From books to reality: one-way journeys

It’s still a famous story in our family about that time when, driving along the Brenner Motorway heading up into the mountains for the Christmas holidays, in one of those sudden moments of uncertainty of mine, I asked out loud whether we’d come across Rovereto or Trento first. I hadn’t even finished asking the question before the answer struck me as utterly obvious: ‘But of course: Cervini came down from Trento to meet Alessandro Farnese, who was travelling up from Rome, heading towards Rovereto! Rovereto is south of Trento, obviously!’ ‘What would you be without your friends!’ my sister Laura cut me to the quick with the ever-ready sting of her sarcasm, and yet it was all true. True was my umpteenth moment of bewilderment, even though we’ve been going up into the mountains for our summer and winter holidays for thirty years now, passing first through Rovereto and then through Trento; and true, and irrefutable, the historical reference to that early April of 1545, when Cardinal Marcello Cervini, papal legate to the Council of Trent, went down to meet Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, nephew of Paul III, welcoming him precisely in Rovereto. There are the records, published by the Görres-Gesellschaft, along with the letters in Gottfried Buschbell’s magnificent edition, which, at least for me, are more reliable and clear than a map or a street directory: you can turn the latter upside down or struggle to read them, but not that visit to Rovereto. It is definitive and irrefutable.

The fact is that there are people – perhaps a tiny percentage of the world’s population, but they do exist – for whom knowledge of places comes neither from direct experience nor from the mediated, authoritative experience of cartography, but from academic research and the study of history; in short, from books. These leave such a deep impression that they even shape any subsequent visits to the sites themselves and first-hand discoveries. I’ve been to Naples twice: the first time for half a day spent examining sixteenth-century manuscripts at the National Library, which you can reach by metro directly from the station; and the second time for a conference on the history of philology at the historic headquarters of the Banco di Napoli (complete with a taxi driver who, misled by the address, just before dropping me off and without having seen the clerical collar hidden by my scarf, switched off the engine, turned round and asked me imploringly for some advice on how to invest his meagre savings), but the Naples I truly know, and in which I could find my way around, is that of late spring 1749. A short travel diary from that period, written by the Prefect of the Vatican, Giuseppe Simonio Assemani, dates from that time; I have been working on it for a few years now, and it has introduced me to the city of Vesuvius more fully and effectively than any actual visit. The only complication is that, whilst I know everything about the Bourbon Printing House and its chalcographic plates, and can discuss the relics preserved in the church of Santa Patrizia, as well as speak authoritatively on the question of the true, and only, cathedral of Naples, I do not know where the Vomero is. Or what it is, because I’ve heard it mentioned in a film or two, but the notion has evidently not taken root. I’m more familiar with Charles of Bourbon and his minister Montalegre, Queen Maria Amalia, a keen cigar smoker and lover of cloying chinoiserie – she was, after all, Saxon, poor thing – but I do not know who the current mayor is, nor which or how many motorway exits lead into the city.

I know Venice’s map of printing houses and bookshops in the mid-18th century like the back of my hand, along with that of the censorship offices; and in Rome, the exact list of owners and street numbers of the villas that stood in the early 16th century between the Quirinale and what is now Porta Pia, it’s a pity that not a single one remains, just as there are no longer any of those sixteenth-century booksellers in Campo de’ Fiori, of whom I have far more than a passing knowledge. Like certain other human beings – a small percentage, it is true, but they do exist – I rejoice when I find myself in front of memorable places: the room in the Palazzo di Caprarola, from whose trompe-l’oeil Fulvio Orsini, the Farnese family’s librarian, peeks out; the corner of Madrid where a plaque commemorates Doña Ana Mendoza de la Cerda, Princess of Eboli, and my thoughts immediately turn to Verdi’s *Don Fatale* and a somewhat over-the-top Agnes Baltsa, or when I (don’t) look at the Palazzo Barberini, trying to imagine what Rodolfo Pio da Carpi’s villa must have been like, right there! I don’t think one can escape this literary cartography, which, according to my sister, also has quite a few emotional implications and some not entirely honourable psychoanalytic implications, but perhaps that isn’t even necessary. Of course, you need to be accompanied by someone who’s firmly rooted in the present, or equipped with good navigation devices – though these don’t work well in Venice, because Google doesn’t quite grasp the concept and structure of the ‘sotoportego’ and goes haywire every time, directing you straight into the water – but in the end, I wouldn’t know how, nor would I want to, do it any other way.

Incidentally, this situation has nothing to do with the emotive interpretations or the more or less historical accounts found in many tourist guides, which claim to breathe new life into the stones with some often undocumented anecdotes from the past, which are in any case always verging on gossip or crime stories: I still recall with some embarrassment a visit to a castle in upper Lazio, where a trapdoor to the icehouse was spun into a tale of an escape route for the lovers of the nymphomaniac castle lady. No, the path is exactly the reverse: not from reality back to the books, but from the books to reality, yielding results that are therefore far more solid and authoritative, albeit with the drawbacks I am now familiar with: an inability to find one’s bearings in the contemporary landscape; emotional outbursts and fits of anger at the sight of seemingly anonymous buildings or those rising from the ashes of others that have vanished; and requests for information based on references that are long dead and buried, resulting in embarrassment for the passer-by who is asked. It is as if one were to ask for directions to the ‘Tower of the Epitaph’, between Terracina and Fondi, where the documents of those intending to enter the Kingdom of Naples were checked, or as if one were to walk into a pizzeria, converted from a deconsecrated church, and, under the pretence of using the loo, set about looking for a grave that one assumes should be located near the ancient transept. This has happened too.