Writings on the Sober Life: The Art and Grace of Living Long by Alvise Cornaro (review)

The Lorenzo da Ponte Italian Library presents here the most comprehensive version to appear in English of yet another seminal, albeit less wellknown, classic of Italian literature, A Treatise on the Sober Life, written by the Venetian gentleman Alvise Cornaro, first published by Grazioso Percacino of Padua in 1558. The volume, in fact, includes Cornaro’s “Aggionta” (Addition), which is translated here for the first time, as well as “A Brief Compendium of the Sober Life,” a “Eulogy Written for Alvise Cornaro,” and a dossier of epistolary exchanges between Cornaro and several celebrated contemporaries, including Sperone Speroni and Pietro Bembo.

Alvise Cornaro (1484–1565), following a serious illness around the age of forty, discovered dietary rules of abstemious eating and drinking (“the sober life”) that not only enabled him to regain his health but, he claimed, would enable anyone to live 100 years or more. Thus, Cornaro’s own life became the principal testimonial to the effectiveness of the “sober life” he had discovered, and the focus of a remarkable career of Renaissance self-fashioning that the author relentlessly pursued in his writings. Indeed, to better support his alimentary theories Cornaro claimed to be 70 in 1551 when he had reported himself to be only 56 in 1540. In 1555 he said he was 74, yet he claimed to have reached 80 in 1557 and 85 in 1559. He would claim to be 95 in 1565, the year before he died.

The continuation of Cornaro’s lifelong promotional campaign on behalf of his dietary rules as a means of attaining “immortality” in the “eulogy” he wrote for himself, to be published after his death, comes across as a kind of unintentional parody of the “Letter to Posterity” of Petrarch, the father of humanism. Humanism had evidently come a long way since Petrarch’s time, as have we. The publication of Cornaro’s Writings on the Sober Lifeis particularly timely given current intense interest in the theme of aging, a point that is well illustrated in an engaging foreword to the book by health journalist Greg Crise, who briefly situates Cornaro in the history of modern longevity science. Fixing the problem of aging has become one of the missions of Silicon Valley, where billions are being poured into biotech firms hoping to “hack the code of life.” ³

The lengthy “Introduction to Cornaro” and the concluding essay, “How to Attain Immortality Living One Hundred Years, or The Fortune of the Vita Sobriain the Anglo-Saxon World,” both by the Italian scholar Marisa Milani, authoritatively inform both specialist and non-specialist readers concerning the philological and cultural situation of Cornaro’s writings. The Italian originals of both the primary and secondary sources are rendered by Hiroko Fudemoto in elegant, clear English, and the translator has generously annotated the texts with the needs of the nonspecialist in mind. This scholarly edition of the Sober Lifewill no doubt serve well a broad range of literary scholars, anthropologists, and cultural historians.