Writings on the Sober Life: The Art and Grace of Living Long

284 Pages·2014·1.908 MB·English

by  Massimo Ciavolella, Hiroku Fudemoto

WRITINGS ON THE SOBER LIFE
The Art and Grace of Living Long
THE LORENZO DA PONTE ITALIAN LIBRARY
General Editors
Luigi Ballerini and Massimo Ciavolella,
University of California Los Angeles
Honorary Chairs
Honorable Dino De Poli
Mr Joseph Del Raso Esq.
Ambassador Gianfranco Facco Bonetti
Honorable Anthony J. Scirica
Advisory Board
Remo Bodei, Università di Pisa
Lina Bolzoni, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
Francesco Bruni, Università di Venezia
Cesare De Michelis, Università di Padova
Giorgio Ficara, Università di Torino
Rachel Jacoff, Wellesley College
Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University
Gilberto Pizzamiglio, Università di Venezia
Margaret Rosenthal, University of Southern California
John Scott, University of Western Australia
Elissa Weaver, University of Chicago
Alvise Cornaro
WRITINGS ON THE SOBER LIFE
The Art and Grace of Living Long
Edited and translated, with additional notes
by Hiroko Fudemoto
Foreword by Greg Critser
Introduction and Essay by Marisa Milani
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press 2014
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-1-4426-4509-7
Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer
recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.
The Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Cornaro, Luigi, 1475–1566 [Discorsi della vita sobria. English] Writings on
the sober life : the art and grace of living long / Alvise Cornaro ; edited
and translated by Hiroko Fudemoto ; foreword by Greg Critser ;
introduction and essay by Marisa Milani.
(Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library)Translation of: Discorsi della vita sobria. Includes
bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4426-4509-7 (bound)
1. Health – Early works to 1800. 2. Longevity – Early works to 1800.
I. Fudemoto, Hiroko, editor, translator II. Critser, Greg,
writer of added commentary III. Milani, Marisa writer of added
commentary IV. Title. V. Title: Discorsi della vita sobria. English. VI. Series:
Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library series
RA775.C6713 2014 613 C2013-908700-1
Publication of this book has been assisted by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura,
Toronto.
This book has been published under the aegis and with financial assistance of:
Fondazione Cassamarca, Treviso; the National Italian-American Foundation;
Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Direzione Generale per la Promozione e la Cooperazione
Culturale; Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Direzione Generale per i
Beni Librari e gli Istituti Culturali, Servizio per la promozione del libro
e della lettura.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing
program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing
activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing industry
Development Program (BPIDP).
Contents
Foreword by Greg Critser vii
Note on the Translation by Hiroko Fudemoto xxvii
Acknowledgments xxxi
Introduction to Cornaro by Marisa Milani 3
Letter to Bishop Cornelio Musso by Bernardino Tomitano 72
A Treatise on the Sober Life by the Magnificent Messer
Luigi Cornaro, Noble Venetian 75
Addition to the Treatise on the Sober Life by Messer
Alvise Cornaro 102
A Brief Compendium of The Sober Life by Alvise Cornaro
With Many Things Added, Especially Useful and Necessary
for Those Who Are Old 107
Letter Written by the Magnificent Alvise Cornaro to the
Most Reverend Barbaro, Patriarch Elect of Aquileia 117
A Loving Exhortation by the Magnificent Messer
Alvise Cornaro 124
Eulogy for Alvise Cornaro 131
Selected Letters 140
How to Attain Immortality Living One Hundred Years, or
The Fortune of the Vita Sobria in the Anglo-Saxon World 183
Selected Terminology 214
Bibliography 223
Index 229
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Foreword
If one were asked to name a telling aspect of the early twenty-first
century, one would be hard pressed to come up with something better
than the subject of aging. For the first time in history, elderly popula-
tions are overtaking young populations in both numbers and influence.
The phenomenon is global; its impact wide and deep.
Hence today’s newfound interest in longevity or, rather, pro-longevity –
the belief that one can beat traditional aging and live an extra-long
healthy life. Like Cicero, who believed that we ought to “treat aging as
we would a disease,”1 the contemporary immortalist seeks the “end of
aging as we know it.”2 Modern society, too, is pro-longevist to its core,
driven by the twin forces of an aging population and the consumer-
ist medical engine that services it. Anti-aging medicine now surpasses
$50 billion a year in revenue. There are anti-aging medical societies and
magazines and TV channels. Politicians pander to the elderly. Sophia
Loren is on the cover of Modern Maturity.
Where did we get the idea that we can seriously retard or stop ag-
ing? The dream has lurked since Pythagoras, but the notion that
human agency might extend maximum lifespan arrives only with
the Italian Renaissance. This it did in the person of Alvise “Luigi”
Cornaro, and in his famous treatise La Vita Sobria. The book in your
hand features the first complete new English translation of that work
in more than 200 years. It is a remarkable work, one that elegantly
1 Marcus Tullius Cicero, “On Old Age,” in Letters and Treatises of Cicero and Pliny
(New York: PF Collier and Son, 1909), p. 58.
