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 chapter four Choices As Brosses took leave of the Palazzo Agnesi on that night in July 1739, he was told something that surprised and disappointed him. Apparently Gaetana had expressed the wish to enter the cloister and don the sky-blue habit of an Augustinian nun. Brosses could not understand this choice, which indeed was an unusual one. “She is very rich,” he commented in his last letter from Milan, implying that she could well have continued living the sparkling existence that had brought so much attention to the Agnesi conversazione . In fact, Gaetana had expressed the desire to abandon her life in society for the quiet of the cloister while she was carrying out her most celebrated public performances. Her friend and biographer Frisi effectively describes Pietro’s immediate reaction to her request: “It was as if he had been struck by lightning.” Pietro “did not dissimulate his sorrow at the idea of being abandoned by such a dear daughter, who was, more than the others, the delight of his life.” It’s unlikely that he would have been upset by the idea of a female member of the Agnesi taking the veil: two of his sisters and at least four of his daughters would enter the monastery. Rather, through the years the Agnesi conversazioni had been entirely constructed around Gaetana ’s public persona and her performances. At the moment when visibility was crucial to Pietro’s strategy of social enhancement, he risked losing what had brought him to the elite’s notice in the first place. Not surprisingly, Pietro was eager to discuss and negotiate.1 That Gaetana was suffering from the exceptional circumstances of her life had already been signaled by the “strange” and “persistent” disease that had struck her down between 1730 and 1732, at the climax of her career as a child prodigy. In 1739, during another period of repeated public appearances , Gaetana again manifested her uneasiness with the life that her father had been imposing on her. Frisi refers to long discussions between father 67 and daughter, with Pietro being remarkably understanding for a father of that period. Eventually, Gaetana agreed to maintain her lay status but only on certain conditions, which would make her life an unusually private one. It is unclear whether Gaetana ever intended to take the veil. The fact that she did not take this step despite surviving her father by almost fifty years suggests that she might have used this argument primarily to negotiate a different life. First, Gaetana asked for the freedom to dress simply, thus cutting herself off from her father’s conspicuous style. She also asked to be able to visit the church of San Nazaro and other city churches whenever she wished. Finally, she asked to be exempted from attending balls, theatrical spectacles, and other worldly amusements. Gaetana had therefore decided to separate herself from the sites and rites of social visibility, but she saw this as the first step toward a real and meaningful involvement with the mondo, the worldly life.2 Believing that she was destined by God to live in the world and assist and relieve “suffering humanity,” Gaetana asked to be allowed to volunteer at the Ospedale Maggiore, taking care of poor and infirm women. She had direct knowledge of the conditions of the urban poor, as the Palazzo Agnesi was in the midst of a medieval urban tangle. The Pantano quarter hosted noble palazzi like the Agnesi’s and the Settala’s, but also workshops, brothels , and overcrowded residential buildings. The sight of misery, prostitution , and infirmity was thus a daily experience for Gaetana, particularly in those years of war and economic depression. In similar conjunctures, the proportion of beggars in the city’s total population could rise from the average 5 percent up to 20 percent. Families headed by single women and the elderly deprived of material support from their families seemed to be particularly susceptible to periodical crisis. Their precarious economic and social status was typically manifested in their relegation to the higher floors of buildings, in the insalubrious sottotetti. In his letters written in the summer of 1739, Brosses did not fail to report the impressive number of infirm crowding the streets of Milan.3 Pietro agreed to all of Gaetana’s requests. In return, she promised to participate occasionally in the conversazioni, although there is no evidence that she ever performed a formal disputation again. Gaetana also promised her father that she would...

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