“Seeing Foreign Parts” 1638–1639However, he sometimes had difficulty treading the fine line between the polite-
ness required of a guest in a Catholic country and the testimony to truth required of
a committed Protestant, and those strains sharpened for him the contrasts between
England and Italy, Protestant and Catholic cultures. Wotton’s recommendation of
discreet silence about religion and related political issues (CPW I, 342) was not a
course calculated to appeal to the fiercely intellectual and argumentative Milton.
He worked out, he says, a different policy: “I would not indeed begin a conversa-
tion about religion, but if questioned about my faith would hide nothing, whatever
the consequences” (CPW IV.1, 619). That policy worked well enough in Florence
where his friends were tolerant of his views on religious matters (CPW II, 764). In
Areopagitica he refers to learned Italians who themselves denounced the Inquisition
and pointed to its restraints on intellectual activity as the cause of Italy’s decline
from her former greatness. His immediate segue to Galileo associates those senti-
ments with the Florentine intellectuals:
I could recount what I have seen and heard in other Countries, where this kind of
inquisition tyrannizes; when I have sat among their lerned men, for that honor I had,
and bin counted happy to be born in such a place of Philosophic freedom, as they
suppos’d England was, while themselvs did nothing but bemoan the servil condition
into which lerning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had dampt the
glory of Italian wits; that nothing had bin there writt’n now these many years but
flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo grown
old, a prisner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise then the Franciscan
and Dominican licensers thought. And though I knew that England then was groan-
ing loudest under the Prelaticall yoak, neverthelesse I took it as a pledge of future
happines, that other Nations were so perswaded of her liberty. (CPW II, 537–8)He also reports that he heard the Jesuits denounced as “the onely corrupters of
youth and good learning” by “many wise, and learned men in Italy.” But in Rome
he was awash in ambiguities. There was the attraction of the antiquities. There was
glorious music. There was the “truly Roman magnificence” (CPW I, 334) of the
elaborate opera he attended in the Barberini palace, and the exquisite courtesy and
culture of his Cardinal host. But there were also the “treacherous” Jesuits, the
display of idolatrous worship, and the seductions of the flesh. Later, Milton often
sorted out his impressions of Italy by the formula, “good humanist Florence, bad
popish Rome.”^77
Before leaving Florence Milton took a few days for an excursion to Lucca, a tiny
republic which had managed to remain independent, peaceful, and prosperous,^78
and which was reputedly the site where the purest Italian was spoken. If Milton had
recently heard of Charles Diodati’s death, that pilgrimage to the family’s native
region would have had a special poignancy. He then crossed the Apennines and
“hastened” to Venice by way of Bologna and Ferrara, both of them part of the
Papal States. From Bologna on, travelers often went by boat along the network of