the south, I saw those proud and noble pinnacles rise up one by one against the leaden sky.

Supreme among them, as the coachman pointed out, was the lofty and sublime spire of the Cathedral of St Stephen, a dazzling fretwork of intricate decorations, with the added embellishment of a gleaming mantle of snow. Not far off was the sturdy octagonal campanile of the church of the Dominicans. Then came the noble bell tower of St Peter of the Holy Trinity, as well as those of St Michael of the Barnabite Fathers and St Jerome of the Coenobite Franciscan Fathers, and then the pinnacle of the Convent of the Virgins at the Gate of Heaven, and many others besides, crowned by onion spirals, typical of those lands, each culminating, at the very top, in golden globes surmounted by the holy cross.

Finally, there was the symbol of the supreme imperial authority: I espied the great tower of the Caesarian Palace, in which Joseph the First of the Habsburg House of Austria, glorious Sovereign of the Holy Roman Empire, had reigned happily for six years.

With the music of the military regiment calling us to discipline, the grandiose fortified walls of the city obliging us to modesty and the innumerable bell towers of the city disposing us to the fear of God, I began to picture to myself the sinuous curves of the Danube, which, as I knew from the books I had perused before our departure, flowed on the far side of Vienna. But above all I silently invoked the name of the leafy dark mass, which now, between one cloud and another, began to take shape on the horizon, gentle with its hilly rotundities, and yet mighty, as it loomed steeply over the waters of the river and gazed silently eastwards: the city’s silent and heroic sentinel. It was the Kahlenberg, the glorious mountain that had saved the West: it was from this woody promontory, overlooking Vienna and the river, that the Christian armies, twenty-eight years earlier, had freed the city from the great siege of the Turks, and delivered Europe from the threat of Mahomet.

It was no surprise that I remembered those events so clearly. All those years ago, in September 1683, while everyone in Rome and Europe was tremulously awaiting the outcome of the Battle of Vienna, I was working as a servant boy in an inn, where I served lunches and dinners. There I had met my wife, Cloridia, and, among the many guests in the hotel, a certain Abbot Melani.

Screwing up my eyes, with the carriage wheels creaking as they forced their way out of yet another ditch, I saw a ray of sunlight strike the little building on the summit of the Bald Mountain, perhaps a church — yes, a little chapel, the very one where (so memory — or rather history, as it was by now — told me) a Capuchin father, at dawn on 12th September 1683, the day of the decisive assault, had said mass and harangued the Christian commanders before leading them to the bloody but blessed final victory over the Infidels. Now I was going to touch with my own hand, or rather my own feet, the shining relics of the past; I myself would tread the gentle hills of neighbouring Nussdorf, where the infantrymen of the Christian armies, battling from house to house, from barn to barn, from vineyard to vineyard, had driven back the wretched curs of Mahomet.

I turned with emotion to Cloridia. With our little child sleeping in her lap, my wife said not a word. But I knew that she shared in my reflections. And they were not light thoughts.

We had endured a grim journey of nearly a month, setting off from Rome at the end of January, not without first anxiously prostrating ourselves before the sacred relics of Saint Filippo Neri, patron of our city. Abbot Melani had seen to it that we always obtained seats well inside the carriages and not the far less comfortable ones by the doors. After changing horses at Civita Castellana and spending the night at Otricoli, we had passed through the Umbrian town of Narni, then Terni and finally, at midnight, ancient Foligno. And in the days that followed, I, who had never travelled beyond Perugia, had spent each night in a different city: from Tolentino, Loreto and Sinigaglia, a city situated in a charming plain looking onto the Adriatic Sea, up to the Romagnolo cities of Rimini and Cesena, and then Bologna and Ferrara, and even further north, up to Chioggia on the delta of the river Po, and Mestre at the gates of Venice, and then Sacile and Udine, capital of Friuli Veneto, a notable and splendid city of the State of the Most Serene Republic. And I had then seen the nights of Gorizia and Adelsberg, arriving happily in Ljubljana, despite the fact that snow had been falling incessantly from the moment of our departure until our arrival. And then I had slept at Celje, Maribor on the Drava, Graz, capital of Styria, Pruch and finally Stuppach. Equally numerous were the cities that I had passed through, from Fano to Pesaro and Cattolica, a small town in Romagna, and from there through Forlì and Faenza. We had travelled along the river Po, passing through Corsola and Cavanella on the Adige, and along the Brenta. We had passed through the delightful town of Mira and reached Fusina, where one enters the waters of the great lagoon of Venice. And, finally, we had sailed along the river Lintz in one of those small boats that are rightly called wooden homes, since they possess all the comforts of a house. Twelve men rowed it and went so fast that in just a few hours the view before our eyes had changed from rocks to forests, from vineyards to cornfields, from great cities to ruined castles.

