The innocents of florenc.., p.13
The Innocents of Florence, page 13
Despite the wheel’s ongoing use, tradition was giving way to innovation in other areas of the foundling home, especially in medicine through its affiliation with the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. In the previous century, the pioneering anatomist Lorenzo Nannoni made history by launching the first surgery courses on infants at the Innocenti, and Gaetano Palloni, a legendary specialist in childhood diseases, offered some of the first classes ever taught on pediatrics there in 1802. In 1815, one of the earliest maternity wards was established at the Innocenti for the care of poor pregnant woman, and that same year, a pioneering school of obstetrics was founded there to train a new class of midwives and rid the foundling home of older ones prone to ignorance and superstition. In testament to these advances, Andrea della Robbia’s terracotta baby, swathed in blue and white atop Brunelleschi’s arches, was chosen as the insignia of the American Academy of Pediatrics at its founding in 1930.
Michelagnoli turned out to be a rather dubious steward of this remarkable medical pedigree. The reform-obsessed director insisted on feeding infants goat milk instead of human milk, a controversial decision aimed at helping the Innocenti address—albeit acrimoniously—a perennial labor crisis, its shortage of wet nurses. Many resisted the plan. In 1849, a cartoon appeared in the satirical journal Il Lampione (The Lamppost) with the heading “Herod on the Counterattack,” depicting Michelagnoli riding on a goat under a banner proclaiming, “Onward, onward, I will renew the slaughter of the Innocents.”
Seal of the American Academy of Pediatrics from 1931 to 1940. American Academy of Pediatrics
This allusion to the biblical slaughter of innocent children cast Michelagnoli as a reform-minded but death-inducing tyrant, as he is shown facing an army of infuriated infants and wet nurses prepared to battle him for daring to introduce animal milk into the diet. In an earlier cartoon, Michelagnoli was drawn surrounded by foundlings roused in anger as they revolt under a banner that reads, “Down with King Herod.” The message could not have been clearer: Michelagnoli was a zealot whose reforms were sowing disaster and death among the very children it was his duty to protect.
These events marked the start of the Innocenti’s “goat milk scandals.” Between 1860 and 1863, under the direction of an unorthodox physician (or quack) named Calosi, the Innocenti continued to administer goat milk to its infants—but not from a sterilized bottle, glass, or other device. Instead, babies were put to suckle directly from the goat’s teats, an act as horrifying to its critics then as it is to us now. In 1866, a gravely ill woman whose peasant husband had just died found herself bedridden and unable to care for her six children, the youngest of whom was five months old. A dumbstruck parish priest discovered that this “poor creature, because of the lack of other means or hands to help, was actually suckled by a goat, something truly shameful in this Age of Light.” To rescue the child and avoid what he called “an epidemic crisis that might have arisen from the great stench that the aforementioned suckling goat had left in the room,” the priest asked the Innocenti to intervene. He would have been shocked to know that, per Calosi’s order, the Innocenti had actually authorized this unseemly practice.
Follow for extended description
Illustration by Nicola Sanesi in Il Lampione(January 18, 1849).
Cartoons satirizing Michelagnoli’s reforms in The Lamppost.
Illustration by Nicola Sanesi in Il Lampione(November 13, 1848).
The editorial director of the journal that took Michelagnoli to task for his goat milk initiative, The Lamppost, was none other than Carlo Lorenzini, now better known by his pen name, Carlo Collodi, as author of the celebrated The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), which would appear three decades later. A volunteer in the Tuscan army in the Italian Wars of Independence of 1848 that led to unification, Collodi founded The Lamppost that same year. Not surprisingly, it was suppressed just months later, in 1849, by the Innocenti’s official director and ruler of Tuscany, Leopold II. But Collodi was not a man to back down from a fight. In 1847, he published a second inflammatory newspaper, the fittingly titled La Scaramuccia (The Skirmish), which continued The Lamppost’s provocative lines of social critique. Collodi’s hectoring of Michelagnoli stemmed from his dedication to defending children’s rights; his journalism established him as one of Italy’s most influential thinkers on childhood development long before the appearance of Pinocchio.