2 Aubrey DeGrey, Interview with Greg Critser, 22 September 2007. See also Aubrey De-
Grey, Ending Aging (New York, 2007).
viii Foreword
deepens, fixes, and restores. It also preserves and explains Cornaro’s
eccentricities, while making them more approachable to the twenty-
first-century mind. In this and its accompanying documents, some of
them translated into English for the first time, we can inhabit the world
of the original immortalist.
Who was he?
Early Life
On 17 July 1509 the great Venetian general Andrea Gritti and a troop of
soldiers docked at the Porto Codalunga on the outer wall of Padua and
commenced to retake the city from its imperial captors. “Marco! Marco!”
he cried out as a call to rally. As a sign of good will, Gritti presented to the
besieged inhabitants a number of staple goods, along with “3 cara [di]
formento” – three carts full of wheat.3 The exchange, recorded in Marin
Sanudo’s famed Diarii, was meant to document the signal military event
of early-sixteenth-century life in the Veneto, but it also, at least retro-
spectively, brings together two transformative trends: land reform and
politico-economic entrepreneurship wielded by the men who planted
that land, much of it, eventually, in carbohydrate-rich New World crops.4
Alvise Cornaro prospered by them all. Arguably, he was also, at one
time or another, sickened by them.
Born in Venice in c.1484, Cornaro spent his early years pursuing a
dream: to restore his family’s presumed lost noble lineage.5 Over and
over, in pleading after pleading, he insisted that he descended from the
same line as Doge Marco Cornaro. The young man told a mangled, un-
believable story, something about an ancestor in Morea who had lost his
connection to the old line family. Not surprisingly, the keepers of the
Libro D’Oro repeatedly turned him down. In the highly bureaucratized
Venice of the period, that meant one thing for a young man: limits –
limits on one’s future, limits on one’s ability to live the good life.
Fortunately for Alvise, there were options. His mother, whose family had
the real money in the Cornaro household, sent him to live with an uncle,
3 Sanudo, I diarii di Marino Sanuto, July 1509.
4 New World crops – rice and corn – figured heavily in Veneto agriculture during
the period. The “3 carts of wheat” may have been corn, given the use of the same
word – formentum – for the new crop. See James McCann, Maize and Grace (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 63–77.
5 The best single account of Cornaro’s early years is in Giuseppe Fiocco, Alvise Cornaro: Il
suo tempo e le sue opere (Venice: N. Pozza, 1965), pp. 15–44, and in Marisa Milani.
Foreword ix
“Barba” Angelieri, in Padua, about thirty miles inland from Venice. It was
a fortuitous match. Barba Angelieri was the classic political entrepreneur,
obtaining municipal, ecclesiastical, and academic posts to further his
economic interests. Padua itself was in nearly continuous turmoil, having
survived the League of Cambrae wars by constantly shifting allegiances be-
tween Maximillian’s empire and the Serenissima. The result was a culture
of experimentation and relative openness. And opportunity; with Venice
shifting its empire away from sea and only land – the result of setbacks in
Turkey and elsewhere – suddenly the fetid marshy lands around it became
a prize. Venetians began an aggressive series of acquisitions. The lands
that Barba Angelieri owned soared in value. All this the young Cornaro
took in, a heady brew of enterprise and action, intellectual synthesis and
guile. The lesson: one could transcend traditional boundaries.
He tried attending law school and got bored; his “choleric” nature, he
later wrote, made him a bad candidate for a profession given to abstract
reasoning and rigid theoretical rules. Instead, he began to frequent the
arts world. As a youth, he had joined a Compagnia de la Calza, one of
the period’s informal theatre and arts troupes, many of which displayed
a dangerous pro-Imperial tang. Now, he began to meet poets and play-
wrights and architects. He travelled to Rome to see the recently revealed
treasures, classical art that would transform his later life.
Following the ways of Barba Angelieri, who left him several large par-
cels of land when he died, Cornaro became a deft player in the power
game of early-sixteenth-century Veneto.6 Another entry in Sanudo notes
how Cornaro and a band of mounted hunters once rode through the pi-
azza outside of St Mark’s and deposited the era’s equivalent of a gift bas-
ket – ten roe-deer, two wild boars, two stags – “tutto lui mandor a donar al
reverendissimo cardinal Pisani, per haver il vescovado di Padua.”7 Pisani
later made him financial administrator of the Paduan diocese.
6 For a discussion of land reclamation and Cornaro’s influence, see Denis Cosgrove,
The Palladian Landscape (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993),
pp. 161–4.
7 “In questa matina una cosa notanda, che per piazza di San marco atorno et per corte di
palazzo fo portato da fachini una cazason fata a Fosson per Alvise Corner, sta a Padoa,
videlicet 10 caprioli, 2 porchi ciangari, et do cervi grande, che fo bel veder.” [“This
morning there was a thing to be noted, that through piazza san Marco, both around
and in the courtyard of the palace, porters carried game hunted in Fosson by Alvise
Corner, who lives in Padua, that is to say 10 roe-deers, 2 boars, and 2 large stags, and it
was a beautiful thing to behold.”] Sanudo, I diarii di Marino Sanuto, 27 January 1519.
See Linda Carrol’s discussion of this in her Young Charles V: 1500–1539 (New Orleans:
University Press of the South, 2000), pp. 24–5.