For 10 long years after Paolo del Rosso’s arrest, no further moves in his favour appear to be recorded from the Malta end. Then Grand Master de Valette again intervened with Duke Cosimo de’ Medici on behalf of Del Rosso, a professed knight of St John, kidnapped in Rome while on official business of the Order.
Men are dark in colour, and unsuitable for war. Maltese women are very beautiful in shape and cover themselves when they leave the house- Giovanni Bonello
De Valette pleaded with De’ Medici to lighten the burden of the incarceration of the Order’s former envoy, and to obtain his release. That would have been a highly confidential mission which seems to have left no trace in the Maltese records but survives in the Florentine ones.
The Grand Master’s secret letter to De’ Medici, dated January 28, 1563, shows that De Valette had been prodded by someone to intervene on behalf of Del Rosso: “A letter tells me that Your Excellency, having almost eliminated the suspicions you harboured against the knight Fra Paolo del Rosso, has agreed to the relaxation of the conditions of his imprisonment in the castle of Pisa, where he is now allowed to roam free with a certain reassurance that he will not escape; if the matter does not displease you and could be done without disturbing your plans, I would wish that knights of this Order, who are not allowed to live outside the convent (Malta), would take up residence here, and that you would be pleased to allow that the said Fra Paolo be sent here, on condition that he would not be permitted to leave the castle (of St Angelo). It would cause me great pleasure to forestall all occasions for him to be of disservice to his Prince”.
De’ Medici passed on De Valette’s letter to his secretary with instructions to see to the matter. But again, nothing came of this plea. It would seem that De’ Medici did not even bother to reply to the Grand Master.
What we do know is that at a certain point, after 1560, the knight of Malta’s jailers allowed him access to pen and paper, and his old passion for Latin and for poetry took over once again. De’ Medici even permitted the prisoner monitored correspondence with his friends outside.
A broken Del Rosso finally left prison in 1566, 13 interminable years after being nabbed in Rome. That explains why he missed being present to fight alongside his brother knights in the Great Siege of 1565 – among others, many of the Medici entourage, both knights and volunteers. Those Florentines who took part in the relief of Malta by the Gran Soccorso were led by the monstrously obese condottiero Chiappino Vitelli, a capable, but brutal and brutish captain loyal to the Medici, reputed to be a militant atheist – the right person to save Christianity from the threats of the infidel.
By the time Del Rosso regained his freedom, he had turned into a vocal Medici supporter.
A friend of Del Rosso, Ilario Zampalochi, wrote the freshly released prisoner a lettera consolatoria (a letter of consolation) which has survived and which is presently the source of much of the information we have about Del Rosso’s years in jail.
Zampalochi has a rather curiously optimistic take on his friend’s captivity, worth recording. He underlines Del Rosso’s questionable fortune in having been the prisoner “of so great a Duke, and although you have been detained and tortured all over his duchy, you ought to tolerate this patiently, and you have to keep in mind how many persons actually aspire to be imprisoned for patriotic reasons, hoping for renown and for glory”.
Del Rosso may not have realised at first that he had won the lottery by being kidnapped and tortured by De’ Medici’s toughs, and it’s providential that he had a friend like Zampalochi to make him aware of this rare stroke of luck.
Being a knight of Malta, Zampalochi adds, Del Rosso would have run a greater risk of falling captive to the Moors, the Turks, and other infidel pirates – a fate far worse than being the prisoner of De’ Medici. “Though imprisoned by the Duke, you received frequent news from your friends, and you have been visited by them and by your relatives, and have been supplied with goods according to their means and their convenience, considering the position you were in (a convict guilty of treason against the prince). You had all the opportunity to read and to study many books, which served you for solace and sustained you, something that is, and will be, evident in the future and after your death.”
Rather clutching at straws, insofar as looking for reasons for consolation was concerned.
Del Rosso’s ‘easier’ years in jail had been anything but unproductive. He translated into Italian King David’s Psalms, Aristotle’s Treatise of the Soul, and completed what can either be viewed as a vacuous literary capriccio or as an intellectual tour de force – a rhymed version of the fundamental philosophical concepts of the Physics of Aristotle, devilish to translate in prose, let alone in impeccably metered terza rima.
Immediately after his release from prison, Del Rosso completed the major work that links him with the Knights of Malta – a translation from the Latin original into Italian (‘in lingua toscana’) of the ancient and modern statutes of the Order of Malta. These Statuti della Religione dei Cavalieri Gerosolimitani, Fra Paolo del Rosso published in Florence as printed by (Filippo and Jacopo) Giusti in 1567. For long, this was believed to be the very first Italian version of the Statutes. Recent research has, however, established that the registry of the Order already held far earlier manuscript translations into Italian.
