This chapter considers important female figures in Puccini’s circle. It begins by outlining Puccini’s relationship with his mother, Albina, who died relatively early in the composer’s life, and with his six sisters. The author then discusses Puccini’s relationship with his wife, Elvira, in some detail, considering the circumstances in which the couple met and their subsequent rather strained relationship. Puccini’s affairs with other women are considered, and particular attention is paid to the Doria Manfredi scandal, when a young woman wrongly accused of an affair with the composer committed suicide. The author discusses Puccini’s step-daughter and granddaughter, Simonetta. She also considers his platonic relationships with female friends, most importantly Sybil Seligman.

This chapter considers Puccini’s relationship with his native region, Tuscany. It begins with a discussion of how Florence is represented in the comic opera Gianni Schicchi, asking how realistic the depiction of the city is. The author provides a political and social history of the region, starting with the glorious reign of the Medicis and moving on through the Habsburg era to the politics of Puccini’s own time. The chapter discusses agricultural policies in the region, industrial expansion, the emergence of the modern labour movement, uprisings and unrest, and fascist suppression, showing that the Tuscany of Puccini’s time was not the rural idyll depicted in Gianni Schicchi. The chapter also considers the region’s rich artistic culture and the importance of Florence as an intellectual and literary centre.

This chapter examines Puccini’s early life in the Tuscan town of Lucca. Puccini came from a long line of church musicians and was expected to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfathers as maestro di cappella at the Cattedrale di San Martino. The chapter briefly outlines the careers of these musical forebears and their influence upon the young Puccini, whose musical career would ultimately take a very different course. It examines Puccini’s musical training and the family members and other figures who provided funding for his education. The composer’s move to study at the Conservatorio in Milan is briefly considered, with a particular emphasis on the composers and critics who were his teachers and mentors. These figures played a vital role in helping him gain a foothold in the Italian operatic world of the 1880s, setting him on the path to musical greatness.

Giovanni Villani, in his chronicle, reports that, in 1117, Pisa and Florence formed a military alliance. Pisa asked for protection against Lucca, while their troops were busy in Mallorca besieging a Saracen stronghold (Figure 4.1).1 The safeguard from Lucca meant a Florentine military presence right at the doorstep of their neighbors, the problematic nature of which did not escape the attention of the author. Villani explains at length the measures taken by the Florentine army to avoid any potential attack on women in Pisa while their men were away.

Italian instances of adjudication rarely exceeded annual totals in the single digits. The few plaintiffs who did approach ecclesiastical officials were usually well-prepared from a legal standpoint. They encountered decent prospects of winning by avoiding the launch of suits without written and witness testimony. Regular supervision of the English kind was completely unknown. Although episcopal visitations brought domestic partnerships to the attention of prelates, they were undertaken too intermittently to sustain regular inquiries. Disinterest may have been tied to the fact that judgement did not imply secondary judicial benefits. Damage claims on account of sex out of wedlock were normally reserved to secular justice. As a result, public notaries assumed overriding importance when the conclusion of marital contracts was celebrated. The exact value and delivery of bridal dowries and counter-gifts had to be authenticated for future reference in endowment disputes reserved to civil and not ecclesiastical judges. Also attesting to the principal concern of elders and relatives with asset control was the recourse to papal authority for dispensation from impediments to the union. The process could skip church verification altogether in favor of automatic settlement and registration at the hands of laymen.

This chapter presents the overall shape of the phenomenon, situating urban food cultivation against the backdrop of rural agriculture for urban provisioning which characterised the majority, though not the totality, of Italian agronomics. Examples from Lucca point to key issues in urban food cultivation: urban topography, relations between neighbours, and relations between landholders and larger institutions such as churches. In small, densely populated cities such as Lucca, as well as in larger cities, we can see tightly controlled cultivated spaces within the walls. Archaeobotanical evidence is providing new information about what was grown, where, and how much. Here I use it to demonstrate the radically changed cerealiculture in Italy for the fifth to seventh centuries, and then analyse in detail the floral remains of two urban gardens, one from ninth-century Rome and one from tenth- to eleventh-century Ferrara. These case studies reveal the wide range of foodstuffs cultivated in cities and the prevalence of polyculture, when growers planted many different food crops with varying harvest cycles for household consumption rather than single crops for market production.

The interest of the two months from late April to late June 1490 lies in the light they throw on Piero’s active involvement in politics, as well as on his more hidden role as Lorenzo’s stand-in, collaborating with the friends in the Otto di Pratica (the all-important foreign affairs magistracy) to ensure that Lorenzo got his way. He already enjoyed a close relationship with Niccolò Michelozzi, the principal secretary who remained in Florence, and neither Michelozzi nor Piero Dovizi (with Lorenzo at the baths) found much to add – they said – to Piero’s letters at this time. Michelozzi only once added a paragraph in his own hand to one of them, and on 9 May he told Lorenzo he was letting Piero communicate with him, since he ‘writes and behaves most diligently, as you have seen’. And Dovizi told Michelozzi that he rarely wrote to him any longer: ‘writing to Piero, as one is doing, there’s very little or nothing to say to you’.1