2 If on a summer’s eve a traveller, or two - Routledge...If on a summer’s eve a traveller, or two … 2 Microhistory, very often, asks how, in something little, we might see much

If on a summer’s eve a traveller, or two …

2

Microhistory, very often, asks how, in something little, we might see much bigger things. The tale that follows works very much that way. Its topic is in all ways pinched. The central event takes place on a stretch of road so strait that it squeezes two travelling groups tightly, so that they collide, grouch, scrap briefly, and briskly disengage. As with a two-stroke diesel motor: compression, ignition, expansion. So this is a collision story: we watch two groups move calmly across the city, bump, tangle, flare, disentangle, and move on. Tension resolves, coherence fades. We witness an emergent order, a briefly structured, ludic chaos, and then quiet resolution. Our scrappy revel now is ended, and home we go to sleep, or to the captain’s house for drinks.

So much for the small: what of the big? The essay evokes bigger struc-tures. There is time, on assorted scales: the shape of a particular summer’s day, the uncertain movement, across the decade, of papal policies towards Jews, and the many centuries of Rome’s Jews. There is space: the city, its landscape, its walls, its roads, and a looming ancient gate, almost a charac-ter itself, a structure that everybody in this tale traverses or inhabits. And then there is culture – the matrix of values, perceptual habits, routines, and negotiating strategies that give meaning to what people say and do.

So, writing here, in the microhistory way, this story weaves busily between the very small event, and its brief judicial aftermath, and the world that gave both shape. As it does so, it takes time to explain itself to readers: here is our subject, our method, our goal.

The essay adopts the present tense, easily done when an event is brief. It does so by design, to coax readers into the scrum at hand. Be there! See the scuffle, hear the curses and the whiz and thump of flying stones, feel their sting when hit. Oddly, what is clearest in the story is the ruckus in twi-light’s murk: several witnesses, many accounts. But this clarity demands tough work. For the historian, the more the witnesses, the fuller the picture, but the harder the sifting: every detail and each word and action must find its place on an ever more granular, ever more finicky time-line. As always with microhistory, the more you see, the more you know you need to know. Fractal ignorance.

If on a summer’s eve a traveller, or two … 17

As the book’s Introduction tells, I gave this trial, so short, so well confined, to my graduate seminar and asked them to try their hands at the microhistorical craft. I ran them through those games that mimed the procedures we scholars adopt to bring forth our arguments for the profession to bat around. Some seminar debates turned on technique: order, focus, tone. How much amusement, how much surprise, how much, given Abramo’s bullying in court, sympathy for a persecuted Jew? The students also speculated on the backstory, enticingly murky. What, they asked, connected these five picnic Jews, and their kinsmen and fel-low ghetto-residents, with the Captain, and with his master, Cardinal Vicario Savelli? What alliances and entanglements brought the Jews to the vineyard in the first place? What connivances and loyalties later car-ried Abramo to the Captain’s house, table, and spare bed that Sabbath night? The record is thin: four days in court, a mere five witnesses-all good for what happened at or around the fight. There is the police cap-tain, plus two keepers of the gate, one rider, and Abramo, the Jew who played the lute. For the picnic itself, we have only the Captain and the musician. For what happened later, in the city, again we have those two and no others. Of our witnesses, all the Christians testified to a notary of the court. Only Abramo suffered prison, and testified under greater pressure.

The students, energised by the intellectual tussle, adopted the story. You really have to bring it out, they said.

In a story full of men and women, one salient, silent character is a city gate. In 1563, people called it Porta San Giovanni, as it stood just behind the famous San Giovanni in Laterano, the great basilica dating back to Constantine that, through the Middle Ages, had been the papacy’s solar plexus. In the fifteenth century, when the great schism ended, popes shifted to the Vatican at the other side of town and the area declined. The Lateran, though still venerable and holy, was remote; a belt of vine-yards and gardens draped the hills that sloped towards the Colosseum, the cowfield at the ancient forum, and the settled zones of Rome. Like many Roman sites, the gate had a second name; it was sometimes called la Porta Asinaria, the Donkey Gate, with good reason, as it opened onto a minor road, the Via Tuscolana, a medieval route to ancient Tusculum, now called Frascati, famous for its elegant villas, as it had been in Cicero’s times. Most of Rome’s great gates opened onto the ancient consular roads, ambitious long-distance routes that, long after the empire went under, remained fit for wagons, not just donkeys and other beasts. By the 1560s, Porta Asinaria was no easy passage. Over the centuries, as everywhere in

18 If on a summer’s eve a traveller, or two …

Rome, the ground had piled ever higher, so that passage down from the precinct of the great church to the exit through the city wall had grown steep. Unpaved, pitched, and rain-sluiced, the road had worn stony. In places, walls pinched it. The big Dupérac-Lafrery map of 1577 shows how the road outwards, Via Celimontana, curves down, on the left the Scala Santa, the holy steps trodden by Jesus on his way to Pontius Pilate, and, to the right the basilica’s tall colonnaded porch. The cartographer added wavery lines to show how here the road is rough. On reaching the gate, outbound travellers encountered an enclosed courtyard to help fortify the passage, part of the ancient Roman defences, and then the main gate itself, mostly brick, but trimmed in white travertine. The map suggests, to the left, a shack of sorts, and then, beyond the great door, a clutter of out-buildings and an arched bridge across the Marana creek, after which the Via Tuscolana merges with the Via Latina to traverse yet more vineyards and cross an open landscape that in classic volcanic mode slopes ever more steeply towards the Alban Hills, with their villas, perched villages, and forested crater lakes.

By a quirk of Renaissance city planning, the complex inner architecture of the old Porta San Giovanni survives largely intact. Just a decade later, the papacy gave up on the steep old gate and built a new Porta San Giovanni, a few dozen metres to the east, and it is there that, on broad asphalt, relent-less traffic today streams through. The builders walled up the old gate. They stripped the ancient travertine for reuse, levelled the ground, and bur-ied the inner courtyard.1 Later maps and artists’ views show the retired gate encrusted with rough buildings on the outward side and, inwards, towards Rome, fenced behind a garden.2 So was it that, in 1949, when archaeologists began to rescue and reconstruct the abandoned gate, the buried inner defences typical of ancient Roman gate-works came back to light. Only one other of Rome’s gates, Porta Ostiense, conserves this mil-itary feature. At other surviving gates, the yen to accommodate wheeled traffic eventually destroyed these defensive enclosures. Today, the original Porta San Giovanni is shut to tourist traffic but, with a lucky permit and trained guide, one can get in. I have climbed the cylindrical twin towers, like those that the emperor Honorius, early in the fifth century, added to many of Rome’s gates when raising the third-century wall. I have stalked and run the covered walkway inside the adjacent stretch of wall where, at each tower, the tall steps, so hard for walking, are built for running sol-diers, arms in hand. One can imagine oneself a sentry, peering anxiously through loopholes for invading Goths or Vandals. Everything there, today, is archeologically neat, stripped of clutter, soil, and life. Our imagination can repopulate the gate, when its portonari, gate-keepers, would open the great doors at dawn, shut them at dusk, and, for taxation’s sake, tally live-stock and crops streaming in to feed the city. In July of 1563, three officers live there, lodged in the hut or hulking towers: Pietro Bianchino, ‘the one who serves at the gate for the Camera [the papal treasury]’, a Venetian by


origin, and Leonardo Pizzolicco, from Manfredonia on the coast of Apulia, and, under them, a fellow named Tributio, the garzone of the gate who, in our story, sleeps through everything and never speaks in court, so we know nothing else about him.3

In Rome’s July, when midday’s heat hangs heavy, few times are sweeter than the evening. Before sundown, Pietro and Leonardo climb to Piazza San Giovanni ‘to take a little fresh air’.4 They stay for dinner ‘at the osteria of Bartolomeo, the inn-keeper’. Tributio minds the gate.5

Another way to beat Rome’s summer heat is to retire to a vigna. Strictly, a vigna is a vineyard, but there is more to vigne than grapes on vines. Romans hire a vignarolo to tend the trees, vines, and vegetable beds with an eye to the market and the owner’s table, and also put up simple build-ings; owners go there for rest, play, and social life and, in many a court case, for intrigues that might land a girl in trouble with her family and the law. Vineyards come plain and fancy; the rich adorn theirs with antique statues and invite the great for fancy entertainment, but lesser folk of many classes have simpler retreats and recreations.

