Argisto Giuffredi: Gentiluomo borghese nel vicereame di Sicilia (review)

In this concise study of Argisto Giuffredi, a baroque personage before his time, Bernardo Piciché brings to life an unfamiliar corner of late Renaissance Italy: the viceroyalty of Sicily. A bourgeois functionary, a cheerful adulterer, the perpetrator and victim of torture, a multilingual participant in the Republic of Letters, and the author of a handbook on family management halfway between the genres of ricordi and trattati, Giuffredi embodies the possibilities of the Renaissance unwound, from the margins.

Born around 1535 to a merchant of Tuscan descent, Giuffredi rose in royal and clerical bureaucracies with titles of secretary, contractor, and notary. In such roles he collected without comment, as was the practice, 10% of the goods of condemned victims of the Inquisition, and on one occasion at least participated in the torture of some unfortunate. For some unknown crime, no doubt having to do with the maneuverings for advantage that were the warp and woof of a Sicily dominated by secret police and inquisitors, Giuffredi was imprisoned in 1580, when he himself suffered the torture of the corda that he had inflicted on others. Imprisoned again with two of his three sons in a Palermitan fortress in 1593, he saw one son escape, but did not live to know that the second was blown to smithereens in the same explosion that took his own life at the age of fifty-eight.

Piciché anchors his narration of the events of Giuffredi's career on this explosion, the first of three on which he structures his monograph. The second explosion concerns Giuffredi's literary career; the third, his role as theorist of the household system. Giuffredi's literary career centered on languages, several of which he commanded. Sicilian was his madrelingua; he learned Castilian during a Spanish sojourn of several years during his childhood; he learned Latin, presumably, in school; and Tuscan from reading the many works (although he avoided poetry) being produced in that tongue during his lifetime. As a member of Palermitan academic circles, Giuffredi engaged in literary conversation. A lover of words, he wrote a guide for Spanish speakers seeking to master Tuscan, another for Tuscans hoping to write Castilian, as well as some translations; all are lost.

Giuffredi's main literary product, and the only one to survive, belongs to the genre of householder advice book that is of great current interest. That genre includes medieval handbooks such as that of the Goodman of Paris, the ricordi of Florentine merchants, and the Latin or Latinate treatises on marriage and family by humanists and clerics. Giuffredi's mimics all of these in predictable ways, warning about the danger of chills, wastefulness, and pedophiliac tutors.

But Giuffredi also departs from the literary tradition that he knew so well as to paraphrase it from memory. He gives cagey advice to his sons (he had no daughters) on how to get ahead, how to keep their wives chaste and subordinate (he had an absolute horror of le corne), and how to manage their inevitable adulteries without leaving a trace. So this is paternal advice that befits a decadent age, an age without illusions that instructs its sons to survive as best they can, to salvare la pelle.

Piciché's analysis is most interesting when it comes to politics, viewing Giuffredi as a subversive —something not impossible even amid omnipresent spies and snitches, as his Avvertimenti cristiani ("Christian Admonitions"), the deeply ironical title of his advice book, was written only for the private reading of the immediate family. The king must be obeyed, he tells his sons in tones of savage irony, even when he is a tyrant, when he takes your property, when he takes your wife, when he inflicts tortures upon you, and when he kills you; you will be rewarded for your suffering —in heaven. One of the few straightforward (or compassionate) statements that Giuffredi makes is his condemnation of capital punishment (non date mai morte a nessuno) —this 200...