The cold and the snow that had accompanied us throughout our journey seemed to have no intention of leaving us. Now we were finally at the gates of Vienna, anxious as to what awaited us. The city about to welcome us to her bosom, which we had so long dreamed of, was justly known as the “New Rome”: it was the capital of the immense Holy Roman Empire. Under its dominion lay, in the first place, Higher and Lower Austria, Carinthia, the Tyrol, Styria, the Vorarlberg and the Burgenland: the hereditary lands of the Habsburgs, the so-called Archduchy of Austria above and below the Enns, over which they had reigned as archdukes long before being crowned emperors. But the Holy Roman Empire also embraced countless other lands and regions, on the coast or in the mountains, such as Krajina, Istria, Dalmatia, the Banat, Bukovina, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slavonia, Hungary, Bohemia and Moravia, Galicia and Lodomeria, Silesia and the Siebenbürgen; and it watched over the German Electorates, including Saxony and therefore also Poland; and since the Middle Ages it had been (or it used to be, or would soon be) also Switzerland, Swabia, Alsace, Burgundy, Flanders, Artois, Franche-Comté, Spain, the Low Countries, Sardinia, Lombardy, Tuscany, the Grand Duchy of Spoleto, Venice and Naples.

Millions and millions of subjects lay under the Caesarian City, and dozens and dozens of different cultures and idioms. Germans, Italians, Magyars, Slavs, Poles, Ruthenians and Swabian artisans and Bohemian cooks, attendants and servants from the Balkans, poor fugitives fleeing from the Turks, and above all hosts of hirelings from Moravia, who swarmed to Vienna like bees.

Of all these peoples the city that lay before us was the capital. Would we find what Atto Melani had promised us there?

Relying on the Abbot’s credit, we had entrusted all our meagre savings to the girls, whom we had decided to leave in Rome to continue in their jobs as midwives, leaving them to the strict surveillance of our dependable co-tenants from Istria. We had said our tearful goodbyes, promising to return as soon as possible with us the long-awaited dowry so that they could finally marry.

However, if anything were to go wrong in Vienna, we would not have a penny, either to make our departure or to survive on. We would just have to beg and wait for death to bear us off in the freezing weather. This is what poverty can do: drive mortal beings to travel all the way across the world, and then immobilise them in its crushing embrace. In short, we had made a classic leap into the dark.

Cloridia had finally agreed to the journey: “Anything, just so I don’t have to see your face covered in soot anymore,” she said. The mere idea that I would at last give up the job she loathed so intensely had persuaded her to accept Abbot Melani’s offer.

I instinctively looked at my hands: after days without working, they were still black under the nails, between the fingers and in the pores. The distinguishing mark of wretched chimney-sweeps.

Cloridia and the child were coughing hard, as they had done for several days. I myself was tormented by a fluxion in my chest, night and day. The bouts of fever, which had begun halfway through the journey, had gradually worn us out.

The carriage now rumbled over a little bridge that crossed one of the defence moats, and finally passed through the Carinthian Gate. In the distance I could see the green woods of Kahlenberg. The diurnal star lifted its gilded fingertips from the hill and laid them gently on my own poor person: a ray of sunlight, sudden and joyous, hit me full in the face. I smiled at Cloridia. The air was cold, sharp and immaculate. We had entered Vienna.

Instinctively I slipped my hand into the pocket of the brand-new heavy overcoat, bought on the Abbot’s credit, where I kept all the instructions we needed for the journey. According to the documents the notary had given us in Rome, we would find lodgings at a certain address, where we were to present ourselves. The street name was promising: Via di Porta Coeli: Heaven’s Gate Street.