Capitano Ottavio commands the sbirri [cops] of the Vicario, that church-man who, on the pope’s behalf, runs Rome’s urban bishopric. We have no idea where precisely Ottavio’s vigna lies, but, coming home to Rome, he uses the San Giovanni gate so routinely that Pietro and Leonardo both know him by sight.6 Nor do we know whether Ottavio’s vigna is stately. But big enough it is to put on dinners. July 14 is a Sunday; the Captain, off duty, has invited friends who invited others so that, at two tables, some 20 Romans dine with him. We know a little about almost every guest. The core of the gathering is the Captain’s household: his daughter Paolina and his maid, Margherita, who live with him. Ottavio’s wife – he had one – is absent.7 Horatio, his son, is also there, as are one or two male servants not easily pinned to a master. Also present is the Captain’s nephew Ambrogio, a priest. A second social nucleus is another nephew, a judicial official named Giulio Antonio de Angelis. He has come with Hortensia, his second wife. In 1558, suspecting his first wife, Flaminia, of adultery, Giulio Antonio killed her, the mother of their two small children; he went to prison briefly, and then resumed his career in law; we lack a date for his very recent second marriage.8 Giulio Antonio has brought a servant, Bernardino, from Todi, in Umbria, near Montecchio, the home of the aunt who, when he killed his wife, sheltered his two children and their nurse.9 Geography, and family connections, may link Bernardino to his master. Given his role in the coming fight, it would be nice to know. There was also Antonio ‘Malaria’ [the name is hard to read], a canon of the Lateran, a man of substance who once had been stable-master for Paul IV, when the late pope was still a cardinal. Canon Antonio has turned to Giulio Antonio for


investment matters.10 Capitano Ottavio adds to his list a Pietro Paolo from Tivoli, while another guest mentions a butcher, plus one allegedly clumsy Christian lutenist.11

And then there are the Jews. Capitano Ottavio names two of them: ‘Marano, a Jew, and maestro Abramo, lute-player, a Jew, and I believe there were others too’.12 Given this vague tally, the police chief seems barely to know his Jewish guests. From Abramo, we hear that they are five in num-ber, all male: ‘We were five Jews: that is, Beniamin alias Todeschino [little German], with his son, Vitale son of maestro Salamone, and Salamone alias Marano, and I’.13 These men are hard to trace today, as we have no last names and few patronymics, the given names are standard, and the ghetto, with 3000 Jews, is a haystack too big for such small needles. Thanks to the trial to come, we do know that Salamone, alias Marano, is far from young. Pietro the gate-keeper calls him old: ‘he is all grey-haired, he has a belly, and his beard is silver and white all over’.14 Salamone, like the other four, is dressed in black and, like the others, on his head he wears the yellow cap that papal legislation has imposed on all Rome’s Jewish men.15 As for Salamone’s nickname, it points to the Portuguese Jews forcibly converted to Christianity in 1497, who, in the sixteenth century, inhabited a limbo between the two faiths. Often pressured by Inquisitions that doubted the sincerity of their new faith, they were also regarded askance by Italy’s long-resident Jews, who resented the economic privileges princes extended them in hopes of richer trade.16 There were Marranos aplenty in North-Central Italy (Venice, Ancona, and Livorno especially), but not in Rome, so Salamone’s nickname is surely ironic.

Salamone brought the other four Jews. We know this from Abramo, the lutenist.

I went there because Salamone called me, telling me that Capitano Ottavio was putting on a meal [pasto] at the vigna, where he had been invited. And he said that I should do him the favour of fetching the lute and going with him to give him a bit of pleasure.17

Much here remains unsaid. Note who is who. The Vicario of Rome, Cardinal Savelli, is responsible ex officio for the city’s Jews, and his police enable and enforce his policies. Ottavio’s small force is one of eight police bodies in Rome, each attached to its chief magistrate. It also, on occasion, serves the Roman Inquisition, of which the cardinal is a member.18 The judicial records of the Vicario, sadly, are all but gone, so it is hard to trace Ottavio’s own career in his master’s employ; we do know by chance, from another trial that, six years later, he still holds the job.19 It is also hard to describe the routines of his men, although the rich records of other courts do tell much about the usual conditions of police work. Though they have their spies, sixteenth-century policemen lack detectives; it falls to the courts to pry truths out. So, to the Vicario’s enforcers, the Jewish world, with its


suspicions and its well-founded worries, its long habit of discretion, and its Judeo-Roman dialect shot through with Hebrew, surely is frustratingly opaque. Therefore, friends or allies like Salamone must have proven use-ful. Meanwhile, to Rome’s Jews, the Vicario, with his power, policies, and whims, is a dark glass too, so, to Salamone, Ottavio may well provide useful insights into whatever is coming next. So what is in this friendship? Why does Ottavio invite Salamone? Why does he accept? We can only surmise. And why does Salamone invite Abramo and, probably, the three others, and why do they go? Is Salamone something of a patron, a privi-leged conduit to the church and papal state? And why does Abramo bring his lute? Just to cheer Salamone, or is it to sweeten up Ottavio and the other Christians? This mixed party at the vigna, some 15 Christians of assorted station and five Jews, assembles for business and pleasure, so tightly inter-woven that neither we nor they can tease the strands apart.

United as they are by the beauty of the setting, the pretty afternoon, festive mood, and music, the two groups still mesh partway only. Few social rituals bond better than shared food and drink, communion in sim-ple pleasure. But, at their vigna dinner, Christians and Jews sit apart, the former around a table, and the latter, at a smaller tavoletta, a short way off among their own. So we have not one communion, but two, sundered from eachother. It is the meat; Rome’s Jews, despite the rabbis’ strictures, indulge in Christian wine, but un-kosher meat draws a line they will not cross.20

We Jews did not eat with the Christians. But we drew aside to a little table as far from the table of the Christians as this room is long. And we ate cucumber salad, and mozzarella di bufala, and bread, and noth-ing else.21

A week later, a court eager to police the religious boundary would tell Abramo that it disbelieved him.

His lordship told him to watch his words, as the court knows well that they dined together with the Christians that evening and ate meat.22

Abramo would answer firmly, and, about the main things, probably truthfully:

I never in my days ate meat with Christians. And I have been to the wars and I have sometimes been hard up, and I have never been will-ing to eat it. And it is not true that any of us ate with Christians that evening, or ate meat.23

Which war? Abramo does not say. He is not young and Italy’s wars are many. Pietro the gate-keeper would describe him: like Salamone he is old,


‘but he shows his age less, for he has some dark hair in the beard, which is grey, and he is squint-eyed and bent a bit sideways’.24

If shared food is hard, another communion, music, comes far easier. Jews have their sacred music, a mix of old Jewish and Christian tradi-tional melodies and modes. But they also play the shared secular music of life and loves, and Jewish musicians often find ready Christian ears.25 At Ottavio’s party Abramo has a Christian rival: ‘another youngster who also played the lute, but he knew little about how to do it’.26 Abramo esteems his own artistry.

