“Seeing Foreign Parts” 1638–1639took great interest in this work-in-progress and seems to have discussed it with him
on several occasions. On August 31/September 10, 1638 he wrote a long Latin
letter to Buonmattei, offering both praise and advice. He extols the grammar as a
work second only to that of the founder of a wise government, since it will prevent
the decline that accompanies linguistic carelessness and will make the state “truly
noble, and splendid, and brilliant” (CPW I, 329). He advises Buonmattei to in-
clude, for the benefit of foreigners, “a little something on right pronunciation” and
some suggestions as to which Florentine authors to read after the best-known names,
citing himself as one of those Buonmattei should address: “Certainly I, who have
not merely wet my lips in these [classical] Languages but have drunk deeper drafts –
as much as anyone of my years, am nevertheless glad to go for a feast to Dante and
Petrarch, and to a good many of your other authors” (CPW I, 330). He wrote the
letter in Latin rather than Tuscan as a further argument, “that you may understand
that I wish that Tongue clarified for me by your precepts, and to confess my awk-
wardness and ignorance plainly in Latin” (CPW I, 332). Buonmattei did not incor-
porate these suggestions.
Carlo Dati seems to have been Milton’s closest friend in Italy. He was only 19 in
1638 – another of those bright prodigies who crossed Milton’s path – and was
already astonishing his elders by his scientific learning and his eloquence. He also
enjoyed entertaining foreign scholars and literati. His many interests are evident
from his later publications: a respected study of the four principal Greek painters of
antiquity, panegyric poetry, and several mathematical, antiquarian, and philological
tracts.^22 Dati is the only Italian friend with whom Milton exchanged letters (in
1647–8), in one of which Dati reports his appointment to the chair and lectureship
of humane letters at the Florentine Academy (CPW II, 762–75). Other Florentine
friends identified by Milton are Agostino Coltellini, founder of the Apatisti, Benedetto
Fioretti, president of that academy, Valerio Chimentelli, Pietro Frescobaldi, and
the poet Antonio Francini.^23 Milton did not name the poet Antonio Malatesti in
the Defensio Secunda, but greeted him in the 1647 letter to Dati as one of those
“especially fond of me.”^24 During the Florence visit Malastesti presented to Milton
a fifty-sonnet sequence he had written the previous summer, entitled La Tina:
Equivoci Rusticali; he dedicated it to “the most illustrious Gentleman and Most Worthy
Master Signor John Milton, Noble Englishman.” The sonnets were an elaborate
linguistic joke, each one carrying a risqué double entendre.^25 This gift suggests that
Milton’s Florentine friends credited him with an earthy sense of humor.
One highlight of Milton’s stay in Florence was his visit to “the famous Galileo,
grown old, a prisner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise then
the Franciscan and Dominican licencers thought” (CPW II, 538). Galileo was con-
demned in 1633, and thereafter confined under a kind of house arrest, his activities
limited. Seventy-five years old in 1638 and almost totally blind, Galileo lived in a
pleasant villa at Arcetri, a short distance from Florence. Milton might have visited
him there, or at the home of his illegitimate son Vincenzo on the Costa San Giorgio,