Siena by Jane Stevenson

Author:Jane Stevenson [Stevenson, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781801101165
Publisher: Head of Zeus

PIUS II

Fifteenth-century Sienese history is enlivened by a highly individual character, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, the only pope to write both an autobiography and a novel. He was born in Corsignano, which he made over as the beautiful little Renaissance town of Pienza in 1405. The Piccolomini were one of the leading families in thirteenth-century Siena, but were driven out, with other noble families, in 1385. They lost their property in the city and failed to consolidate their landholdings. For some, expulsion from the city could have a positive outcome: it enabled excluded citizens to forge business and personal contacts abroad, while maintaining contact with Siena with an eye to returning home eventually. In the fifteenth century, Sienese connections to Naples and Rome were strong, thanks above all to the Piccolomini, Spannocchi and Chigi.38 However, Aeneas’s grandfather was not one of the success stories. He retreated to an estate he owned at Corsignano and died there shortly afterwards. His posthumous son was sent to the Visconti court at Milan for a nobleman’s education. When he came of age, he found his resources so limited that all he could do was go home and live on his modest estate. He married a noblewoman, Vittoria Fortiguerri, who bore him eighteen children of whom only three, two girls and a boy, survived to adulthood. Aeneas grew up in very straitened circumstances, though he loved his home with its long views out to Monte Amiata, and he developed a deep love for the natural world. It was clear to the family that their surviving son was very bright. He was sent to the parish priest to start his education, and his father taught him the refinements he had learned in Milan in the hope that he might eventually become something more than a struggling small farmer.

Aeneas had a stroke of luck when he was fifteen, because the University of Siena arrived in Corsignano en masse. Often, when there was plague in the city the entire learned community decamped to a hill town for the summer, and that year they chose Corsignano. This brought a much-needed boost to the local economy: rooms could be let out as lodgings and local produce sold to the scholars. The university stayed on into the autumn, and in those weeks and months they gave Aeneas a glimpse of a much wider world: he began to dream of studying at the university himself.

Fifteenth-century student life was not luxurious. One ‘Edward the Englishman’ came to Siena in 1481, and as was the custom, rented a furnished room. It contained a bed with a straw mattress and a feather bed on top, two feather pillows, a blanket, and a ‘shabby yellow coverlet’ (no sheets). Otherwise, he had a bench to sit on, two small cupboards, one for bread and one for his books, and a chest for his clothes.39 Aeneas’s parents could just about afford to let him live like this.

When he was eighteen years old, the family arranged

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.