File:Men and manners of old Florence (1909) (14769040464).jpg

Identifier: menmannersofoldf00biag (find matches)
Title: Men and manners of old Florence
Year: 1909 (1900s)
Authors: Biagi, Guido, 1855-1925
Subjects:
Publisher: Chicago, A. C. McClurg and co.
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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om long-established tradition, andthey would have liked the world to be regulatedaccording to those precepts of exemplary morality.But when they quitted their desks, where they haddevoted themselves to the spiritual exercise of inditingpious precepts for children and grandchildren, whenthey laid down their pens in order to return to theirbanks or shops, they found regular and unconsciousbreakers of those same precepts in their own clerksand assistants, and the force of habit was so strongthat they could not escape from it or apply to reallife those moral precepts they themselves had justbeen compiling. The contrast between desire andreality, between precept and practice, was the secretof all those lives, which were unable to escape fromthe fierce necessities of their times and surroundingsexcept by shutting themselves up in monasteries ordevoting themselves wholly and solely to religion. Thus it is that in books written by men of thosedays, who were not moralists by profession as were
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Photol (Aliitari. THE DEVIL, BY GIAMBOLOGNA, AT THE CORNER OF THE VECCHIETTI PALACE, IN THE OLD MARKET. (To face page 97. PRIVATE LIFE OF THE FLORENTINES 97 priests and monks, we find good thoughts and moralcounsel mingled with advice of the most utilitariandescription. Moreover, in an age when the strugglefor life was fought out almost man to man, theywould have felt disgraced even in the eyes of theirown children and familiars if they had failed to showthemselves shrewd and crafty and in all ways wellable to defend themselves. Shrewdness, and above all, craftiness, is still heldto be a valuable quality in the business world. Inthe matter of morality the merchants of to-day (andnot only Italian merchants) do not differ very greatlyfrom those of the Trecento and the Renaissance. Onlymodern merchants are more sincere, and not beingobliged to keep up religious appearances, they donot trouble themselves to give good advice and areashamed to commit to paper the business methodsthey may fi

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