Leon Battista Alberti - The Books on the Family

Page 20

Italian Literature - Einaudi

...highly recommended and most welcome. And so, my sons, I see it as the duty of the young to love and obey the old, to revere age, and to hold all their elders in the place of a father, and to offer them, as is due, the greatest respect and honor. In great age, one finds long experience Original: pruova, meaning "proof" or "test," here referring to the empirical testing of life's events through experience. of things; therein lies the knowledge of many customs, many manners, and the minds of men. There, too, is the record of having seen, heard, and contemplated infinite useful things, and for every turn of fortune, the best and greatest remedies.

Our father, Messer Benedetto—a man whom I must remember in all things, as I do, for in every matter he always sought to be known by us as most prudent and most civil The term civilissimo refers to the humanist ideal of the "civil life" (vivere civile), emphasizing the responsibility of an individual to participate constructively in the social and political life of the city.—while finding himself with some of his friends on the island of Rhodes, entered into discussions regarding the unjust and bitter calamities of our family. They judged that our Alberti family had received too great an injury from fortune; and seeing perhaps in some of our fellow citizens some flame of envy and unjust hatred being kindled, it happened during the discussion that Messer Benedetto then predicted many things for our land Reference to Florence, the Alberti family's home city, from which they were exiled in the late 14th and early 15th centuries., many of which we have already seen come to pass in no small part.

Since it seemed a very marvelous thing to those who heard him to predict so openly what was difficult for others even to comprehend, they begged that it might please him to reveal from where he obtained that which he foretold from so far off. Messer Benedetto, a most humane and easy-going man, smilingly uncovered his high brow and showed them those white hairs canuti: gray or white hair, used here as a symbol for the wisdom and empirical knowledge gained through a long life, and said: "These hairs make me prudent and knowledgeable in everything."

And who could doubt that in a long life there is a great memory of the past, much practice in affairs, and an intellect well-exercised in judging and knowing the causes, the ends, and the outcomes of things? It is age that knows how to join the present things with those that happened yesterday, and from there to sense how much might result tomorrow. Thus, through such foresight, there appears and follows certain and most fitting counsel; and by counseling, it provides the best remedy to sustain the fami- The text cuts off mid-word, presumably "family" (famiglia).