After the meal, Ottavio and his party tarry and then, as day wanes, head back on foot to town.27 By the time the party reaches the city gate, the light is all but gone. It is, as Romans say, the first hour of the night.28 The doors are not yet shut. Tributio, the one man on duty, must see them in. The way is narrow and the walkers string out. Abramo is towards the front, playing his lute for Giulio Antonio’s wife Hortensia, who to his melody lifts her voice.29 The street is dim: ‘because of the faint light, and the great darkness, it was hard to make people out’.30 But not yet full night, for, halfway down the slope, Pietro and Leonardo, strolling back from dinner in the square, recognise Ottavio and spot the Jews’ yellow headgear. Ottavio is a regular; they know where he is coming from: ‘they were coming back to Rome, for they had been at the vigna of this Capitano Ottavio, which he has outside the San Giovanni gate’.31 And Pietro can see that Ottavio wears his sword. ‘We said good evening, each side to the other, and we went off towards the gate where we are living, and they headed towards Rome’.32

Not long after – the climb was short – looming in the dusk, down the road come two animals. The first is a horse, with its rider. The second is a mule bearing a mounted muleteer and, behind the saddle, a bulging cargo, full baskets with flasks of wine.33 Halfway up, ‘in the middle of the San Giovanni rise, in the stony street’,34 trouble starts. Abramo and Ortensia, making their music, pass the riders without fuss35 and then, in the dim and narrow road, the mule lurches towards the walkers. For what happens next, we have two versions, as each party, in court, will claim to have spo-ken gently to the others, who hurled back curses and abuse.

The somewhat polite version:Ottavio:

Because that horse, or that loaded mule, passed so close to him [Giulio Antonio] that, between the load and the wall it would have hurt him, and the women especially, for you could not see well, as I have said. But, with his hands, he pushed a bit and shoved the load back from him. He said to the fellow on a horse, ‘Back off! By my body! To you want to make me drop dead!’ And he gave that load a bit of a push.36


Francesco Scaramuccia, the muleteer:

So they began to lay hands on the hampers, and I said ‘leave these ham-pers alone!’ and Messer Bernardino [the other rider] said, ‘Please, don’t touch these hampers because they are breakable’.37

Ottavio:

Messer Giulio answered him: ‘Do you want me to let myself get killed here, at this wall. The street is plenty wide!’38

The much ruder version:Ottavio:

And then that other man, the one riding the saddle horse that was behind the mule began to shout and upbraid Messer Giulio, saying ‘Don’t touch those baskets! Don’t touch those baskets!’ And he was shouting.39

And the fellow kept on saying ‘Don’t touch these baskets, don’t touch these baskets, Whore Virgin!’ and he was cursing, ‘Don’t touch these baskets!’40

Scaramuccia, the muleteer:

And, in response, they began to say that we were oafs, villains, cuckolds, and spies, and while they were cursing us they were swarming us.41

The curses reported here are utterly standard for the time; we need not take the report as precisely worded, but, given Romans’ assertive street talk, and also what happens next, surely neither side is gracious. ‘Then’, says Ottavio, ‘those men went off cursing, saying “Scoundrels” and words like that’.42 ‘And’, says Scaramuccia, ‘I prodded the mule and got a bit ahead’.43

Then comes the shower of stones. Although some fall harmlessly around the riders, four do harm or hurt.

They threw a stone that hit Bernardino on his right arm, and Bernardino, having received the stone-throw [la sassata], spurred the horse towards the gate. And, as this was happening, those fellows threw other stones, one of which hit a hamper, and another got me on the left shoulder, and another hit the mule on the left rump, and it made a cut this long [showing the length of his middle finger]. And other stones that missed, and while they were throwing they kept on calling us spies.44

To Roman eyes, of judges, riders, and cops, nothing that happens here is at all novel. In Rome, as in many towns and villages of North and Central Italy,


stone-throwing is ancient, deep-seated, and utterly ritualised. A scholar who studied the habit long and well argues that throwing stones was both expressive and instrumental. It could be sport and play, or battle, or civic politics. The police, widely scorned and hated, are a frequent target, as, sometimes, is the regime itself. In early modern Italy, all blows and weap-ons bear social messages: the scornful slap, the earnest punch, the edgy and respectful metal blade that takes an adversary seriously. Stones, though sometimes earnest, are scornful. Unlike steel, they sneer and jeer. The cus-tom has its names. A simple barrage like the one at Porta San Giovanni is a sassata, as sasso means stone. That is what the court’s file cover calls the crime in question here. A bigger affair, with gang on gang or, as at Pisa or Perugia, official team on team, hundreds to a side, is a sassaiola. Stone fighting often comes with a gust of words to amplify or garnish the shower of rocks, men or boys hollering while they throw. Despite its price in wounds and occasional deaths, through the Middle Ages authorities often acquiesced to the practice, or promoted it as a school of manly courage and martial skill. By the sixteenth century, cities and states moved to clamp it down, pushing stone-fights to the margins, towards childhood and remoter tracts of town, but they would live on for centuries longer.45

How many of Ottavio’s guests shower the two riders? To judge from the muleteer’s hit tally, maybe several, but we only hear of one, Giulio Antonio’s Umbrian servant Bernardino. If so, the fellow is quick and nim-ble; the stones fall thickly. Capitano Ottavio will tell the court how he caught him:

After we had turned away and all of us were leaving I heard the sound of a throw and the thud of a stone that hit, I suspect, one of those hampers, if it indeed was hampers that they were, or the saddle of that horse. At once I turned about and saw that the one who had thrown the stone was Bernardino from Todi, Messer Giulio’s servant. For I saw him make a movement with his arm, the way one does right after one has thrown a stone. But I put my hand to my sword to give him sword-slaps. And I would have hit him had I not reckoned that he was my nephew’s servant, and I chewed him out thoroughly because I was very angry that he had thrown, as it is not my custom to hurt anybody. And he begged my pardon, saying ‘Forgive me, Messer, for I have done a bad thing by throwing. Forgive me’.46

Should we believe everything the Captain tells the court? Abramo does confirm some of this story:

I heard the Captain, who was scolding a servant of Messer Giulio, and he told him, ‘I don’t know who taught you to throw without receiving orders from anybody, and without anyone’s having done you harm’.47


Abramo will also confirm the threatened sword-slaps, but only second hand.48 Confirmation shores up the story but, as we shall see, Abramo is no neutral witness. Does the Captain indeed restore order? Does he quell Bernardino’s attack? Does he really threaten sword-slaps? We will never know for sure. The version is self-serving, exculpating both the Captain and the swiftly remorseful servant: as commander, he did his best to re-establish order, and, in that darkness he so stresses, he saw but a single offender and single throw. As for the flat-blows, they show once more how readily weapons speak. To cut with the edge is noble; it esteems the foe. So to strike with the flat is deeply scornful: this flesh and its owner are beneath real fighting. A flat-blow is to a cut what a haughty slap is to a hard punch, an insult that heeds honour’s rich gestural language of respect and scorn.