These printed statutes are also somehow special in that they include a short, 11-page description of Malta by Del Rosso, fashioned by an inquisitive mind in an inquisitive fashion. Though not the very first ‘description’ in the Hospitaller period, this counts among the earliest. How was Malta perceived through Del Rosso’s eyes, over 450 years ago?
He saw the seat of the Order as a “confined, deserted and savage place”. The island, though only a rock, had always been famous since antiquity and “un’isola veramente degna di meraviglia”. He did not feel it necessary to include a map of the Malta “as there are currently so many good maps available that is so easy to get hold of one”. Del Rosso is here obviously referring to the large number of ‘siege maps’ of Malta published during and after the Great Siege of 1565. He did, however, include a map outlining the fortifications planned to be built around the new city of Valletta.
Malta, he says, had 20,000 inhabitants who live in the Sicilian manner and most of whom die after the age of 80. Men are dark in colour, more Sicilian in temperament than otherwise, and, according to other writers, unsuitable for war – “nevertheless, in the recent siege, they were like lions”. Del Rosso judged Maltese women very beautiful in shape but, like wild beasts, they run away as soon as they see other people approach, and cover themselves up when they leave the house. That, I believe, has changed.
The Maltese speak Carthaginian since the times of Carthage, and in Malta can be found many old stones with Carthaginian characters on them. The natives can read and understand the Punic passages in Plautus and Avicenna, and also some words in the Bible, like eloi (alla, God), efetha (iftah, open) and cumi (qum, arise).
The houses in Birgu did not impress the author, when compared to those of Mdina, which was made up of “edifici molto più nobili e dilettevoli all’occhio”. The old capital he considered a “civil place, both because of the quality of its inhabitants and of the places”. Sadly, Grand Master De Vilhena pulled down many of the old Mdina palaces that Del Rosso had admired.
The countryside, Del Rosso added, is home to many water springs and palms; Malta grows cotton and grapes, more suitable as fruit for the table than for producing wine – in fact, for centuries Malta imported most of the wine it needed from Sicily, Nero d’Avola topping the charts at the time of the Knights.
The wheel has come full circle, with the luscious, full-bodied Nero regaining popularity in today’s supermarkets.
Another Maltese crop, Del Rosso observed, is cumin (aniseed) used as an ingredient in medicine and to add flavour to bread. The Maltese still use cumin for special traditional celebrations, like some Easter bread rings, and until recently, Maltese cumin (anice di Malta) featured as a proud component of the most popular Italian cough remedy, La pasticca del Re Sole, first marketed in 1918, and said to be based on a 17th century French royal recipe.
Del Rosso’s Statuti seem to have become an instant bestseller – no doubt also due to the fact that they were published immediately after the Great Siege victory, when everything about the Order of Malta had added value and anything related to its knights appeared even more trendy and electrifying than ever. Other editions were printed in 1570 and 1589, and his translation remained the basic constitution of the Order until Giacomo Bosio produced an updated version in 1597.
Del Rosso’s Statuti has become a bestseller. After the Great Seige everything about the Order and its knights appeared more trendy- Giovanni Bonello
Del Rosso records what urged him to translate the Order’s statutes from Latin into Italian: “As the majority of the people of our times have little knowledge of Latin, which is not generally used, and because our language (Italian) prevails not only in Italy but is also known and understood and spoken in every other land, more than any other language, in the island of Malta which is our home…”
Unexplained, if not outright baffling, is the fact that Del Rosso did not dedicate his translation of the Order’s statutes directly to the Grand Master – the most obvious dignitary to offer his work to. Maybe he felt that De Valette had not done enough to obtain his release from the Florentine prisons (though, in truth, he did include a sonnet in praise of the victor of the Great Siege).
The indirect tribute to Grand Master came about in quite a tortuous way: Del Rosso dedicated his Statuti to Fra Onofrio Accaiuoli, the Order’s receiver in Tuscany. Accaiuoli, in turn, dedicated them to the Grand Master. In that age of punctiliously formal protocol, some could have read into the way Del Rosso went about it a deliberate snub to the head of the Order. Even less would Del Rosso have dedicated the Statutes to the subsequent Grand Master, Pietro del Monte, a first cousin to the Del Monte Pope who had betrayed him to De’ Medici’s torturers.
On his release, Paolo del Rosso, by now a tame, domesticated and house-trained lackey, joined the men of letters sucking up to the Medici regime. He benefited and advanced on the strength of his newly-discovered anti-republican credentials and kept himself busy churning out literary works, mostly related to the Latin classics.
He died, aged 63, on January 13, 1569, barely three years after his release from prison, and was buried in the beautiful Dominican church of St Marco in Florence. His works did not die with him – some of his skilful translations of the classics go on being reprinted to the present day.
Concluded
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Manuela Belardini, Maroma Camilleri, Tim Chilvers, Joe Peel and Theresa Vella for their valuable assistance.