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1 Mystery and Silence
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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1 chapter one Mystery and Silence Our story begins with desperation, a mystery, and many secrets. An intense famine in Renaissance Florence sweeps food from working people’s tables. Just as it begins to subside, an epidemic fever arrives to sweep many of the survivors into the grave. A group of charitable women open a home for hundreds of the teenage girls who have been orphaned or abandoned by these twin scourges. They flock in, but many dozens of them die, sometimes within weeks. The troubled home relocates after fourteen years, and once it’s gone, the neighbors won’t admit to it ever having existed. Hundreds of women are involved in the e√ort to open the shelter and keep it running, but within a decade, they fade from the scene. Almost unbelievably in a city that runs on chatter and gossip, no one says anything about it—no impassioned sermons, no lewd songs. Manuscripts called up from the shelter’s archives give a perplexing picture . One seems to say a lot, others very little. The only thing that’s clear is that they are telling very di√erent stories. This deepens the mystery: what was killing the girls of the Casa della Pietà? I stumbled across this mystery while researching the charitable shelters that Florentines built to house girls who had been orphaned or, more often, abandoned by their parents. The Casa della Pietà, or House of Compassion, was one of the earliest. Opened around Christmas 1554, dozens of girls, most of them barely teenagers, soon jammed into its beds. A worn manuscript register gave these girls names and faces and sometimes o√ered clues about who they were there. On 25 January 1555, nineyear -old Margherita, daughter of Mona Betta of Florence, was among the first girls registered. One month later she was dead. A few weeks after this, fourteen-year-old Maria, daughter of the soldier Neghrante, who was stationed in the Mugello Valley to the north of the city, entered the Pietà. A year later she died in a bed in Florence’s main hospital, S. Maria Nuova. The hospital’s nurses likely put her beside or even in the same bed as thirteen-year-old Maddalena, named after Mary Magdalen, the saint 2 lost girls who summoned up images of prostitution, temptation, and sin for Renaissance Italians. Maddalena’s father was Friar Billi, from the prominent monastery of the Certosa just outside the city walls. The mothers of Maria and Maddalena may have been prostitutes; on this, the register is silent. Regardless, the friar’s daughter had shadowed the soldier’s daughter . Maddalena entered the Pietà shelter four months after Maria, took the same one-way journey over to the S. Maria Nuova hospital, and died only four weeks after Maria.1 Eleven-year-old Bartolomea dead in sixteen months. Twelve-year-old Chaterina in twelve months. Ten-year-old Lizabetta in six months. Fourteen-year-old Agniola in two months. Twelve-year-old Lucrezia and five-year-old Brigida in one month.2 In every orphanage, a few children died at an early age; what’s puzzling in this case are the sheer numbers. Well over half of the fifty-two girls registered on the day the Pietà first opened died under its care, many of them within months or even weeks of arriving. That shouldn’t have been happening to teenagers, even in an orphanage. Only abandoned babies died in these numbers. At Florence’s central foundling home, the Ospedale degli Innocenti, located just a few blocks away, a death rate that high would have been considered almost normal. Most Innocenti babies were illegitimate newborns, abandoned in the dead of night to protect the identities of mothers who likely weren’t much older than Maria and Maddalena. In that tightly packed and underfunded shelter, illness and malnutrition sent many babies to an early grave, and only a fraction of those who entered the Ospedale degli Innocenti survived to walk out its gate as adults. The Innocenti’s overcrowding merely intensified a problem that all Renaissance parents faced at the birth of a baby: the high likelihood malnutrition, plague, or some gastrointestinal disease would claim their child before it reached age five. The chubby, angelic putti who pull back curtains or peek over parapets in so many Renaissance paintings look cute and sometimes a bit saccharine. Yet their images on frescoes and altarpieces were perhaps a hope and prayer for parents who...