Down at the gate, Leonardo hears none of the ruckus up the hill. He goes straight to bed and, he tells the court, sleeps through everything.49 He is a remarkably speedy, oddly sound sleeper, or, more likely, a reluctant witness to what happens next. When questioned, he shoves his colleague, Pietro, to the fore.

After I went to bed, he [Pietro] heard a shout from San Giovanni, towards the gate, saying, ‘Gate-keeper, grab a weapon’, and he was shouting like that when he arrived at the gate.50

The shouter is not muleteer Scaramuccia, but the second Bernardino, the man on horseback. His is the faster beast and the greater authority, which, at the gate, he vaunts loudly. Sleeper Leonardo, who will learn all on rising, Monday morning, explains: ‘And when he got there, he [Pietro] saw that it was a papal groom’.51 Of Bernardino’s pride of office Pietro bears the brunt:

And that groom began to shout: ‘Gatekeeper, gatekeeper, take arms! Take Arms!’

And I asked what the matter was.

He said, ‘And this is how they do violence to the pope’s property!’

And he said that he was carrying some wine and some gifts on the pope’s behalf to Marino to Signor Marcantonio and that he had suf-fered violence.

And when I asked him who they were, he told me: ‘It the ones who are going up the hill’.

And he wanted both of us to get up behind them in the saddle, and go find them.

But I told him that I did not want to go pick a fight with them because we were outnumbered.

And he said we should go just to identify them.


To which I answered that there was no need for it because, if it was those people who were going up the slope, that I had met them and that I knew them, and that any time he so desired, I would have said so.

And then he said, ‘It is sufficient that you know who they are. I want nothing else’.52

This conversation tells us many things of which Capitano Ottavio is still happily unaware. And of which, some days later, he will be made, officially, unhappily all too cognisant. Those two riders hurling curses are no mere riders, hurrying outwards in the dusk before the gate is shut. The muleteer, elevated by the groom’s presence, is no simple muleteer, but an emissary of His Holiness. And the cargo is no simple load of merchandise, but a precious gift, fine wine surely, made far more precious by its origin, the pope’s cellars, we can imagine, but also exalted by its destination. For the Marcantonio at Marino, down the Via Tuscolana, is the powerful Marcantonio Colonna, head of the Roman barons’ greatest clan, with castles and estates by the untold dozens in the pope’s own state and the Kingdom of Naples. He is a fine soldier and, at Rome, one of the king of Spain’s chief spokesmen. Three years back, when Pius IV came in, Colonna was on wobbly footing, eager to recover his estates, seized by Pius’s predecessor Paul IV; he moved nimbly to firm his perch, marrying a sister and a son to the pope’s own influential kin. This wine, for him (Scaramuccia, the muleteer, says it was really for his high-born wife, Felice Orsini), may be a routine blandishment or courtesy, or a minor move in Rome’s endless political chess-game.53 We never learn, but, clearly, its presence in those hampers, and the risk it runs from stones, endow the saddlebags and their load with unwonted gravitas. A good thing indeed no bottles break!

The gate’s urgent parley is more than first meets the eye. What seems an expression of male emotions, the groom venting anger, the gate-keeper soothing him, is actually a carefully calibrated negotiation between two branches of government, between, after a fashion, State and Church. As Italian polities go, Rome is strangely bi-cephalous. One head is the Campidoglio, the city council on the Capitoline Hill. The other is the Vatican and the apparatus of the papal state. They compete to run Rome.54 These two bodies not only bicker and jostle; they also intertwine, and the Apostolic Chamber, the papal treasury, has a hand in many civic func-tions, like the Dogana, the Customs Service which Pietro serves by watch-ing what comes through Rome’s gates. Bernardino, the groom, nevers asks himself whom these watchmen serve. He just throws his weight, and his patron’s, at these underlings, to commandeer their arms and bodies for a somewhat risky mission. But Pietro wants none of it; he protests that it is a fool’s errand, and then placates Bernardino with the offer of a service: in court he will bear witness against Ottavio, whenever called. This offer is not trivial; Ottavio is a senior policeman, and, at the gate, no stranger. Any


act of witnessing, in Rome, has costs. So, to parry Bernardino’s request to assume one risk, Pietro proffers a second, more manageable risk, to stick his neck out in court for Bernardino’s sake. Note, in this, that Bernardino has his own position to protect; he has undertaken to usher a cargo safely to its destination, at night, across the risky Roman countryside. Pietro’s offer speaks to the groom’s anxieties. Surely, it is welcome.

At that, Bernardino, Scaramuccia, the horse, the mule, the wine, van-ish into the gathering night, towards Marino. And Capitano Ottavio, all unwitting leads his party home. At his house, ‘Everybody had a drink and went off about his business, and I stayed in my house with my women’.55

So how did the five Jews go home?

Why ask?

The ghetto! In 1555, Paul IV, in an extraordinary move, made Rome’s Jews live inside a closed precinct, a serraglio, only later called Rome’s ghetto. He made them sell real estate or give up leases in other parts of town and squeezed them into a tight, dank neighbourhood near the Tiber’s bank. Gates went up, and with them came the rule that Jews could not be outside this enclosure between one hour after sunset and next morning’s dawn. Paul’s legislation went further, hemming Jews from almost all their old trades and occupations and barring them from employment and socialising in Christian homes. The move sat well with the militancy of the Counter Reformation church, at war with heresy, keen to spread the faith, and wary of dissent and difference. It also bespoke Paul IV’s own harsh zeal. To Rome’s Jews, the move came as a terrible shock; they had lived in Rome for 16 centuries, sometimes harassed, sometimes tolerated, and, despite their distinct customs and complex ritual prohibitions, complexly integrated in Rome’s economy and life. And popes, more often than not, had protected them, not persecuted them. Paul was deeply unpopular, and, when in 1559 he died, Romans of all stripes rioted for many days in violent celebration, decapitated his statue, affixing a derisive Jew’s yellow hat, and threw the head in the Tiber. They also assailed the ghetto gates, one more emblem of general oppression.56

For the Jews, Pius IV was a milder pope. He undid or softened some of his predecessor’s harshest measures, but not all of them. The ghetto remained, as did the residence rule, and the Bull of 1555 remained the offi-cial letter of the law. Pius IV, it would turn out, was an interlude; under his successor, for the Jews, things would go back to bad, and worse.57

So, well after dark, when they return late to their enclosure, their ser-raglio not yet called the ghetto, do Ottavio’s five Jewish guests have to explain themselves to watchmen at the damaged gates?58 And, if so, do they say, ‘Ottavio’s vigna! Party!’ It would be nice to know. The court does not ask Abramo, and, one knows from reading trials, asked or not, Rome’s Jews are chary with details. With reason, they are often warily discreet.


What happens next depends on groom Bernardino. Thanks to Pietro, at the gate, he now knows Ottavio’s identity. When he returns to Rome, probably on Monday, he lodges a complaint and sets to moving the wheels of justice. The court that hears the case, the part we have on paper, attaches to the Governor of Rome, the pope’s highest magistrate, whose authority extends to matters both great and small. This case is middling, but perhaps a bit delicate, as the Vicario of Rome is a church official of weight and standing, a cardinal, and Ottavio serves in his employ. We know not how or why, but someone assigns the investigation to a judge who primes the administrative machinery that fetches witnesses. The papers still in the Roman archive cannot be complete, as the court alludes, in interrogation, to conversations not in the file; we know, for instance, that Jews besides Abramo are in jail and under interrogation.59 Here is what we can see.