In the unreal silence created by snow, the carriage proceeded slowly along Carinthia Street, which leads from the gate of the same name to the city centre. Cloridia gazed around herself open-mouthed: amid the splendid palaces with their aristocratic mantles of white and the carriages emerging from side streets, swarms of well-wrapped up serving women dawdled idly, as if it were Sunday and not the middle of the working week.

She would have liked to ask the coach driver for an explanation, but the difficulty of the language held her back.

I, however, had eyes only for the spire of St Stephen’s, which I saw rising over the roofs on the right and looming ever larger. It was, I reflected, the sacred pinnacle on which the Ottomans had trained their cannons every day during the summer of 1683, while on this side of the walls, within the city I now saw was thriving, the besieged citizens had resisted heroically, struggling not only against the enemy’s projectiles but also against hunger, disease, lack of ammunition. .

The coach driver, to whom I had shown the piece of paper with the address we were supposed to go to, drew up in an elegant road leading off Carinthia Street. We had reached our destination.

I was a little surprised when, after we had stepped out, the coach driver pointed at a bell rope to announce our arrival: it was the front door of a convent.

“Uno momento, uno momento,” said a shadowy figure in awkward Italian, appearing behind the thick dark grating beside the bell rope.

Owing to my still shaky grasp of German I had not understood that the address we were bound for was that of a nuns’ convent.

On hearing our names, the shadowy figure gave a nod of assent. We were expected. Two days earlier the coach driver, during a pause on the journey, had sent a messenger ahead to announce our imminent arrival.

I unloaded our luggage with the help of the coach driver, from whom I learned that we were about to enter one of the largest convents in the city and almost certainly the most important.

We were received in a large entrance hall with little light, which we left a few minutes later to emerge into the daylight again, in the colonnade of an internal cloister: a long gallery of white stones, adorned with the images of sisters who had shown virtue to the highest degree. Following an elderly nun who seemed to be mute, but who perhaps simply did not know our language, we rapidly passed through the colonnade and reached the guest rooms. A pair of adjoining rooms had been allotted to us. While Cloridia and my son collapsed wearily onto the bed, I set about carrying our bags into the rooms with the help of a young idiot, temporarily hired by the nuns to clear out and clean up the cellars. Stooping and clumsy, but at the same time muscular and tall, the idiot was also extremely chatty and, from the tone of his conversation, I gathered that he was asking me questions about our journey and such matters. A pity that I understood not a single word.

After taking leave of the idiot with a broad smile and closing the door on him, I looked around myself. The room was very bare, but it had all one might need; and in any case it looked much better than the cellar of tufo we had been living in for the last two years in Rome and where, alas, we had left our daughters. I turned my eyes to Cloridia.

I was expecting a barrage of complaints, reproofs and scepticism about Abbot Melani’s promises: lodging with nuns was the very worst thing that could happen to her, I knew that. The brides of Christ were the only women my wife really could not get along with.

But nothing came from her lips. Lying on the bed, still clasping our boy who was coughing in his sleep, Cloridia was gazing around herself in bewilderment, with the vacant gaze of one about to yield to the dark drowsiness of exhaustion.

Our son gave me a start. His fit of coughing was more acute than ever. It seemed to be getting worse. A moment later there came a knock at the door.

“Goat’s fat and spelt flour with a drop of vermouth oil, to rub on his chest. And his head must rest on this pillow of spelt.”

These words, in impeccable Italian, came from a young nun, who entered our rooms with courteous but firm solicitude.

“I’m Camilla, Chormaisterin of this convent of Augustinian nuns,” she introduced herself, while, without even asking for Cloridia’s permission, she arranged the pillow under the little boy’s head and, pulling up his shirt, rubbed the ointment onto his chest.

“Chor. . maisterin?” I stammered, after stooping to kiss her robe and thanking her for the hospitality.

“Yes, conductor of the choir,” she confirmed in a benign tone.

“It’s a surprise to hear such perfect Italian here in Vienna, Mother.”

“I’m Roman, like you; Trasteverine, to be precise. Camilla de’ Rossi is my secular name. But don’t call me Mother, please: I’m just a secular sister.”

Cloridia had not moved from her bed. I saw her peeking sidelong at our guest.

“And nothing to eat but light soup for two weeks,” concluded the Chormaisterin, looking closely at the child.

“I knew it. The usual generosity. .”

