Joseph Luzzi, a professor at Bard College in New York, is a Dante scholar whose books argue for the relevance of the great Italian art and literature of the late middle ages and Renaissance to our own times. A great populariser and advocate of the humanities in public life, he has done for Dante what his Bard colleague Daniel Mendelsohn did for Homer in An Odyssey and other books.
This short volume tells the story of the Hospital of the Innocents in Dante’s home town of Florence, a building Luzzi has been fascinated by since encountering it in 1987 on his college year abroad. The Innocenti, as it is known, was the first institution in Europe devoted solely to the care of unwanted children. The first foundling, named Agata because she was left by its gates on Saint Agata’s Day 1445, had been nibbled at by mice.
At the time, children made up half the population of Florence, and many were abandoned. The church demanded “be fruitful and multiply” and condemned the use of contraception, which was primitive anyway. Babies were left inside church doorways, dumped in rivers and chucked on to rubbish tips. They were, in the lively Tuscan vernacular, the gittatelli – the thrown-away ones. Many were the result of unwanted sexual advances, especially on servants by their masters. In a fiercely patriarchal society, the majority of children deposited at the Innocenti were girls. The mothers would break a coin in two and hang one half round the baby’s neck in the hope of meeting them again.
The Innocenti was built by the Silk Weavers Guild in an era when the contribution that wealthy Florentines were expected to make to civic life was measured in counting-house ledgers like “a business’s gains and losses”. The building had arches designed by Filippo Brunelleschi, architect of the Duomo, and it housed (and still houses) works by the greatest artists of the Renaissance: Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, Andrea and Luca della Robbia. By caring for and educating its children, the Innocenti saved many of them from poverty, sex work or trafficking. And it lessened some of the stigma of illegitimacy, which in Renaissance Italy meant to be “born without honor, a status equivalent to a living death”. To suggest, as the book does in its subtitle, that the Innocenti “discovered” our modern idea of childhood feels a stretch. But it did contribute to the now accepted notion that the fate of every child matters, and inspired similar institutions across the world, including Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital, established in London in 1739.
Luzzi mostly tells the story straight, without the blend of memoir and scholarship that characterises his previous books. He does make brief reference to where his interest in caregiving comes from: he became a father and widower on the same day, when his heavily pregnant wife was killed in a car crash, and his mother and sisters helped him raise his daughter. For more on that compelling story, I recommend his book In a Dark Wood.
But this book mostly paints a wonderfully sensual and cinematic picture of early modern Florence in all its grubby, gorgeous detail. The Innocenti, like the city itself, mixed high-minded motives with utilitarian and cruel ones. It farmed out babies to wet nurses, who would use them as cash cows, almost starving them and sometimes even collecting payments after they had died. And it spent its donations on expensive art while feeding its charges on bread and water, the bread made not with flour but with the bran they also fed to the mules. The boys were taught a well-rounded curriculum of maths, Ciceronian rhetoric and music; the girls learned to weave and were pushed into a life of domestic service, even when the hospital’s directors knew that this opened them up to sexual exploitation.
The Innocenti emerges as an absorbing case study in how the beautiful frescoes, arching columns and paintings of the Italian Renaissance masked “the sweat and suffering of forced labor, the raping of slaves, the abuse of children”. The words of the German critic Walter Benjamin might have been this book’s epigram: “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
• The Innocents of Florence: The Renaissance Discovery of Childhood by Joseph Luzzi is published by WW Norton (£23). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