First off, on Wednesday, 14 July, Pietro the gate-keeper appears before a court notary who extracts his version of what he saw on Sunday evening.60 Then, for two days, nothing. Capitano Ottavio, meanwhile, has all the long been in the dark. To believe him, he first gets wind of trouble on Friday morning. Watch carefully what he tells the court later that day:

This morning, Abramo, son of that Marano the Jew who was then with me, told me that one of those men was a groom of His Holiness, who was carrying a load of I know not what gear to Signor Marcantonio Colonna, at Marino.61

Now this is fascinating. It raises three good questions, none of them easy. First of all, why does it take Capitano Ottavio, a well-connected man, the uncle of Giulio Angelo, a state prosecutor, five days to find out something Salamone-Marano could find out sooner? Second, how has Salamone learned about the groom and his cargo’s destination, if not about the wine? Is it because, as we shall see, others of the Jews have already been impris-oned or perhaps interrogated and set free. Or has he contacts in high places and, if so, where? And third, what moves Salamone and his son (a different Abramo, not the lutenist) to warn the Captain? We can ask, but only spec-ulate. We will revisit these matters shortly.

Once alerted, Capitano Ottavio does move fast. He contacts a second papal groom named Marco Padella, who tells him about the cargo’s destination and informs him that ‘that groom later complained in the Vatican [in palazzo] that that sassata hit him and hurt him in one arm’.62 In hope of repairing matters, Ottavio swiftly turns in the stone-throw-ing servant:

After I heard, as I said, that that groom was complaining the way I said, I at once had Bernardino [the servant] arrested by the bargello and put in prison, where he is now.63


The bargello of Rome is chief of the largest police force, which serves the Governor, whose court, with Pietro’s examination, has already taken up the case. Pietro the gate-keeper knows few names; the court now has its hands on a suspect. We have looked hard but found no record of his interrogation.

A few hours later, Capitano Ottavio appears before the court’s notary, on a warrant [mandato] not of mere judge, but of the Governor himself. He tells the tale we have followed here, stressing the darkness and confusion, and how good he would have been had he only known and understood. Had he recognised the groom?

My lord, I did not know him. In truth, nobody in my group knew him because it was so dark that we could barely see one another. And while these things were being written down, he said: If I had known that he was a papal groom, I would have accompanied him all the way to Marino and done him any service.64

The court then sends Ottavio off, under the standard 500-scudi caution to show up, whenever called, before the Governor himself.65 The same notary then hears from the sleeping gate-keeper, Leonardo, who claims to have heard the whole story from Pietro the next morning.66

That Friday evening, something odd happens. Abramo, our Abramo the lute-player, comes, invited, to Ottavio’s house. And stays for dinner, at table with the Captain, his daughter, and his maid. And spends the night. Outside the ghetto, on the Jewish Sabbath! When my seminar took up the case, I asked my students how it could be that Abramo, so scrupulous at the vigna, eating mozzarella at the separate table, would sit for a Sabbath meal with Ottavio and his household. We figured it out: meatless Friday! So, thanks to the mixed holiness of this day, the Catholics and the Jews can bridge the gulf first dug, then bridged, by their respective dietary rules and share a meal.

But why is Abramo there? ‘Capitano Ottavio called me to come to his house, and told me that that servant of Giulio had been put in prison, and he told me this whole story’.67 Why this hospitality, and breach of ghetto rules? Abramo never tells the court, and the court, oddly, does not ask. Might the two men have agreed to align their testimony, to make sure that, if arrested, Abramo would faithfully echo Ottavio’s version. As, on Monday, he readily does. And, if so, which man more needed the other’s backing? Ottavio is in trouble. Now Abramo, one would think, was safe: no stones, just the lute and songs with Hortensia. But wait, Abramo is a Jew!

And so, the next day, they arrest him. It is, till sundown, still the Sabbath, time for prayer, rest, or study. So where is Abramo when they pick him up?

The next day, the Bargello sent for me, for I was in the house of Cardinal Savelli. He let me know I would be arrested, so I came here and I was detained and put in solitary.68


Not praying, not resting, not studying. Cardinal Savelli, we remember, is the Vicario of Rome. Ottavio’s boss. It is true that his palace, still perched today atop the ancient Roman ruin of the Theatre of Marcellus, is a mere few steps from the southern ghetto gate. But it is curious that, the morning after his sleepover, Abramo finds his way there. For what?

On Saturday, Scaramuccia, the muleteer, tells his version of the story to the notary. They let him off with just an oath to silence.69

When, on Monday, it questions Abramo, the court has little interest in any alliance between the Captain and the lutenist. It begins by asking for the whole story in good order. That was a common move in Roman interrogations. The judge would let the witness tell the tale with few if any interruptions, gathering details for its later, closer questioning. Abramo tells an orderly tale, with few details about the party at the vigna. For his own sake, he is careful to place himself too far in front to see the fray and then offers up a tale that serves Ottavio very well indeed. He stresses the real risk to the women and then reports Ottavio’s solicitude: ‘The street is wide enough without needing to crowd the women’.70 Abramo skips over all the cursing but throws in Ottavio’s reprimand to Bernardino the servant: ‘I don’t know who taught you to throw without anybody’s giving you the order and without anybody’s having given you offense’.71 He claims he still has no idea who those riders were and then throws in the Captain’s threat to slap Bernardino with a sword: it was, he says oddly, the Captain’s maid who told him.72 He then swerves: ‘I told him that some of our people were in prison for this affair, and that I did not want to go to prison and have four or five bad nights’.73 There we have a hint of the inter-dependency between the Jews and the police, and a suggestion that, in this matter, the two men might trade support, each helping the other out.

Abramo finishes his version of the whole story with a picture of how he and Hortensia were making music: ‘I was up front with the wife of that Messer Giulio, for I was playing the lute and she wanted to sing. And that is all I know’.74 At that, the court, in charge all along, takes the dialogue in firmer hand. It seems disinclined to probe Abramo’s pro-Ottavio story. Instead, whether to unnerve him, or to make a case against his actions, the notary targets not the stones, but the intimacy his tale reveals between the Christians and the Jews. We lack the notary’s precise words, as trials, quoting witnesses in full, merely summarise in Latin the actual Italian questions asked.

First question: Who came to dinner that evening to Ottavio’s vineyard?75

Abramo tells the court, finishing with the names of the five Jews.

Second question: Why did the Jews go to the vineyard?76

Abramo gives a slight, light answer: he went because Salamone invited him for the pleasure of his music. His answer points at Jews and Jewish social reasons, not at Christians, and ignores the motives of his four companions.


Third question: Did the Jews dine at the same table together with the Christians, and what did the Jews eat?77

Abramo parries first with a denial and then with a demonstration of how far off the Jews were sitting: ‘We withdrew to a little table as far from the Christians’ table as this room is long’.78 We can imagine his stretching his arms or pointing with a hand. He then lists what they ate for dinner: the salad, fresh cheese, and bread, ‘and nothing else’.

The court follows up with not a question but a rebuttal. Abramo had best watch his words, for the court has heard from others that the Jews ate with the Christians that evening, and they ate meat.79 Is this bluff or has the court heard such reports? If so, it was in testimony not in our record. The first assertion, together at table, might be true, but shared meat, given Jewish rules, seems unlikely.

