“Seeing Foreign Parts” 1638–1639where he stayed at times for medical treatment.^26 The visit may have been arranged
through Vincenzo, whom Milton knew, or through Dati, who had been Galileo’s
pupil.^27 What they talked about, and whether Milton might have looked through a
telescope, must remain matters of speculation. Conceivably, Milton purchased or
was given a copy of Galileo’s Dialogo... sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, tolemaico,
e copernicano, published in Florence in 1632, but if so it was a clandestine copy, since
the work had been banned since 1633.^28 It is possible though not very likely that
Milton visited the Abbey of Vallombrosa, a beauty spot about 18 miles from Flor-
ence and the site of the famous “autumnal leaves” simile in Paradise Lost (I, 300–4);
the valley was noted for its many varieties of trees.^29
Sometime in late September Milton left Florence for Rome, taking the usual
route through the medieval city of Siena, with its walls, its striking Gothic cathedral
of black and white marble, and its ancient baptistery and university. Passing through
Viterbo, he probably entered Rome by the Porta del Popolo and along the Via
Flaminia, where there were many lodging places.^30 He was in Rome for “nearly
two months” (October and much of November, 1638), and for as long again on his
return trip (January and February, 1639). Milton made a point of his attention to
“the antiquities,” though much that the modern tourist sees was then covered over.
Like Evelyn and most other tourists, he might have engaged the services of a “sights-
man,” the seventeenth-century version of a tour guide who made his living by
showing strangers around the city. As he made the rounds of the Coliseum, the
Capitol, the Tarpeian Rock, the Pantheon, the temples, the arches, the aqueducts,
the Via Appia, and the ancient gates, Milton laid in a sense of ancient Latium, the
Roman Republic, and the Empire that would enliven his readings of Virgil, Ovid,
Horace and Livy, and that he would reimagine in several passages of his great epics.
Walking about, he could also take the measure of the present city, the center of
Catholic Christendom: priests and nuns bustling everywhere, magnificent Baroque
churches, the Vatican, the overwhelming spaces of St Peter’s.
While the papacy was not the power in Europe that it had been in the previous
century, the reigning Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini) was a forceful secular
prince who enlarged the territories of the Papal States, involved himself in the
power plays of the Thirty Years War and among the various Italian states, encour-
aged the Jesuits in their Counter-Reformation activities, and completed several
grand Baroque building projects (the Bernini baldacchino at St Peter’s, Borromini’s
church of San Carlino, the Barberini Palace at the Quattro Fontane). In the Ren-
aissance manner, he also wrote poems in Latin, Greek, and Italian,^31 and patronized
artists, musicians, and dramatists. And in the Renaissance tradition of papal nepo-
tism, he packed the College of Cardinals with members of his family and made his
nephew, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, his chief counsellor and Praefectus Urbis (some-
thing like a mayor of Rome). As Masson observes, “Rome all but belonged to the
Barberini, whose family symbol of the bees met the eyes on all the public buildings,
and on their carriages in the public drives.”^32