Michelagnoli was a member of Florence’s Academy of the Georgofili, a learned society that tragically made world headlines during a recent bombing by the Sicilian Mafia. Founded in 1753, the Georgofili was a brainchild of the Florentine Enlightenment, whose members applied rational and scientific principles to agrarian reform. Its initiatives exerted tremendous legislative impact, leading to the abolition of Florence’s storied artisanal guilds in 1771, which removed the Innocenti once and for all from the control of the Silk Weavers and placed it under the direct rule of the Tuscan grand duke. Michelagnoli believed that an education in farming was the only secure path to economic self-sufficiency for his charges at the Innocenti, so he supported programs that taught children to cultivate the land. Part of his motivation was a faith in science. Naked fear also figured into it for Michelagnoli: he was worried that the poorly resourced youth under his care might have to beg for food one day if they lacked the skills to grow it themselves.
Michelagnoli established three public farms (Case di Deposito) on land owned by the Innocenti on the outskirts of Florence. Inspired by the work of Cosimo Ridolfi, the aristocratic president of the Georgofili and founder of Tuscany’s first agricultural college, Michelagnoli used these farms to employ male foundlings who had been forced to return to the Innocenti as adults after failing to integrate into society. One of his successful cases was a boy named Settimo, who had arrived at the Innocenti in 1845 as a baby. After being sent out to a wet nurse in the country, Settimo was ordered back to the Innocenti by the parish priest in 1849, and from there was sent out again to several other families. Eventually, he was trained at a public farm in the village of Montanino, where his agricultural skills finally anchored him in an otherwise nomadic life.
Despite his reforms and good intentions, Michelagnoli, like Borghini, faced conflicting views on his directorship. His ideas were ambitious, but he did not always keep his eyes on the numbers. Financial woes undermined his directorship, as they had Borghini’s: eight of the twelve farms that belonged to the Innocenti had collapsed by the time he stepped down. Meanwhile, massive political changes were taking place that would not only change the Innocenti forever, but also make it a centerpiece of national debate.
* * *
The epigraph from a leading Italian statesman (“We have made Italy, but we have yet to make Italians!”), Massimo d’Azeglio, symbolizes the challenges faced by a newly formed Italian nation upon its belated unification in 1861, after the decades-long Risorgimento, the political “resurgence” that consolidated the independent Italian states into one kingdom. The task outlined by d’Azeglio was neither as intuitive nor as inevitable as one might think. The concept of “Italy” actually stretched back to ancient times: the emperor Augustus had used the rallying cry “tota Italia,” pure Italy, against the allegedly unpatriotic Marc Antony and his foreign consort, Cleopatra, in the battle for Rome after Caesar’s death. And in the groundbreaking treatise On Eloquence in the Vernacular (1302–05), Dante had passionately argued on behalf of a unifying volgare illustre, illustrious vernacular, that would give the fragmented peoples of the Italian peninsula a common language. But the accumulated centuries of foreign occupation, differing dialects, and regional rule made it difficult for Italians to rally under the new national flag, the red, white, and green tricolore, three colors. The scholar and legislator Francesco De Sanctis captured the situation in a speech to the inaugural Italian parliament in 1864:
Today Italians see Italy through the prism of their province. It is thus not enough to shout “Long Live Italy!” and think that Italy has been made. I can see that everyone still carries inside them something of their past, of their memories, of their traditions. Each of us, though Italian, nevertheless still feels in some measure Neapolitan, or Lombard, or Tuscan.