Abramo parries first with an emphatic denial: neither then nor ever, not even at the wars, has he himself eaten meat with Christians. Well-anchored in his own story, he then pivots to his fellow Jews that evening, to deny the allegation.

Fourth question: Why did they not share a table that evening?80

Abramo’s reply does not parry with the rules about kosher food, with their insistence on proper butchery, something the notary will know about. He keeps the explanation simple: ‘We were not at the same table with the Christians because none of us was eating meat, because we weren’t the ones to cook it. And then also because the table was small, and so we gathered among ourselves.’81 His second reason subverts his first, as if convenience trumps the sanctity of ritual.

Fifth question, up the sleeve all along: And then why did the suspect, last Friday evening, dine at the same table with Ottavio and his daugh-ter and servant, and does he not know that it is prohibited to Jews to eat with Christians.82

It was Abramo who told the court this, just minutes before, in his story about his visit to Ottavio’s house. Why has he slipped the notary this detail, and this leverage against him? Is it part of a bid to show that he has the policeman’s backing? If so, his next answer shows why he may have miscal-culated the story’s impact on the court.

I ate at the same table with Capitano Ottavio and his daughter and the maid on Friday evening, and I have not known for these past four years that it is forbidden to the Jews to eat with the Christians so long as they do not eat meat cooked by Christians and sin, according to our law.83


Note the subtle slip here: while the notary alludes to a Christian ban, Abramo flips the burden to a prohibition of his own, the Jewish law, and Jewish sins. Rhetorically, he shifts the rectitude from the notary’s side to his. Note too the four years. Abramo is speaking code here, but the notary will catch the meaning. Four years back died grim Paul IV, and with him died some of the anti-Jewish rules. Under Pius, the rules are looser.

Where does that leave Abramo? Not clear. The notary drops the matter. For good? For now? He swerves to a sixth question: who was armed, and to a seventh: had Abramo known that one rider was a papal groom? No, says Abramo, not at all. And then the notary has Abramo put back in detention, ‘with a mind to continuing’. Why still hold him? Why continue? What more does the court desire to know from him? Does it intend to punish him, and, if so, for precisely what? We never learn. The trial record runs another month, from Abramo’s interrogation on 19 July to a last hearing on 20 August, but the evening at the vineyard, the clash on the street, the groom’s complaint, and the Captain’s course of conduct all disappear, as do the actions of the Jews. All further hearings, in this record, concern the shady practices and the wife-killing of Ottavio’s lawyer nephew. There must have been more to the reckoning and settlement, for Ottavio and his Jewish guests. Reprimands, a suspension, for the Captain? We do not know, and the Vicario’s vanished archive cannot tell us. Our final chapter here does show him, six years later, at the same old job. Reprimands or fines for the Jews? Or quiet release from custody as the case unwinds and all witnesses may go free? We cannot say.

So where are we? What lessons can we draw? One lesson, for microhis-tory, addresses scripts and structures, for our story involves both. Both scripts and structures engage the social sciences, and social history. One strategy, for scholars, is to unveil the structures that organised the world. A second is to trace the processes within those structures, to catch the flow of life and action. And action, often, had its scripts, but, as in many a performance, of music, of dance, of drama, within a social script there was ample room for improvisation, for ornament. Just ask a good lutenist like Abramo.

First, some structures.

Our story has spatial structure: city, country, a road, a vineyard. These spaces are sometimes open, sometimes enclosed, like the vineyard, like Rome itself, and sometimes pinched, like the Via Celimontana’s rising slope to San Giovanni’s wide, vague public square. The spaces have boundaries; Rome has a gate, and our story crosses it, moving from outside to in. And the gate itself has its own architecture, surviving today as trim archaeol-ogy, and visible in its far more shabby past, in old maps and prints, and early photographs. An historian can explore these spaces, on foot, on maps old and new, and from above with aerial photographs and satellite imaging.


There is also temporal structure: day, night, the calendar. The tale of Ottavio’s Sunday moves from the freedom of a summer’s day to the inse-curities of night, with its risk of ambush and, for the Jews, its ordinance to retire behind the ghetto’s gates. Back then, night is truly black. Our scuf-fle explodes at dusk, on the shady, ambiguous boundary between the two times, when conditions and rules both shift.

A third structure is social, institutional, and legal: notice how many structures intersect and overlap. Jews and Christians, feasts and fights, the professional class and lesser commoners, masters and servants at table, the papacy and the lay state, two police forces and the courts they serve, two bodies of law – one papal legislation, the other Jewish halacha. The notion of structure suggests not flux and flow but rather, if not rigidity, a goodly dose of firmness. But, in this story, even the laws that set boundaries for Jews and Christians and shut the ghetto gates might sometimes bend.

So this evening’s story, like many a story, escorts its protagonists across assorted boundaries. In 1979, the legendary Italian novelist Italo Calvino (lover of legends, editor of fairy tales) published a tantalising novel called in its English translation If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller.84 The novel is all beginnings, no end in sight. It plays on the odd intimacy between the writer and the reader and, archly, slips both into the story. As does this story here: If on a Summer’s Eve, a Traveller or Two.… As often with microhistory, the author does step inside, to invite the reader to puzzle over how we know, or accept resignedly that we cannot know what ever happens next. Moreover, this microhistory, like so many, and like Calvino’s novel, has loose ends everywhere.

Structure. Calvino’s novel is structured anti-structure. It sets a frame, or anti-frame, for flow.

As with us here, and that fact takes us to our other topic now: pro-cesses, and scripts. Many a social event is, in its fashion, a drama, with its implicit theatricality. That is true of any world, but good scholars have argued cogently that Italy, in early modern times, was unusually given to a sense of theatre, in its urban planning, architecture, religious and lay liturgy, social rhetoric, and conduct of life.85 Think back over our story. The summer’s outing at the vigna must have had its scripts, of hospitality and shared pleasures. As had crossing the city gate. The collision on the slope was deeply scripted: the push, the warnings, the curses, the stones. And so were, afterwards, the anxious negotiations among the accused, and the court’s actions, both the notary’s questions and the responses of the witnesses and suspects. So, in court, Ottavio plays the officer, responsible, firm, socially responsible. Scaramuccia plays the offended decent working man. And Abramo, perforce, must play the Jew. Not the Jew as entire and unconstrained, among his fellows, but the Jew among the Christians, never defiant, always circumspect, but clearly self-respectful and punctiliously observant of what he is swift to call ‘our law’. But social scripts are supple: there is play inside the play of life, even when stakes are high.


For microhistory, the complex dialogue between structure and process imposes a set of contradictory tasks. Before writing, an author must do homework. For background, one goes reading, and one scrutinises the old maps and leans in close to take pictures, scooping up images of the crime scene so that, when writing, one can blow them up to catch details like later fenced gardens or Dupérac’s wobbly lines that indicate ‘steep patch on the road’. But what of foreground? For foreground, one has the trial itself, those mere 8 folios of yellowed paper, 16 pages, no more, and then another 12 folios, barely helpful, about Giulio Antonio’s dodgy past. One job, as in seminar, is to build a file, that ‘perp list’ of people, things, and places, garnering what shreds of fact one can about anyone and anything. One groups our people: the Jews, the papal servants, the gate-keepers, the Captain’s family, his guests. That second, harder task is to cruise the depo-sitions and lift their details, never forgetting who said what to whom where and when, and paste them onto a time-line. This is often tricky: just which admonition, or blustering curse came first? Stories often run in parallel, or perhaps gradually converge, as with two dinners, one, the gatekeepers’, up on the piazza, the other outside the gate, while two riders cross a Roman afternoon towards a twilight collision. Moreover, witnesses do not always depose in the order of what happened, the court circles back for more, nobody tells time by clocks. Even a careful time-line always has its floaters and its utter mysteries. But, well contrived, a time-line does hint to the flow, the social process. It allows a story that, in the way of stories, can say ‘and then’ or, flashing back, ‘before that’ or, cross-cutting, can remind us ‘meanwhile at the gate’. Without a sense of time, we cannot uncover flow and process. But what of the contradiction? The contrivance, the time-line, in its effort to catch the social flow, breaks a second important current, deposition’s purling rush of speech.