Cloridia’s harsh and unexpected outburst made me flush with embarrassment; I was afraid we would soon be driven out, but the victim reacted with an amused laugh.

“I see that you know us well,” she answered, not in the least offended. “But I guarantee that in this case my fellow sisters’ proverbial stinginess has nothing to do with it. Spelt soup with crushed prune stones cures all fluxions of the chest.”

“You treat people with spelt too,” remarked Cloridia in a dull voice after a moment’s silence. “So did my mother.”

“And so we have been doing ever since the early days of our holy sister Hildegard, Abbess of Bingen,” Camilla declared with a sweet smile. “But I’m pleased to hear that your mother appreciated it too; one day, if you feel like it, will you tell me about her?”

Cloridia responded with hostile silence.

She was truly amiable, Camilla de’ Rossi, I thought, despite my wife’s diffidence. She was dressed in a white habit, its sleeves lined with fine, pure Indian linen, and a hood in the same linen with a black crépon veil hanging down behind.

The face that the hood and veil left uncovered belonged to neither of the two physiognomies peculiar to young nuns (or secular sisters, it made little difference): she had neither the watery, dull eyes surrounded by pudgy pink and white cheeks like ham lard, nor the hard little tetchy eyes set in a sallow, scraggy complexion. Camilla de’ Rossi was an attractive, blooming girl, whose dark, proud eyes and lively mouth reminded me of my wife’s features just a few years earlier.

There was another knock.

“Your lunch has arrived,” announced the Chormaisterin, as she opened the door to two scullery maids carrying trays.

The meal, curiously, was all based on spelt: flat loaves of spelt and chestnuts, cream of apples and spelt, a pie of spelt grains and fennel.

“Now hurry up,” urged Camilla after we had refreshed ourselves, “you’re expected in half an hour’s time at the notary.”

“So you know. .” I said, astonished.

“I know everything,” she cut me short. “I’ve already sent word to the notary that you’ve arrived. So come along; I’ll look after your boy.”

“You don’t really expect me to leave my son in your hands?” protested Cloridia.

“We are all in the hands of Our Lord, my daughter,” answered the Chormaisterin maternally, though as to age she could have been our daughter.

Having said this, she ushered us with gentle firmness towards the door.

I pleaded to Cloridia with my eyes not to offer any resistance nor to make any of her less gracious remarks about the tribe of the brides of Christ.

“Anything, if it means I don’t see soot again,” she merely said.

I thanked God that my consort, thanks to her hatred of the chimney-sweeping trade, had finally given in. And perhaps the young nun, who seemed to have genuinely taken our little boy’s health to heart, was beginning to break down Cloridia’s wall of diffidence.

When we stepped outside we found the convent’s idiot leaning against the wall and waiting for us; the Chormaisterin gave him a quick confirmatory glance.

“This is Simonis. He’ll take you to the notary.”

“But Mother,” I tried to object, “I don’t know German very well, and I don’t understand when he speaks to me. When we got here. .”

“What you heard wasn’t German: Simonis is Greek. And when he wants he can make himself understood, trust me,” she said with a smile, and without another word she closed the door behind us.

“Very generous this donation of Abbot Milani, yes, yes?”

It was with these words, spoken in diligent Italian with only Melani’s name pronounced incorrectly, that the notary welcomed us into his office, gazing at us from behind his little spectacles; unfortunately it was not clear whether the words constituted an affirmation or a question.

We had arrived at the office after a short walk through the snow, during which our limbs had nonetheless grown exceedingly numb. The terrible winter of 1709, which had brought our family and the whole of Rome to its knees, had been nothing in comparison with this, and I realised that the heavy overcoats we had bought before our departure were as much protection as an onion skin. Cloridia was tormented by her fluxion of the chest.

“Yes, yes,” the notary repeated several times, after bidding us remove our coats and shoes and inviting us to sit down opposite him. Simonis had remained in the anteroom.

While we enjoyed the warmth of an enormous and rich cast-iron stove coated with majolica, such as I had never seen before, he began to leaf through a file, whose cover bore words in gothic characters.

Cloridia and I, our chests bursting with silent tension, looked on as his hands riffled through the papers. My poor wife lifted a hand to her temple: I realised she was suffering one of those terrible headaches that had tortured her ever since we had fallen into poverty. What news did those papers hold? Was the end of our troubles inscribed there, or was it all just another hoax? I could feel my belly churning with anxiety.

