Read Veritas (Atto Melani) for Free Online Page B

techniques. As houses grew in
number and density, fires broke out more frequently, so that Emperor Maximilian I decided to hire the chimney-sweeps in Vienna on a permanent basis. In the headquarters of our confraternity there
still hung on the wall, venerated almost like a sacred relic, a document from 1512: the Emperor’s order for the hiring as chimney-sweep of a certain “Hans von Maylanth”,
Giovannino from Milan, the first of our brothers.
    After a century and a half we had gained such a solid position in the city that, to practise the trade, we were issued with a licence complete with imperial permit. Since the art of
chimney-sweeping had been imported into the Empire by us Italians, for two hundred years we had done all we could to keep it in our own hands. Martini, Minetti, Sonvico, Perfetta, Martinolli,
Imini, Zoppo, Toscano, Tondu, Monfrina, Bistorta, Frizzi, De Zuri, Gatton, Ceschetti, Alberini, Cecola, Codelli, Garabano, Sartori, Zimara, Vicari, Fasati, Ferrari, Toschini, Senestrei, Nicoladoni,
Mazzi, Bullone, Polloni. These were the names that recurred in the chimney-sweeping business: all exclusively Italian and all related to one another. And so the job of chimney-sweeping had actually
become hereditary, passing down from father to son, or from father-in-law to son-in-law, or to the nearest relative, or, if there were none, going to the second husband of an eventual widow. That
was not all: it could even be sold on. A rare and lucrative possession, which cost no less than two thousand gulden, or florins: a sum that very few artisans could afford! Not a day went past
without my thinking gratefully of Abbot Melani’s generous action.
    If my fellow chimney-sweeps, back in Italy, only knew what a hell they were living in and what a paradise was to be found just across the Alps!
    I was making a very good living. Each of us chimney-sweeps was assigned a quarter or a suburb of the city. For my part, I had had the good luck, through Abbot Melani’s donation, to acquire
the company responsible for the suburb of the Josephina, or the City of Joseph, from the name of our Emperor; this was a neighbourhood of modest artisans very close to the city, but it also
included some summer residences of the high nobility, and with these alone I was able to earn more in a month than I had earned back home in my entire life.
    As I was Italian, Abbot Melani had had no difficulty in acquiring the company for me. Futhermore, with his money he had acquired absolutely everything. He had only had to forge the documents
– birth certificate, curriculum
et cetera –
that were necessary to prevent the confraternity of chimney-sweeps protesting to the court. To tell the truth, when I presented
myself for the first time they received me rather coldly, and I could not really blame them: my appointment as chimney-sweep “by licence of the Court” did not go down well with my
colleagues, who had had to sweat hard to get what had been given to me on a silver tray. I also aroused some mistrust since they had never heard of chimney-sweeps in Rome. My colleagues, in fact,
all came from the Alpine valleys or even from the Ticino or the Grigioni. They accompanied me on my first cleaning assignments, to make sure that I knew how to do my job properly: Atto’s
money had a lot of sway in Vienna, it was true, but it was not powerful enough to make a chimney-sweep out of an incompetent fool who might one day set the whole city alight.

    And so began a new life for my family and myself in the Most August Caesarean capital, where even the humblest houses, as Cardinal Piccolomini had noted with astonishment,
resembled princely palaces, and where every day the gates of the massive and sublime city walls let through an unending stream of provisions: carts loaded with eggs, crayfish, flour, meat, fish,
countless birds, over three hundred wagons laden with casks of wine; by evening it would all be gone. Cloridia and I gazed open-mouthed at