That mental break came to mind late, as I pondered how things went for Ottavio and Abramo when they came to court. Meticulously, I had chopped, diced, and sorted their testimony to recapture events in the country, at the gate, and up on the square. But, to understand the stakes at the prison, I had to return to what the suspects said, in its original order, in dialogue with a probing notary, with their work, liberty, and property at stake. So, late in the writing, I finally decoded what the men said, and how they said it, read-ing for those slipped words and telling silences that reveal strategies, tactics, cultural roles, and personal habits. The double reading, for two processes, one at the gate and another in the prison, reminds us that a microhistory, trolling for a drama in the world, relies for so much of its story on another drama, in the chambers of the law. The second drama, with its stories, and its scripted words and deeds, both reveals and veils the first.

Calvino’s Winter’ Night plays with the reader’s expectations for and from a novel. A novelist owes us a complete story. But Calvino, keeping the reader off balance, refuses to indulge that appetite for closure. He aims for heightened consciousness, restless engagement. Microhistory often


does much the same. Closure is a luxury; in life’s small histories it is rare. And, because the magnifying glass of micro-narrative alerts us to our mac-ro-ignorance, our big small picture forces us to sift the details, ask carefully how we come to have them, and puzzle over where they are leading us. Microhistory, often, is an unsettling, slyly subversive genre.

Critics of microhistory sometime argue that it wastes the reader’s time. So much about so little! What lesson, pray, might a reader ever take home? The microhistorian’s riposte to this takes two main forms. One is to say that there is great use in looking closely; one comes to deeper understand-ing of a world. One sees reflexes, and the scripts that shape them. The other answer is to assert that one sees how actions embed in structures, how our miniature connects to the big picture. As ever here: process on the one hand, structure on the other.

To close, let us reflect on something big indeed: the relationship between Christians and Jews. But let us imagine not so much a structure, as process writ large. But conceive it abstractly, via the theory of gift exchange. In any society, the gift is a great mobiliser of action, and a binder of persons, tied by obligation. Gifts, circulating inside networks, are their internal glue, often far more than are rules and formal obligations. In early modern Italy, where the rules were often flexible or vague, and the institutions to force compliance were often feeble, with few muscles, feeble memories, and few organs of perception (think of the chaotic police in Rome), and capricious too, the informal bonds reinforced by gift-exchange were vital to survival or success. Risks were many, and Romans, to make good security’s lack, were swift to entangle one another in webs of mutual obligation.86 It is here that Richard Trexler’s distinction, for Florentine history, is useful. Florentines, he writes, had two modes, which he calls ‘contract’ and ‘sac-rifice’.87 Contract is precise and closed: my house, your purchase money; our groom with his morning gift, your bride and with her trousseau and dowry; my army, your payment to retain it, and so on. One fulfils the terms and walks away. Sacrifice is often vague, and open-ended. Unlike contract, it pretends that reciprocity is not at stake. The vassal to his lord, the lover to his or her beloved, the child to the father, ideally, says ‘I am yours’. The faithful pray to Mary, God, or saints, perhaps in that order, ‘I am devoted’. And, at times, the prisoner tells the judge who torments him, ‘My Lord, I am in your hands. Do with me what you will’. But, as is obvi-ous, sacrifice is a rhetorical stance. ‘I want nothing’ has the subtext, ‘Oh do ever I need something from you!’ But sacrifice dares not be so blunt. Now in early modern Italy, alongside busy contractual practice, sacrificial acts and gestures were everywhere. Religion practiced them, on the model, for Christians, of a God who as Son sacrificed Himself for us. Honour asked sacrifices in abundance: lavish generosity; truthfulness despite the material and moral costs; loyalty despite the risks to life, limb, and property; chas-tity if one was female; and other virtues, often burdensome. Family values, too, demanded obedience, not always easy, and collaboration, despite one’s


own interests. And the law, with its strictures, and its sense of bonum pub-licum, curbed individual appetite and interest.

A gift-based relationship, as both theory and our own experience will tell us, is open-ended and fuzzily reciprocal.88 Gifts bring counter-gifts and, unlike with contract, closure is never easy. We do not stage easily the final birthday card, the last kiss that ends the love, the dinner to end that chain of dinners. Why not? Because of the logic of sacrifice, which defies precise measurement. Indeed, one reason we remove the price tag from a present is because, notionally, our gift is bigger and vaguer than the money laid out. The price signals contract and sets unfitting measure; it ignores the implied devotion or concern that render a gift immeasurable.

The very vagueness of gifts forbids the precise balance that enables clo-sure. The other thing of importance here, besides the open-end, is the band-width of gift exchange: cards for cards is narrow, but love, friendship, and group loyalty are broad (as is enmity, another Renaissance bond), and the exchanges are diverse and richly varied. That is true in general, and, for Italy in particular, it is crucial. Ponder the great bandwidth of Italian gifts by contemplating what Jews and Christians could not easily do for one another. ‘I pray for you and for your welfare!’ It did not work. ‘I will spon-sor your child at the baptismal font’. God-parentage, a supple social bond, was out of the question. ‘I honour you!’ How? In Christian eyes, Jews were pretty well outside the calculus of Christian honour and, as generally dis-armed, they did not participate in male honour culture with its swagger and swift bloodshed. They could, and should, respect the Christians. But the Christians could not honour them back; the whole exchange was cramped and incomplete. ‘I will kill for you!’ Fighting for an ally, among males, was a major gift; one put one’s body and life on the line, and Jews could not do that. They did throw stones at one another, and even at Christians, but they were outside the pugnacious military zone that defined male status on all levels. And then what of love, and sex, and strategic matrimonial negotiations? Separate spheres for the two faiths, with prohibitions on both sides and, when sex or even love did happen, it was anxious, cramped, generally unequal, and often risky for both sides. And then what of food and drink, the small change of daily generosity or, with banquets, gifts to celebrate and remember? Food was tricky, as we have seen with Abramo and Ottavio. Simple hospitality was beset with dietary rules and formal prohibitions. In sum, many of entanglement’s standard gambits, between Jews and Christians, were impossible, or hard, and often risky.

Food brings up the gift’s opposite, communion. When a gift moves from hand to hand, obligation goes back the other way. But, in Italy, as anywhere, there were moments when giving stepped back, and the par-ties shared in some movement of the soul or senses one can call commun-ion.89 Think of the bliss of lovers, after a courtship marked by material and rhetorical gifts exchanged. Think of the excitement of a crowd at a ball game or horse race, of the thrill of a throng at a gorgeous procession, of


any shared emotion – excitement, triumph, awe, terror – that breaks down boundaries. The pleasure at beholding things beautiful, rare, or strange; the shared devotion at prayer; and, of course, the simple pleasure sharing food. Assorted gifts structure the movement towards communion, but the shar-ing itself has few strings attached. And here too, for Jews and Christians, moments of communion were less easy. Cheese yes, fish yes, wine maybe, meat no! And the party might be awkward, and the law frowns, so let’s sit at separate tables!

