In her The Stones of Florence, Mary McCarthy writes about a certain "Donna Maria Celiego" who was a female philosopher in Renaissance Florence. According to McCarthy, this woman owned nothing and slept outside, like Diogenes, and was famed for her wisdom.
Trouble is, I can't find any info about her beyond McCarthy's narrative. According to Google, she doesn't exist. Does anyone know who this mysterious Donna M. Celiego might be, or where I can learn more about her? Thanks!
The character of Maria Ciliegia (Mary Cherry) appears briefly in Malmantile Racquistato, a parody of epic poetry written by Italian poet and painter Lorenzo Lippi, published posthumously in 1674 under the anagrammatic name of Perlone Zipoli. The work is full of references to contemporary characters and places (the Malmantile in the poem is a kingdom but it was actually a ruined fortress near Florence) and written using popular Florentine expressions, which made it amusing but also difficult to understand. For that reason, Cardinale Leopoldo de’ Medici commissioned Paolo Minucci, a friend of Lippi (who appears in the poem as "Puccio Lamoni"), a critical edition of the text that added a large number of explanatory notes, so as to make the poem comprehensible to a wider audience. This second edition was eventually published in 1688 (Arrighi, 2010).
Maria Ciliegia shows up in the Stanza 43 of the Third Song.
Dietro a suoi passi mettesi in cammino Maria Ciliegia, illustre damigella;
Tutto lieto la segue il Ballerino,
Che canta il titutrendo falalella.
Va Meo col paggio, zoppica Masino,
Corre il Masselli, e il Capitan Santella.
Molti e molt'altri amici la seguiro,
E più Mercanti, c'hanno avuto il giro.
I'm not able to translate 17th century Tuscan slang, but the first line more or less says "Behind him, Maria Ciliegia, the illustrious damsel, set out on the road". It is followed by a list of characters that probably made sense to Florentine readers.
Or did they?
Stanza 43 is followed by a page-long footnote written by Minucci, that explains who were this "Maria Cieliegia" and the other cited people (translated below using Deepl/Google Translate)
She was a woman believed to be insane, who went around Florence receiving alms without asking for them. This woman, with an unusual phlegm and gravity, always talking to herself, said beautiful and sensible sentences; therefore, she was not considered crazy by many, but like Diogenes, who lived in a barrel, and for this action would have been considered crazy if he had not left such beautiful sentences and dogmas; which is exactly what this Lady Maria did. Like Diogenes, she also did not care for her house, but slept in the streets under some porch or loggia; and therefore she always carried with her a broom, to sweep up the place where she slept, and a brush for her dress, which, although not very real [?], was nevertheless too clean, and although full of patches, very beautiful [...]. In her bag she still had some linen, and many times a washing basin [?] or cauldron full of fire, in which she used to cook her food while walking through the streets. Under her skirt she had several bags, in which she put the pot and the dishes for her own use, and whatever was left over for her meals. She had sisters and nephews, who treated each other comfortably, and lived in a good little house, which belonged to the said Lady Maria, where she sometimes went to change clothes; but she never wanted to stay there, nor to sleep there, even though she was begged and forced by the said relatives to want to stay with them. She collected a lot of money, with which she bought what she needed inexpensively: and every Saturday evening she gave for God's sake whatever she had left over, and mostly to poor nuns, to whom she sometimes brought as much as ten scudi. When asked by someone for an opinion, she would not answer; but continuing her usual chatter, before the person left her, he would be satisfied with some sentence or motto, which she would say about the question.
For example. One morning, as she was standing under the loggia in front of the Temple of the Most Holy Annunciation, a young man asked her if she believed that his beautiful wife, who was very well known to Lady Maria, was honest; but he told her so in the dirtiest way possible. Lady Maria, without raising her head, or giving any sign of attention to the young man's question, continued her discourse, which was about the little respect that was paid to churches, and after much talk said:
Do you see this foul-mouthed young man, how little respect he pays to the Church? His wife is beautiful, and he took her, as she was honest: but what can she have learnt from him, if not how to become otherwise? and now I know what she has become, because every jealous person is a cuckhold.
And she continued her chattering, getting herself into various troubles, as she was wont to do: and so, chattering all day long from morning till night, she collected a great deal of money. She died, and a purse was found in her bag, in which there was a receipt for fifty scudi given to certain nuns, with the obligation to say one mass a month at the altar of the Ss. Nunziata for her soul: from which we deduce that she was not crazy.
From this description, she seems to have been some sort of rich and pious "bag lady" (literally, she carried bags with her few belongings) walking around Florence collecting money from passerbys to give it to nuns, eating in the streets, sleeping under porches (even though she owned a house), talking aloud to herself and saying things that other people occasionally found wise. Since the whole enterprise (the poem and the footnotes) was parodic and humorous, I'm not sure that we should take Minucci's description too seriously. He does insist a little too much that Maria Ciliegia was not crazy and he compares her to Diogenes, just like Lippi's "epic" heroes in the poem are anything but heroic (see Hauck et al., 2018).
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