Humanism and the Urban World: Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance City

5. The Suburbs and Other Places

As we have seen, in the Villa, rural property is viewed exclusively in terms of productivity. In the Della famiglia, Giannozzo conceives of the farm in a similar way. However, he also repeatedly talks of the enjoyment and pleasure that he would gain from working the fields and even tells Adovardo that should his farm not be highly profitable, it would still be worth owning for pleasure. The tone is no longer the somber and admonitory one of Hesiod but is rather that of the Roman writers Cato, Varro, and Columella. A statement from one of Varro’s characters seems to express Giannozzo’s opinion exactly: “The farmer should aim at two goals, profit and pleasure; the object of the first is material return, and of the second enjoyment. The profitable plays a more important role than the pleasurable.”1 Although Giannozzo is keen on self-sufficiency as an ideal, his perspective very much remains that of the Florentine patrician who owns property in both town and country. He asserts that he would be content to remain largely in the country and that “a farm should be such that a whole family could live on it the entire year without having to add more than a bit of salt.”2 On the other hand, he would prefer to have property close to the city since this would allow him to visit his villa often and to “spend a good part of the year there.”3 Again, his views appear to accurately reflect the real Florentine situation, where lands close to the city were especially prized. T H E S U B U R B S A N D O T H E R P L A C E S 5 144 HUMANISM AND THE URBAN WORLD Giannozzo’s praise of farming does not, of course, signify that he welcomed backbreaking agricultural work. Landowners of his station entrusted the work of their estates to laborers, most of whom were tenant farmers. The legal agreements made by proprietors and lavoratori could vary considerably , as could the personal relationships between the two classes.4 A characteristic but by no means ubiquitous arrangement was the sharecropping system known as mezzadria, in which the tenant divided the produce with the landlord. Such arrangements could necessitate a close degree of contact between proprietor and lavoratore, and this would have been central to the rural experience of many farm owners. For all his love of the country, Giannozzo is certainly not idealistic in his view of the peasantry. Rather, he denounces peasants as being incredibly wicked, deceitful, and sly—always asking for something, always bemoaning their poverty, often taking the best part of the produce and leaving the landlord with nothing but expenses.5 Here, again, we encounter a view that was probably quite widely held. Pietro de’ Crescenzi, for example, expresses similar opinions in his Trattato della agricoltura, written at the beginning of the fourteenth century.6 This state of affairs was underpinned by economic factors. Wealth tended to drain from the country toward the city, leaving the country in a state of what David Herlihy has termed “liquidity crisis.”7 Tenant farmers were indeed compelled to ask their landlords for many things, since they relied on the landlords’ capital injections to keep their operations viable. It may also be true that tenants were given to bemoaning their poverty.As Herlihy points out, most mezzadria arrangements were initiated by a loan from the landlord, which the tenant sometimes struggled to repay. In such cases, poverty became the tenant’s primary defense. Alberti may have shared Giannozzo’s opinions regarding rural lavoratori. As Luca Boschetto has shown, he was repeatedly involved in legal action against the tenants of his benefice at San Martino a Gangalandi. The vigor with which Alberti, who appears in his writings as one who disdained money, pursued these sometimes indigent peasants is quite startling.8 Villas The vast majority of Florentine villas may have been geared toward production ,but some were not.This distinction found expression in Florentine modes of tax assessment, with the catasto of 1427 differentiating between THE SUBURBS AND OTHER PLACES 145 those properties that were productive, or that supported a productive family, and those that were surplus.9 A similar distinction appears in Alberti’s architectural treatise, where he observes that “country houses may be divided into those inhabited by gentlemen and those by workers of the...