So, between them, Rome’s Jews and Christians had to work together, in a gift-giving culture of extreme elaboration, in the face of rather restricted bandwidth. What did they do about it? They invested cleverly, subtly, and assiduously, in the channels still available. Useful information, advice, com-panionship, connections, perhaps some music. And protection, asymmet-rical for sure but sometimes mutual. Ottavio sometimes needed the Jews, they often needed him, and they found assorted ways to serve one another. The Captain, this time, may well have traded promises of protection, either bald or tacit, for Abramo’s tactful recital of his proper official conduct. Broadband? Not really. But not so narrow as we first might think. Read Abramo’s coyly gentle, slyly protective account of the brawl at Porta San Giovanni in that light.

Notes 1. Antonio Colini, ‘Rinascita di Porta Asinaria’ (1954). 2. For the fence and garden, Falda map, 1676. 3. ASR, GTC, busta 85 (sixteenth century), caso 9, 271r, for Bianchino’s infor-

mation; 274v for Leonardo and for Tributio [maybe also spelled Tiburtio]. We have a likely death notice, 12 years later, for Pietro Bianchini, dying on 25 September of a head wound, and buried at Santa Maria in Via: Claudio de Dominichis, ‘Notizie biografiche’. Henceforth, I give the folio only.

4. 271r–v. 5. 274r: Leonardo, a gate-keeper, says so. 6. 271r: Pietro knows him well by sight; 274v, Leonardo the gate-keeper knows

him too. 7. In 1569 he does have a wife of long-standing, who dies that year; see chapter

seven. 8. De Dominichis, Notizie genealogiche, 14, reports the death of a two-year-old

son, buried on 8 September 1577, at Sant’Angelo in Pescheria, by the ghetto gate.

9. 282v, 284r: for the aunt in Montecchi. 10. For the investment history of Malaria and Giulio Antonio de Angeli: 285r–v;

286r–293r. 11. 278r, Abramo, for playing the lute poorly: ‘another young man who also

played the lute, but he knew little about how to do it’; 273r: Ottavio, for the list of guests; 277v: Abramo, for other details.

12. 273r. 13. 277v. 14. 271v, Pietro the portinaro: a belly: una trippa.


15. 271v, Pietro the portinaro, for the black clothing; also 275r, Leonardo the gate-keeper: yellow caps: berette gialle.

16. For the resentment of Marranos and their absence from Rome, Stow (2010): 24–25.

17. 277v: pleasure: spasso. 18. Fosi, ‘Inquisition in Rome’ (2018): 41. 19. See chapter eight, p. 172. 20. For Jewish consumption of Christian wine, despite the Jewish rules: Roberto

Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy (1991): 245; Toaff, ‘La Vita materi-ale’ (1996): 250.

21. 277v, Abramo: mozarella di bufala: pronatura. I thank Edward Goldberg for the translation.

22. 278r. 23. 278r: I have sometimes been hard up: ho hauto qualche volta necessità. 24. 271v, Pietro the portinaro: squint-eyed; bent a bit: è losco; balestra un puoco

attraverso. 25. For Jews who played for Christians: Harrán, ‘Tradition and innovation in

Jewish Music’ (1992): especially 482–3; Ravid, ‘How Other really was the Jewish Other?’ (2008): 32–34.

26. 278r. 27. 276v, Abramo, for the pause after dinner. 28. First hour of the night: 273r: Ottavio; 276v: Abramo. 29. 277r, Abramo, on the wife’s singing. 30. 273r, Capitano Ottavio, for the dim light and great darkness: buio et scuro

grande. The Captain here stresses how hard it was to see. 31. 271r, Pietro the portinaro. 32. 271r. 33. 275r, Scaramuccia mulateer: baskets: cestoni; flasks: fiaschi. 34. 273r, Capitano Ottavio: stony: pietrosa. 35. 276v: Abramo says ‘other women were coming behind with the group’. 36. 273r-v: by my body: corpo di me; make me drop dead: mi voi tu fare crepare. 37. 275r. 38. 273v: get killed: mi lassi crepare; plenty wide: larga assai. 39. 273v. 40. 273v: whore virgin: puttana vergine. 41. 275r-v: oafs, villains, cuckolds, and spies: poltroni forfanti cornuti … spioni;

swarming: attorno. 42. 273v: scoundrels: furfanti. 43. 275v. 44. 275v. 45. Davis, ‘Stones and Shame’ (2000); Davis, ‘Say It with Stones’ (2004). 46. 273v: sword-slaps: piattonate; I reckoned: per rispetto; hurt: dar fastidio. 47. 276v. 48. 277r: Abramo mentions the maid. 49. 274v. 50. 274v–275r: shouting like that when he arrived at the gate: gionse alla porta

gridando. 51. 275r: groom: parafreniero. 52. 271r-v: suffered violence: gli … fatta violentia; behind them in the saddle: in

groppa, fight: questione; outnumbered: non eravamo del pari.


53. Bazzano, Marco Antonio Colonna (2003): 72–109; Pastor, Storia dei papi (1950): 34, 88, 103, 107–9, 132, 167; Sergio Raimondo, ‘Il prestigio de debiti, 65–165, especially 72–3 for the fiefs and for Marcantonio’s efforts at han-dling his vast debts’ (1997).

54. Nussdorfer, Civic Politics (1992). 55. 274r. 56. Caffiero, Storia degli ebrei (1994): 100–108; Calimani, Storia degli Ebrei

(2013): 68–74; Di Nepi, Sopravvivere al ghetto (2013); Stow, ‘Consciousness of Closure’ (1992); Stow, ‘Emotion and Acculturation’ (2008): 56–71; Stow, Theater of Acculturation (2010); Milano, Il ghetto di Roma (1964).

57. Caffiero, Storia degli ebrei, 108 (1994); Stow, Theater of Acculturation (2010): 41; Calimani, Storia degli Ebrei (2013): 69–74.

58. Stow, ‘Consciousness of Closure’ (1992): 386, for ‘serraglio’. 59. We found no other trace of this judicial process. 60. 271r–272r. 61. 274v. 62. 274v. 63. 274v. 64. 274v. 65. 274v. 66. 274v–275r. 67. 276v–277r. 68. 277v: in solitary: in secreta. 69. 275r–v. 70. 276v. 71. 276v: given you offense: fatto dispiacere. 72. 277v. 73. 277v: bad nights: male notti. 74. 276v. 75. 277v. 76. 277v. 77. 277v. 78. 277v. 79. 278r. 80. 278r. 81. 278v. 82. 278r. 83. 278r–v: to sin, according to our law: far peccato secondo la lege nostra. 84. Italo Calvino, Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiagore … (Turin: Einaudi,

1979); If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovano-vich, 1981).

85. For theatre and theatricality see for instance Burke, Historical Anthropol-ogy (2005), especially chapters one and eight; Richard Krautheimer, Rome of Alexander VII (1985): 47, 114–117, 126, 138, and passim; Cohen, ‘Lay Liturgy’ (1992).

86. Ago, Economia barocca (1998) lays out entanglement, but one can push further.

87. Trexler, Public Life (1980). 88. For early modern gift practices, Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France

(2000). 89. Sabean, ‘Communion and Community’ and ‘The Sacred Bond of Unity’, in

Power in the Blood (1984): 37–60, 94–112.

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