devoting more care to the management of his villa than to his business in the city. Rinuccini wrote Dialogus de Libertate one year after the Pazzi conspiracy, while he was in forced retirement at his villa outside Florence, which he made the setting for his dialogue. There he said he led “ab urbana frequentia et, quae ab ea fluunt, innumeris avaritiae atque ambitionis curis semotam vitam” (a life dis sociated from urban congestion and the immeasurable greed and abition which flow from it).196 Rinuccini’s description of the vices of city dwellers would be echoed nearly a century later by Taegio in La Villa (p. 2) where he wrote that he could not see anything in the city but “pride, ambition, greed, hatred, falsehood, and idolatry.” Rinuccini said that it was not his purpose to tell others how to live, only to explain why he chose his way of life, which was to attain “what the Greeks called euthemia, a word we might translate as spiritual well being, or simply tranquillity.”197 Rinuccini defined “tranquillity” in terms of his interpretation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, as follows:
Quod si Aristotelem sequi volumus qui non inhabitu sed in actu collocavit foelicitatem, hanc ipsam animi quietem et tranquillitatem carentiamque perturbationum fundamentum sedemque foelicitatis non immerito arbitramur, quod ita institutus animus facilime ad actionis aut contemplationis operationem sese conferet.
(If we agree with Aristotle’s conviction that happiness lies not in passivity but in action, we shall conclude that tranquillity is the essential foundation and basis of happiness because it allows us to devote ourselves properly to either action or contemplation.)198
In the soliloquy that concludes the dialogue, Rinuccini made clear that he felt justified in retreating from the city only because political conditions there had become unbearable for him. In words that are reminiscent of Seneca’s statement in De Otio, that a man has good reason for retiring “si res publica corruptior est quam ut adiuvari posit” (if the state is so corrupt that it cannot be helped),199 Rinuccini wrote,
Libertatis occupatoribus gratificer perpeti non possum. Propterea, hac, ut videtis, villula et hoc agello contentus, nullis anxius curis, nec quid agatur in civitate perquirens, quiete libereque vitam duco.
(I cannot peacefully tolerate the usurpers of our liberty. Therefore, as you see, I lead a quiet and free life, content with this little villa and farm, free from all anxiety, never inquiring into what goes on in the city.)200
For Rinuccini, as for Seneca, service to the state took priority over leisure. In fact, as soon as he was again offered a position in the government of the city, Rinuccini ended his retirement and returned to Florence. However, while it was possible, according to Rinuccini, to pursue a life of otium in either the city or the country, the setting he chose for his own “otium cum dignitate et sine interpellatione quietem” was “villula et hoc agello”; in other words, a villa.
In Taegio’s La Villa, ocio is leisure spent in the active pursuit of knowedge. It is associated with pleasure and tranquillity of mind, and it is made possible by villa life. Knowledge of the truth depends on leisure, a point Vitauro makes in La Villa (p. 12) by asking rhetorically, “How can [truth] be had except by means of discourse and leisure put to good use to acquire it?” By calling the leisure he associated with the pursuit of knowledge felice (happy) and productive of quiete d’animo (quiet of mind), Taegio was agreeing with Seneca, who “when in his Sabine [villa] … attended to his very honorable studies with happy leisure and great quiet of mind.” Taegio used the term tranquillità d’animo in connection with leisure as he described the the villa of Francesco Torniello: “He escapes to the sunny and very happy hill of Vergano, where with great tranquillity of mind he enjoys the freedoms and pleasures of the villa.” Taegio associated tranquillity of mind with the mythical golden age, as he penned these words (p. 16): “Hence if neither cities nor castles had ever been built, men living in the country with greatest concord and tranquillity of mind would pass their years in the manner in which the ancients did in the golden age.”201
For Taegio, the study of literature and philosophy constituted learning, and learning led to the kind of knowledge, “la cognitione del vero” (knowledge of the truth), that he called both “il fin dell’anima” (the spirit’s goal) and the highest pleasure. In La Villa (p. 147), at the beginning of the discussion of the three kinds of pleasure, Partenio says, “I don’t know anything more pleasing than learning, and while I read some book that satisfies me with noble food, I feel it nourishing my mind.” Near the conclusion of the same section, Vitauro tells Partenio that natural philosophy is the “appointed food for your mind.” According to Taegio, the “ocio delle lettere” (scholarly leisure) that makes such mental nourishment possible can be found more readily in the villa than in the city. By calling the pursuit of knowledge a pleasure, and by defining pleasure and establishing its place in a system of human motivations, Taegio did more than expand the theme of villa as locus amoenus; he followed Aristotle, who said that the intellectual life is the perfect ideal of happiness, by grounding his argument for the superiority of villa life in a theory of happiness. By associating the pleasure of the pursuit of knowledge with the honorato ocio of the villa, Taegio recalled both Cicero and Petrarch, and with them argued for the surpassing suitability of the villa as a setting for the contemplative life of scholarly and philosophical pursuits.
The Function of La Villa’s Dialogue Form
La Villa is a polemical work that pretends to be a record of a conversation between two aristocratic Milanese gentlemen. In it Taegio juxtaposes two contradictory arguments, and resolves the tension between them by using one to overturn the other. The question debated in La Villa is whether a palace in the city or a villa in the country is the more suitable setting for the life of a true gentleman. At the outset Partenio, who represents the urban patriciate, condemns villa life and the contemplation it fosters. The common theme of Partenio’s various assertions early in the dialogue is that virtue and happiness are to be found in the active life and, by extension, life in the city. Vitauro, representing the feudal nobility, denounces cities while he extols the virtue and happiness he associates with contemplation and villa life.
As the conversation progresses, two issues arise. One is whether or not farming is a noble, useful, and necessary occupation. The other is whether the pursuit of philosophical studies is more easily accommodated in the city or in the villa. The latter issue provides Vitauro with the pretext for the roll call of villa owners, many of whom are described as dottissimo (very learned), that fills fifty pages in the first half of the book. The second half of La Villa is devoted to a contest between the respective pleasures of city life on the one hand and country life on the other.
At first the conflicting viewpoints of the interlocutors are explored through logical argumentation, giving the appearance of a sincere effort to discover whether one has more validity than the other. Eventually Vitauro emerges as the princeps sermonis, proving the author’s points by easily overturning each of Partenio’s weak objections. At the end of the dialogue, Partenio serves merely as a straw man, even assisting Vitauro as he contrasts the pleasures of the villa with the miseries of the city by setting him up with leading questions. It finally becomes evident that Vitauro has won the debate when Partenio admits that he knows his opponent is telling the truth. From that point on, there is no real conflict, and the conversation continues, not as a true dialogue, but rather as a monologue in disguise.
Taegio himself never said why he composed La Villa as a dialogue, but two better-known Italian writers of dialogues in the second half of the sixteenth century, Sperone Speroni and Torquato Tasso, did reflect on the capabilities of the dialogue form and explained in writing their reasons for using it. Speroni, who is among the villa owners Taegio praised in La Villa, wrote twenty-one dialogues, ten of which were published in seven editions printed in Venice between 1542 and 1558.202 Taegio was probably familiar with some of them.203
Taegio
