Prologue
Well first of all, I ought to state the fact that I am dead. Yes, as dead as Dicken’s door nail. I’ve met the latter fellow by the way, you often find him haunting the corridors of all the libraries from London to Ljubljana. Not a bad chap as it goes, even if he does live with certain regret. The old boy gave his life to his work rather than his family - a fact that plagues his mortal soul. I, of course was married to Marietta; she was a nice girl in her own way, but did I love her? Well, it was five hundred years ago, renaissance Italy, and back then we didn’t marry for pity little things like love. On the contrary we had more practical things at stake; social status riches, all things to keep the wolf from the door. In those days the odd canis lupus came with the clear stench of plague, hunger and death. No, no, no, love is a very modern thing when it comes to marriage anyway. However I did get hitched, and at thirty-two years of age tying the knot for the first time in medieval Florence was unheard of. I had tried to keep such a thing at bay for as long as possible, I had far too many things to get out of life, no time to waste on such frivolous things like love and marriage, or even friends and lovers. That said societal pressures twisted my arm eventually. They all thought I was one of them of course; a single thirty-something intellectual, political-philosopher who’d been seen once or twice sharing a glass of wine with Michelangelo Buonarrotti, had indeed some tongues clattering around the Ponte Vecchio. Sounds all a bit silly now, doesn’t it? But in those days it was punishable by death. The state was all powerful and if it weren’t blasphemy or indecency laws it was something else. The latter almost did for me when my little book, written in homage to my great leader Cesare Borgia, came out. It was a scandal, but I got away with it - just. I had a right old time of things mind, mediaeval torture was no laughing matter; if you think your twenty-first century waterboarding is brutal, you don’t know the half of it.
Anyway, I’m rambling. I haven’t even given you the courtesy of introducing myself; my name is Nicolo Macchiavelli and like I said, I’m dead. Well, at least let’s say sort of dead, in other words I’m no longer mortal and haven’t been for half a millennia. Five centuries, seems a long time, no? My life is as close to you as the Norman conquests were for me. I’ve seen a lot of things over the years, which to me are just fleeting turns of an autumn leaf blowing in the wind: the enlightenment, industrial and political revolutions, wars, never ending wars.
I’ve been watching from the libraries, amongst my books and in good company too. There are many of us distinct messengers who continue to observe the world in which we once inhabited, perhaps with even greater fervent analysis and criticism than in our breathing hours. Gets a little tiresome from time to time; you see in this digital age of yours down there that Swiss idealist twerp Rousseau has a few things to say. It proves difficult to get any peace at all and then when he and old Hobbesy get together they start fighting like cats and dogs. It’s in those times when I often escape to the campaniles of the peninsula, where over the years, I’ve looked down on the Italian piazzas and watched great minds come and go; ideologies rise and fall and political discourse move and swing. One thing though remains in all this manoeuvring. One adjective amongst all remains constant throughout the centuries. I am referring of course to my eponymous term Machiavellian. They said on my tomb stone, no epilogue would befit me; well then, how about we just let just one word sum it all up, the word that will forever be equated with political shrewdness and artful skulduggery. The problem is, rather like my work in general, the word is and has been as misrepresented, overused and misunderstood as the following: literally, eponymous (ironically) and fuck. Ah beh, cosa posso fare io?
Whatever, I should be getting on with this; look I have a little story rather close to my heart. A story that I watched unfold very closely. One, because it happened in a certain little town I once lived in, and moreover on the five hundredth anniversary of my passing.
Somma Emiliana, was in the heart of the Emilian plane. It was home to me briefly in the days when I was banished from Florence. When I heard the rumblings, I decided to take my spirit there to haunt the staircases of the castle again and perhaps lend an ear or two.
Europe and Italy in that year, was a fractious, waring, unsettled place, just like it had been in my time of life. First the union of nations had broken up and then many of those states followed suit. Regionalism replaced globalism and Italy’s ancient tradition of patriotism for one’s city rather than country, returned triumphantly. The city state, once lost to the bygone feudal system was back with a vengeance; first Napoli, then the isle of Sicily, Sardinia, and Trentino. Milano became the capital of all lands above the Po River apart from the south-Tyrolean land of Trentino that had full autonomy and was now a united German speaking nation. All Italian speakers were booted out into neighbouring Veneto, which almost caused a civil war between the natives of Venice, Verona and Vicenza and the Tyrolean refugees.
Rome was still the capital of the Italian republic, but the country had shrunk to pretty much just the peninsulas heartlands. From the Tiber to the south side of the Po lay the last bastion regions, bar San Marino of course that had always been as so. The nation they called Italy from the Alps to Sicily had not long been celebrating its hundred and sixtieth anniversary when the split began and other former sovereign states soon copied. All over Europe, Catalonia, Scotland, The Republic of London, La Republique de Coste D’Azur, Bavaria. One by one they all broke off, becoming independent and for what reason? Not even they knew really, but they had decided that previous systems had failed and things couldn’t get any worse.
Some of these new independent regions or city states had power, and managed to get along pretty well. Trade deals were formed and European life went on like in the Middle Ages only with twenty-first century technology.
Somma Emiliana, was one of the richest towns in the Italian peninsula, car manufacturing, rich farmlands, enough pigs to feed the whole continent, textiles and technology were all there; why then should they pay to Rome? They thought. Just to keep the Vatican and a few museums up and running? They retorted. But what did they feel? What did they know, or understand what their fate would be?
To get an idea, I haunted every corner of the city; from the piazzas to the palazzi and every word on every lip the of the town’s population, from the mayor, to the barber, to the beggar and the thief. In the end, it was a sad, sad situation, a town that had lost all control due to fear and weak leadership, that’s if you ask me? Yes, in my opinion, there wasn’t a Cesare Borgia, or anyone in sight fit enough to lick his boots.
However, who is asking me? No one! So in this history of the twenty-first century, my job is not to look down from the campanile onto the piazzas and porticos just to make claims about why it happened, but indeed how it happened. With no judging pointing fingers, I shall let the simple stories of the inhabitants of this little renaissance town, come city state republic write their own lines.