So divided was the infant Italy that when members of a noble family from Milan traveled to Sicily in the mid-nineteenth century, baffled locals mistook their dialect for English. In a landmark Sicilian novel from a few generations later, Giovanni Verga’s House by the Medlar Tree (1881), the word Italy was no patriotic symbol to the island’s poor fishing families, but rather an ominous code for onerous new taxes and potentially fatal military conscription. (One of the characters dies, in grimly fitting fashion, on a battleship called the Re d’Italia, King of Italy.) A Freudian slip by a northern politician in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s bestselling novel The Leopard (1958) describes the “happy annexation” of Sicily by the Turin government before he sheepishly changes the words to “glorious union.” The ultimate proof of the regional burdens created by the Italian government’s new laws was the exodus of millions of southern Italian immigrants, who left their impoverished homeland in search of a better life in America, Australia, Argentina, and Brazil, among other far-flung places.
Despite the lofty hurdles to national identity, cultural and political forces joined hands to create this missing sense of italianità, Italian identity, proclaimed by d’Azeglio. His father-in-law, Alessandro Manzoni, had labored for more than a decade on the thankless task of translating his own monumental novel The Betrothed (1827) into the acclaimed Tuscan edition of 1840, going so far as to hire D’Azeglio’s Florentine nanny, Emilia Luti, to help him knead the various dialects of his original version into Dante’s Tuscan, which he envisioned as the language of the future Italy. Tuscan would indeed become the national tongue upon unification, but only about one in ten of these new citizens of Italy could speak it. Creating Italians could not be done by fiat or decree; a long and slow process of cultural reconstruction, principally through education, was required to “translate” Florentines, Sicilians, Milanese, Neapolitans, and the like into veri italiani, true Italians.
There was also the need to create the national child, a program that implicated the Innocenti directly. As De Sanctis’s words revealed, a man or woman born before unification would always carry within them the vestige of being something other than “Italian.” But those born after 1861 represented the biological and metaphorical tabula rasa, clean slate, for the construction of a purely Italian national identity cleansed of regional or local claims. The names of the Innocenti reflected this new national spirit: many children were called Italia, and in one extreme case of patriotism a foundling was given the triple-barreled name Vittorio Garibaldi e Camillo, in honor of the first Italian king, Vittore Emanuele II, the legendary general Giuseppe Garibaldi, and the architect of political unification Camillo Cavour.
The year of Italian unification, 1861, also marked the end of Michelagnoli’s oft-maligned directorship. To his delight, the standardizing spirit of unification had made it increasingly difficult for individual cities to continue operating their wheels. Ferrara closed its wheel in 1867, as did Turin, Rome, and Novara in 1869. In 1873, Italian cities from Venice and Siena in the north to Naples and Cosenza in the south also shuttered their wheels. Eventually nearly all Italian cities agreed that the wheel had to go. For Italy’s governing class, the anonymity despised by Michelagnoli was no longer an acceptable element of infant abandonment. The Innocenti remained a holdover—but only for a bit longer. On June 29, 1875, at 9:45 p.m., a baby girl wearing half a brass medal was deposited anonymously on the Innocenti’s wagon wheel, along with a note indicating that she had already been christened. The Innocenti named her Laudata Chiusura, which translates as Praised Be the Closure. Later the same day, a baby boy with part of a medal on a red wool thread was deposited on the wheel and given the name Ultimo Lasciato, The Last One Left. The references are obvious enough: Laudata and Ultimo were the final two children left anonymously at the Innocenti. Two days later, on July 1, 1875, the wheel and its barred window were forever sealed.
* * *
Meanwhile, educators in the newly unified Italy assumed a dramatic role, as compulsory grade school taught newly minted Italian boys, and to a lesser extent girls, Dante’s Tuscan dialect as their linguistic birthright. Early Italian school curricula were filled with overtly patriotic texts like Edmondo De Amicis’s Cuore (Heart), a tearjerker and immediate bestseller published in 1886 on October 18, the first day of the Italian school year. Set during Italian unification, the novel depicts the lives of schoolchildren from the north and south in a narrative focused on imparting moral values like devotion to country, generosity to the poor, and love and respect for family—ironically enough, themes that would later make it a key instructional text in the repressive regimes of both Fascist Italy and the Communist bloc.
