Iris Origo (1902–1988) was born in Britain to an aristocrat
mother and a wealthy American father. She lived in Italy and
devoted much of her life to the improvement of the Tuscan estate at
La Foce that she purchased with her husband, Antonio Origo, in the
1920s. Their son, Gianni, died of meningitis in 1933, after which
she embarked on a writing career, publishing a successful
biography, Leopardi: A Study in Solitude. Traveling in London in
the 1930s, she befriended Virginia Woolf and became romantically
involved with L. H. Myers (the author of The Root and the Flower).
During World War II, she gave birth to two daughters, Benedetta and
Donata, and, with Antonio, sheltered refugee children and assisted
many escaped Allied prisoners of war and partisans in defiance of
Italy’s Fascist regime and Nazi occupation forces. Her memoirs of
life in Italy during the war period are collected in two volumes, A
Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939–1940 (first published
in 2017) and War in Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943–1944
(first published in 1947). In 1976, she was made a Dame Commander
of the Order of the British Empire. She died at La Foce.
Charles Nicholl is a British-born historian and travel writer
based in Italy. Among his books are Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights
of the Mind, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe
(winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography), Somebody
Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa (winner of the Hawthornden Prize),
and The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street.
"This is indeed the fullest single source of information about the
methods of medieval trade. [Francesco di Marco] Datini’s letters
suggest a man of shrewd, reserved, pious character, daring and
imaginative in his schemes but cautious in their execution.
Constantly anticipating disaster, he still survived the plague and
a Papal ban; and if his marriage to a young girl goes childless,
his wife consented to rear his illegitimate daughter. The merchant
is hardy, patient, and in fact admirable. One likes him, and his
wife, and his family friend with his 14 children and unselfish
loyalty. The biography has warmth and intimacy, and it makes the
most of the domestic affairs and business interests of the canny
Florentine." —Kirkus
The letters between the childless couple, affectionate but as often
bitter and reproachful, are perhaps what will most stay with you.
“Destiny has ordained,” Francesco complained to Margherita late in
his life, “that from the day of my birth I should never know a
whole happy day.” — The Wall Street Journal
"Iris Origo’s success in resurrecting not only a personality but
also his times, his town, his marriage, his friends and associates,
and his business dealings, makes a work of extraordinary interest
with that quality to grip and take hold of a reader that makes a
book everlasting." —Barbara Tuchman
"Origo was a remarkable writer, with a clear, engaging style, a
mind steeped in history and scholarship, but alive always to the
nuances and subtleties of human relationships." —Caroline
Moorehead, The Times Literary Supplement
"As a picture of Tuscany before the dawn of the Renaissance it is a
complement to The Decameron." —The Sunday Times
"[The book’s] success over the long haul is a victory of quality
over fashionableness . . . The key to its longevity is partly
[Origo’s] fluent style, the almost chatty erudition, but mostly the
sense of total historical immersion. It’s as if she has set up camp
in the 14th century and is simply reporting what she finds there .
. . Origo revels in the blunt aphoristic vernacular of these
letters, their scattering of witty ‘Toscanismi’ . . . Her
characters talk the Tuscan of Boccaccio’s Decameron, written in the
early 1350s when they were young men with their lives ahead of
them. Their voices carry clearly across the centuries." —Charles
Nicholl, London Review of Books
"[Origo has] the alert, perspicacious mind of a supremely
intelligent person." —Cynthia Zarin, The New Yorker
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