#iris origo

[conformi]

Piazza del Campo, Siena, Italy, 1333-1348 VS Cecil Pinsent, Villa La Foce, Chianciano Terme, Italy, 1924-1939 , 

[emisovvienleterno]

[notmanthelessbutnaturemore]

Me: *takes ‘The Last Attachment’ with me to read on the tube*

My brain: are you sure? Getting pretty close to Byron’s death

Me: I’ll be fiiine

Iris Origo: “he died in feverish pain, with a prolonged ‘death-bed scene’ (Che bella scena! He exclaimed with a half-smile to the weeping Tita and Fletcher)... Pierino [Pietro] was in such floods of tears that he could not stay in the room.”

Me:

My brain:

Byron: *dies*

Me: This is fine

My brain: ....

Iris Origo: “Pietro did not return to Italy... he became a Colonel in the Greek army. In 1827, having contracted typhoid, he died... and was buried in the fortress of Diamantopoulos. The fortress was destroyed and no trace remains of his grave.”

Me: ..

Iris Origo: “There is not even a portrait or a drawing of him. Nothing remains but his little book about the Greek expedition, his letters, and the tradition of his courage, his fidelity and his high hopes.”

Me:

[notmanthelessbutnaturemore]

“It would suit me better to be with you in a desert, than without you in Mahomet’s paradise, which is considerably more agreeable than ours.”

“I kiss you more often than I have ever kissed you - and this (if Memory does not deceive me) should be a fine number of times, counting from the beginning.”

Byron king of the ‘sweet talk your lady while away on business’ ploy, from his letters to Teresa Guiccioli.

[and-not-waving-but-drowning]

“It has sometimes been pointed out to me,” Iris Origo begins this memoir (published as she was approaching “the end game,” in her words), “that I have had a very varied and interesting life, have lived in some extremely beautiful places and have met some remarkable people.” Her book both lives up to the implied promise of that opening sentence and wanders happily away from it.

[maranzalla]

having a Moment (tm) reading my Datini book where it mentions that we know from the archives that his bastard daughter must have been well-loved , for there is a record in the account book of an expenditure for a small toy drum for her, with a note saying that a clerk (Domenico di Cambio) had to run up and down Florence one whole day to find it

[maranzalla]

The people who live in the courts of the great are more apt to be evil than good

[maranzalla]

On the first page of Datini's great ledgers stood the words, 'In the name of God and of Profit', and these were the only goals to which these merchants aspired: profit in this world or in the next, as if the whole of life were one vast counting-house - and at its end, the final Day of Accounting .