This new Italian child drew on surprising sources. Thanks in large part to the saccharine Disney version of the story, Pinocchio has become a global icon of how a naughty but lovable—and thoroughly de-Italianized—marionette with rosy cheeks and a scalable nose learns to follow the rules and care for his long-suffering father, Geppetto, becoming a real-life boy by the narrative’s end. The original story features a less cuddly protagonist. In Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio, the longer, leaner Pinocchio gets in serious trouble, sowing destruction and even death in his wake as he veers from the good path and succumbs to a life of lies, laziness, and temptation. The puppet’s ultimate redemption, which occurs after he recognizes the error of his ways and makes good on the love he owes Geppetto, represents a turning point in the history of Italian childhood.
Pinocchio’s words at the book’s conclusion signal a change so dramatic that he barely recognizes his former mischievous self: “How funny I was when I was a puppet! And how happy I am now to have become a good little kid!” Collodi aimed to show Italian children, the flower of a freshly born nation, how to study hard and follow the rules in order to have a viable future—and avoid the metaphorical donkey ears that Pinocchio sprouts when ignorance and torpor engulf him. The need for this message was great: at the time of unification, only one in four Italians could read and write. By 1880, free compulsory schooling had raised the literacy rate to nearly 40 percent. A puppet without strings and thus a creature of free will, Pinocchio became a symbol of the Italian child who willingly embraced an educational system that was transforming the nation’s youth and, in the spirit of D’Azeglio’s plea, finally making Italians. To understand Pinocchio, the Italian philosopher Giuseppe Prezzolini once remarked, was to understand Italy.
The same modernized “Italian” spirit that permeates Pinocchio was also redefining the Innocenti. Five years after the publication of Collodi’s book, in 1888, the Innocenti reorganized its wet nurse areas and set up new infirmaries, while also installing electric lighting, hot and cold running water, and new kitchens. In 1890, the Innocenti officially became an opera pia, national public charity, and brefotrofio, orphanage, thus ending its half-millennium as an ospedale, hospital. The impact was profound: the Innocenti, that most local and Florentine of institutions, was now fully national—as Italian as Pinocchio himself.
Because of the Innocenti’s legendary status, its commissioner wanted the orphanage featured in the upcoming Universal Exposition of Paris in 1900, so he hired the renowned photographer Giacomo Brogi to document its daily life. The Exposition was a major international cultural event, the equivalent of a world’s fair. It was also what an observer described as “a hymn to the progressive capacities of bourgeois culture” and “scientific reason.” The modernization of the Innocenti during the past century and its medical advances, which had revolutionized pediatrics as well as obstetrics and vaccinology, made it the perfect fit for the Exposition, whose booths were filled with the latest developments in the arts, sciences, electrical engineering, and mechanical and chemical industries. The Exposition’s organizers decided to display Brogi’s photos in the booth aptly named Social Economy–Public Welfare–Hygiene.
At first glance, it is surprising that these beautiful sepia-tinted images actually depict few children. Instead, Brogi highlighted the orphanage’s adult administrators, doctors, nurses, and caregivers. He also featured the architecture of the Innocenti: the Brunelleschian symmetries, cutting-edge equipment, and clean and open spaces all suggested an efficient laboratory geared toward the well-being of children. A photograph of the Innocenti’s nursing women, arranged in a factory floor of care, revealed the systematic nature of the new Innocenti.
Brogi’s photos cast the Innocenti as what one commentator called a “place of perfection,” a venue with the best lighting, most advanced equipment, and highest attention to detail, down to how it washed its dirty linens and disposed of its trash. But the photos were not all about functionality and best practices; some captured more human and intangible elements. In one, a group of allieve infermiere, female student nurses who assisted doctors by caring for infants, is shown relaxing and socializing in the garden designed especially for them. The al fresco scene offers a welcome visual change from the relentlessly sober, clinical interiors that dominate Brogi’s other images.
