Exemplar Fragmentorum

Correspondence, Niccolò Machiavelli: Letter to Francesco Vettori (excerpt)

I rise in the morning with the sun, and I go off to a wood of mine which I am having cut down, where I stop for two hours to see what was done the day before and to talk to the woodcutters who always have some trouble on hand either among themselves or with their neighbors…

Leaving the wood I go to a spring and thence to some bird-traps of mine.  I have a book with me, Dante or Petrarch or one of the minor poets, Tibullus, Ovid or the like.  I read about their amorous passions and their loves, I remember my own, and dwell enjoyably on these thoughts for a while.

Then I go on to the road and into the tavern.  I talk to the passers-by, I ask what news of their villages, I hear all sorts of things, and observe the various tastes and ideas of men.  In the meanwhile it is time for dinner, and with my folk I eat what food this poor farm and miserable patrimony of mine provides.

When I have eaten I go back to the tavern.  Here I find the host, and usually a butcher, a miller, and a couple of kilnmen.  With them I degrade myself playing all day at cricca and tric-trac, and this gives rise to a thousand arguments and endless vexations with insulting words, and most times there is a fight over a penny, and we can be heard shouting from as far away as San Casciano.