Thu 2 Aug 2007
Staying in a convent can be a peaceful, inexpensive alternative to a hotel but one disadvantage is that there’s likely to be a curfew. Generally starting somewhere between 10pm and midnight, the curfew means that convent accomodation isn’t generally for the late night crowd. However, if you’re an obsessive reader and like to round off the day’s explorations with a book, it can be perfect.
The first time I stayed in a Roman convent I spent my evenings of politely enforced solitude reading My Secret Book, a comparitively little-known work by the Renaissance poet Petrarch. The book, which Petrarch apparently never intended for publication (hence the title), takes the form of three imagined dialogues between the poet and St Augustine, in which Petrarch deals with his unhappiness by confronting his various vices and weaknesses. (These were both personality traits with which the saint was well acquainted, as recorded in his own Confessions.)
My Secret Book is an artifact of a highly-strung young man growing up and learning to take control of his emotions, an allegorical conversation taking place in the form of a Socratic (Ciceronian?) dialogue. It’s uneven but in a very appealing way, veering from what today reads almost like the adolescent bathos of Adrian Mole to a didactic tale of self-discovery that is just crying out to become the centrepiece of a self-help cult.
The book, like Garibaldi’s My Life, has been published in the UK by Hesperus Press and it’s a great example of the kind of gems that they unearth. Their catalogue contains an excellent - and growing - selection of Italian literature translated into English. The Hesperus approach is to take a relatively short, lesser-known work, and give it an attractive wrapper and a new introduction, usually written by a well-known contemporary author. (This last makes me think of the Italian method of launching a new author with a “presentation”, where an established writer in a given genre introduces a newcomer to an audience at a library or bookshop.) The books really are very pretty, with glossy covers and flaps that give the books a very nice feel. They’re also relatively inexpensive, which is an especially good thing when you’re paying a premium to buy books imported to Italy.
And they’re perfect for reading on a warm autumn night in a Roman convent.
