From the New York Times Magazine, May 11, 2016:
The Corsinis kept a record detailing their every decision — and every ledger, bill and correspondence they ever produced.
“IN THE NAME OF GOD and of the Virgin Mary and all the Saints of Paradise,” the story begins, “this book belongs to Matteo di Nicholò Chorsini, and in it I, the said Matteo, will write down every thing of mine and other facts about me and my land and houses and other goods of mine.”
The year was 1362. A trader in woolen cloth, Matteo Corsini had just returned from years abroad with enough money to buy property around San Casciano, 11 miles south of Florence. From then on and for 600 years his descendants followed his example, writing down everything about themselves and preserving everything they wrote. Again and again, huge old books of accounts begin with an invocation to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, then proceed to list endless incomings and outgoings, profits and losses. But mainly profits. By the 17th century the Corsinis would be among the richest families in Florence.
“At what point,” I ask Duccio Corsini, present head of the family, “did they start to think of their papers as an archive?” We are standing at the window in the grand villa that was eventually built on the land his ancestor bought and where all these papers have recently been gathered.
“From the very beginning,” he replies proudly. “It was a Florentine thing.”
In fact, all the Florentine merchant bankers of the Renaissance could be recognized, it was said, by their “ink-stained fingers.” Partly it was a matter of careful accounting, but also of passing on family identity and attitudes from one generation to the next. Up to the 17th century the papers in the Corsini archive were written by men who all bore the same half-dozen “Corsini names” — Filippo, Tommaso, Duccio, Neri, Bartolomeo, Andrea — as if they were hardly individuals but temporary representatives of an ongoing family project.Built in the 14th century but massively enlarged in the 16th, Villa le Corti is a half hour from Florence by winding road. The sweep of vineyards and olive groves is breathtaking, as is the view of the villa, a white stuccoed pile topped with two towers set in geometric lawns. Do not, however, expect comfort inside. When Duccio and his wife, Clotilde, moved here in 1992, the house had not been lived in for almost a century. “Because,” Duccio observes knowingly, “when you have so much it gets hard to use it all.” The couple renovated a small part of the building for themselves, transformed the cellars under the lawn into a restaurant and a shop for their wine and olive oil production and started arranging visitor attractions such as cooking lessons and wine-tasting sessions.
But the rest of the house stood empty. The decision last year to have the archive moved here from its previous home in the family’s grand palazzo in Florence was thus part of a business plan to bring the villa back to life — the papers attract a steady stream of scholars — and place it at the heart of the family enterprise. “In the end,” remarks Duccio, “it was mostly about money.”
Moving the Corsini papers was itself extremely expensive, the largest operation of its kind since Florence’s huge state archive was relocated in 1989. Four thousand feet of steel shelving had to be set up and more than 12,000 files resettled. Since the villa wasn’t in any way designed for this purpose, there is no specific entry point, nor any easily apparent order to the rooms. All the same, wherever you come in to the archive you are immediately overwhelmed by an intense awareness of paper. This is not the experience of an ordinary library where parallel lines of standardized print in neatly bound volumes seem to detach the words from the material they depend on. Here, bundle after bundle of raw papers are tied together with string and squeezed into shelves, from floor to ceiling. There is the thick sepia-toned, slightly porous paper of the 1400s and the ultrathin glossy correspondence paper of the 19th century. There are papers with elaborate watermarks, and with tiny cuts made in the 16th century to show that the surface had been disinfected against the plague. Some papers have been eaten away by silverfish; others have gotten wet and smudged. Scratchy nibs have poked holes. A name is missing. A date. At every point you are made conscious of the moment in which event was turned into document.
The near impossibility of keeping these papers in any kind of order makes you realize how dense and elusive real life is.I arrive at Villa le Corti at 9 a.m. Clotilde orders coffee and I am soon settled down in a tepidly heated room and introduced to the archivist, Nada Bacic, originally from Croatia. As she pours espresso from a silver pot, we speak Italian, each with our foreign accents, and then set off into the past. The archive is spread through a half-dozen rooms, some little more than cubbies, others as grand as they are cold, one with a taxidermied eagle hanging from the ceiling. Stone stairs and oaken doors abound.
In the bottom left corner of the smallest room are Matteo Corsini’s “Recollections” but this is a copy, made in 1475. The difference between a merchant’s handwriting and a scrivener’s is clear enough, the one scrawled and bold, the other neat and careful. In any event, Italian calligraphy has changed so much since then that both are largely illegible to anyone who isn’t an expert. To digitize here would cost a fortune and take an age.
Opening an early tome, I stumble on the last will and testament of Cardinal Pietro Corsini who died in 1403. Written in both Latin and Italian, it fills a thick book 18 inches tall. The fine clothes he is dressed in for burial, the cardinal warns, must not be removed from his body. Two hundred gold florins are left to a monastery, on condition that the monks recognize a “solemn obligation” to say prayers for the cardinal’s soul “in perpetuity.”
After various commercial ups and downs the Corsinis consolidated their fortune in the 16th century when three brothers, Filippo, Bartolomeo and Lorenzo, simultaneously ran three merchant banks in London, Lyons and Florence. Bacic asks my help to shift a 15-foot-long bench, behind which the brothers’ correspondence is stacked in a dozen mammoth white-and-gold folders. Some of the messages are coded, substituting numbers for letters, to protect business secrets. In 1579, I read, a consignment of wool has disappeared from a ship in Lisbon. In 1583 Bartolomeo in Lyons reports being feverish and sweating through three shirts every night. “But our business in Naples is going well,” he assures Filippo in London....
....MUCH MORE