“The documents are all here: Geburtsurkunde, Kaufkontrakt and, above all, the Hofbefreyung,” said the notary at last, in a mixture of Italian and German. “Check the accuracy of the data,” he added, placing the documents before me, although I had by no means grasped their nature: “Signor Abbot Milani, your benefactor. .”

“Melani,” I corrected him, aware that Atto’s signature could give rise to similar misunderstandings.

“Ah, yes,” he said, after examining a page carefully. “As I was saying, Signor Abbot Melani and his procurators have been very diligent and precise. But the imperial court is very strict: if anything is wrong, there is no hope.”

“The imperial court?” I asked, full of hope.

“If the court doesn’t accept it, the donation cannot take effect,” the notary continued. “But now read this Geburtsurkunde carefully and tell me if all is in order.”

Having said this, he placed before me the first of four documents, which — to my no small surprise — proved to be a birth certificate bearing my name, specifying the day, month, year and place of my birth, as well as my paternity and maternity. This was truly singular, given that I was a foundling, and not even I knew when, where or to whom I had been born.

“This, then, is the Gesellenbrief,” insisted our interlocutor, who, after gazing out of the window, suddenly seemed to be in a great hurry. “I repeat, the court is very strict. Especially when it comes to the question of apprenticeship; otherwise the confraternity could create problems for you.”

“The confraternity?” I asked, not having the foggiest idea what he was talking about.

“Now let’s proceed, since there is little time. You can ask your questions later.”

I would have liked to say that I still had not understood what purpose all those documents (false ones, to boot) served. Above all, the notary’s words did not explain what Atto Melani’s donation consisted of. Nonetheless, I obeyed and refrained from commenting. Cloridia kept quiet too, her eyes glazed by the migraine and her fluxion of the chest.

“The Hofbefreyung, to tell the truth, is less urgent: I’m here to guarantee its validity. Since time is short, you could look it over in the carriage.”

“In the carriage?” said Cloridia in surprise. “Where to?”

“To check that what is contained in the Kaufkontrakt is correct, where else?” he answered, as if stating the obvious, and he got to his feet, beckoning us to follow him.

We had entered the notary’s office with a thousand hopes in our hearts, and now we were leaving it with just as many questions on our minds.

We were a little surprised when the carriage that was carrying us — my wife, myself, Simonis and the notary — began to travel away from the centre of the city. We soon reached the walls and passed through one of the city gates, emerging onto a bare and icy plain.

On the journey, while my wife and I huddled in a corner against the cold and Simonis gazed out of the window with inexpressive eyes, I observed the notary and pondered. He seemed to be in a great hurry; to do exactly what, was not clear. There was no doubt that the two documents he had set before me were blatant forgeries, and came from Abbot Melani. Atto — I remembered well — was well versed in the art of falsifying papers, even more important ones than these. . This time, I had to acknowledge, his aim had been less reprehensible: he simply wanted to make the donation effective.

The notary returned my gaze: “I know what you’re wondering, and I apologise for not having thought of it before. It is certainly opportune that I should at this point explain where we are going.”

“About time,” I thought, while Cloridia, suddenly reanimated, mustered her remaining strength to sit up and prepare herself for what the notary was about to say.

“In short, I should attempt to distract your good lady from the tedium of the journey by pointing out to her the forms, qualities and appearances of this imperial city,” the notary began in a pompous tone, clearly very proud of his home town. “Outside the city walls, and all around it, is a broad level area of unpaved earth, clear of all vegetation, which makes it possible, in the event of an enemy attack, to get a clear view of the besiegers. To the east of the residential area lies the river Danube, which with generous and serpentine sinuosity flows from north to south, and from west to east, forming within its curves numerous little islands, marshes and bogs. Further east, beyond this damp, lagoon-like area, begins the great plain that stretches uninterruptedly as far as the Kingdom of Poland and the empire of the Czar of Russia. Southwards lies another flat area, leading towards Carinthia, the region bordering on Italy, whence you yourselves came. Westwards and northwards, however, the city is surrounded by woody hills, culminating in the Kahlenberg — the Monte Calvo or Bald Mountain as you Italians call it — the extreme point of the Alps, which rears up above the Danube, bastion of the West facing the great eastern plain of Pannonia.”

