Veritas (Atto Melani) by Rita Monaldi, Francesco Sorti Read Free Book Online

the greedy rabble, devoted to its belly, which every
Sunday consumed what at Rome it would take us a year to earn. We ourselves were now allowed a place at the table of this lavish and eternal banquet.
    Atto Melani’s act of generosity had come about thanks to a fortunate conjunction of circumstances: His Caesarean Majesty Emperor Joseph I wished to restore an ancient building that stood
at the gates of Vienna, and needed a master chimney-sweep who would undertake to renovate the flues and overhaul the system of protection against fires, which seemed to be breaking out with
increasing frequency. Shortly after my appointment, however, there had been such abundant snowfalls that I had been unable to start my work there, and, to make matters worse, part of the building
had fallen in, making building repairs necessary. Today I was to visit the Caesarean property for the first time.
    Just one thing was still unclear to me: why had the Emperor not appointed one of the many other master chimney-sweeps of the court, who were already responsible for the numerous royal
residences?
    Abbot Melani had even arranged for a small single-storey house to be purchased in our name near the church of St Michael in the Josephina, and had undertaken to have an extra storey added, an
operation that was still under way: my family and I would soon enjoy the great luxury of having a house all to ourselves, with the ground floor given over to business and the upper one to our
living quarters. A real dream for us, after our experience in Rome of having to share a
tufo
cellar with another family of paupers . . .
    Now we could even send large sums of money to our two daughters who were still there, and we were even planning to have them join us in Vienna as soon as our new house was ready.
    Atto, in his donation, had also included wages for a tutor who would teach our child to read and write in Italian, “since,” he had written in the accompanying letter, “Italian
is an international language and is, indeed, the official language of the Caesarean court, where hardly any other is spoken. The Emperor, like his father and his grandfather before him, attends
Italian sermons, and the cavaliers of these lands have such an affinity for our nation, that they vie for the opportunity to travel to Rome and master our language. And those who know it enjoy
great esteem throughout the Empire and have no need to learn the local idioms.”
    I was infinitely grateful to Melani for what he had done, even though I had been a little hurt to find no personal note in his letter, no news of himself, no expressions of affection, just
generic salutations. But perhaps, I thought, the letter had been drawn up for him by a secretary, Atto being too old and probably too sick to see to such details.
    For my part I had, of course, written a letter warmly proclaiming my sense of obligation and affection. And even Cloridia, having overcome her age-old mistrust of Atto, had sent him lines of
sincere gratitude together with an elegant piece of crochet work, to which she had applied herself for weeks: a warm, soft shawl in camlet of Flanders, yellow and red, the Abbot’s favourite
colours, with his initials embroidered on it.
    We had received no reply to our attestations, but this did not surprise us, given his advanced age.
    Our little boy was now doing his best to copy into his notebook simple phrases in the Germanic idiom and in a special gothic cursive, very difficult to read, which the people here call
Current.
    While it was true, as Abbot Melani said, that Italian was the court language in Vienna – indeed, the sovereigns who wrote to the Emperor were required to do so in that language – the
common people were much more at ease in German; for a chimney-sweep wishing to practise his trade, it was essential to learn its rudiments at least.
    With this in mind, I had decided that the wages Atto had set aside for an Italian tutor should be used to pay a teacher of