ITALY AND ME...
If you want to understand a place, being there —with your eyes open —is what matters most.
Then days, months and years pass... You watch patterns form. You see pieces come together and break apart.
That, basically, is my story —as a historian, a writer and an ordinary person doing everyday things.
Italy—real and imagined —has been ground zero for most of my adult life.
In my more fanciful moments, I see myself at a late-night train station waiting for the next load of seeming facts to rumble through.
For decades, my chief outpost has been the Florentine National Archive (Archivio di Stato di Firenze), with forays to other repositories of that sort.
There I paged through heaps of ancient parchment and paper, watching events unfold— seeing them through the eyes of those most immediately involved, hearing about them in their own words.
Along the way, I lost patience with simple tales of cause and effect.
History—like life itself—is never about just one thing.
As “Source Material”, we need to claim whatever we encounter in our journey.
Words on paper, of course, but also people, places and situations. Buildings, landscapes and works of art.
Anything that triggers the flow of memory.
What is a “discovery”—in the archive or beyond?
Sometimes we encounter a seemingly magical document that sheds light on things we never expected to see.
Far more often, miscellaneous data slowly collides, exposing truths long hidden in plain sight.
DI COSA NASCE COSA. (One thing gives birth to another. )
That is a favorite Italian proverb of mine— profound or damned obvious, depending on your point of view.
In any case, it has proven inescapably true in my historical research and writing—since I always jump into the middle without knowing how things will end.
I've written a few books and any number of articles—all filed away neatly on the shelf.
And I have reached that blissful age where I have no academic career to consider —since I will perish soon enough whether I publish or not.
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