Despite the notary’s affable eloquence, Cloridia’s face continued to darken and I myself was conjecturing with some trepidation as to the substance of the donation. If only this odd notary would come out and tell us just what it consisted of!

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said in that moment, suspending the orographic lesson on Vienna and turning to me: “You will be wondering about the precise nature of your benefactor’s donation, and what prestige it bears. Well now, as you can read yourselves in the Hofbefreyung,” he specified, setting one of the documents before me with great care, “Abbot Melani has procured for you — in the suburb of the Josephina, near St Michael, where we are now heading — a post as hofbefreyter Meister.”

“What does that mean?” Cloridia and I asked in unison.

“Obvious: in hofbefreit, hof means ‘court’ and befreit ‘freed’. You have been made free to become meister, or master, by licence of the court, or by imperial decree, however you want to put it.”

We looked at him quizzically.

“It’s because you are not a Viennese citizen,” the notary explained. “And so, given the urgent, the extremely urgent, need that the Emperor has of your services, your benefactor has generously begged and obtained from the court, on your behalf, the Gewerbeberechtigung,” he concluded, without realising that he still had not clarified the main point.

“And that is?” pressed Cloridia with incredulous hope at the notary’s unexpected words.

“The right to exercise the profession, of course! And to be welcomed into the confraternity,” explained the notary impatiently, looking at us as if we were two savages — and ungrateful ones, to boot.

As I was to learn with time, the Viennese take any unfamiliarity with their language for a lack of civility and grey matter.

At the notary’s sharp reaction my already enfeebled spouse fell completely silent, afraid of irritating him and so creating yet more untimely complications for Atto’s long-awaited and inscrutable donation, now so close at hand.

What had I become Meister or master of? What was the profession that the Emperor was benevolently allowing me to exercise despite not being a Viennese citizen? And, above all, what services did the benevolent Sovereign require of me with such urgency?

“You will have to lead a virtuous and blameless life, carry out your duties properly and serve as a model and example to the Gesellen,” he began again enigmatically. “And that’s not all: as you can read in the Kaufkontrakt, or the purchasing contract, which Abbot Melani magnanimously concluded in your name, Haus, Hof and Weingarten are listed! What incomparable generosity! But here we are at last. Just in time, before twilight.”

The light, in fact, was fading fast; it was still only early afternoon, but darkness falls very early in northern lands and almost without warning, especially in midwinter. Now we understood the sudden haste the notary had shown in his office.

I was about to ask what the three things listed in the purchasing contract consisted of, when the carriage stopped. We got out. In front of us was a little single-storey house, apparently uninhabited. Over the entrance hung a brand-new sign with an inscription in gothic characters.

“Gewerbe IV,” the notary read for us. “Ah yes, I had forgotten to specify: yours is company number four of the twenty-seven currently licensed in the Caesarean capital and surrounding area, and is one of the five recently elevated to the prestigious rank of city companies by command of His Caesarean Majesty Joseph I with Privilegium of 19th April 1707. Your principal task will obviously remain that of satisfying the Emperor’s urgent needs as a Hofadjunkt or court auxiliary: you are entrusted with full charge of an ancient Caesarean building which our benign Sovereign now wishes to restore to its original splendour.”

At this last piece of information from the notary, Cloridia, who was trailing sullenly in our wake, under the dull gaze of Simonis, suddenly perked up and hastened her steps. My hopes revived as well: if the company Atto had acquired for us, and which I was to become master of, had been instituted by no less a person than the Emperor, and if the number of such companies in the whole city was fixed by decree, and if, furthermore, I was being put in charge — urgently! — of an imperial building, no less, then it could hardly be a trifling matter.

“So, Signor Notary,” asked my wife in honeyed tones, wearing her first smile that day, “can you finally tell us what it is? What is this activity, which, through the generosity of Abbot Melani and the benevolence of your emperor, my husband will have the honour to practise in this splendid city of Vienna?”

“Oh sorry, signora; I thought it was already clear: Rauchfangkehrermeister.”

“That is?”

“What do you call it in Italian? Master Smokebrush. . no. . Hearthsweep. . Ah yes: Master Chimney-sweep.”

We heard a dull thud. Clorida had fallen to the ground in a swoon.