The following anecdote is taken from the autobiography of the famous goldsmith and sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71). He was travelling on a sort of canal boat on his way from Venice to Florence. "We went to lodge for the night in an inn on this side of Chioggia, on the left as we were approaching Ferrara. Our host wished to be paid, according to his custom, before we went to bed. I told him that in other places it was the custom to pay in the morning, but he said, 'I wish to be paid, according to my way, in the evening.' I replied that men who wanted their own special way would have to make a world to suit their special way, because in this world that was not the way things were done. The host answered that I need not vex my wits, for he wished to do according to his way. My companion was trembling for fear, and poked me to be quiet lest the host do worse; so we paid him, according to his way, and went to bed. We had excellent new beds, everything new, spick and span; in spite of this I did not sleep a wink, thinking all night long what I could do to revenge myself; first I thought of setting fire to the house, next of cutting the throats of the four good horses that he had in his stable; I could see that this would be easy to do, but not how it would be easy for me and my companion to escape afterwards. At last I hit on a plan. In the morning I put my companion and all the things into the canal boat. When the horses were hitched to the rope that pulled the boat, I said that they must not start the boat till I got back, as I had left a pair of slippers in my room.... When I got in the room I took my knife, which was sharp as a razor, and I cut the mattresses on the four beds to little bits, so that I knew I had done more than fifty scudi worth of damage." Throughout a delightful autobiography, which we need not accept too literally, Cellini exhibits a perfectly unmoral disposition, a mind with no sense of social law and no respect for anything except Michelangelo and art. These four men, Caesar Borgia, Machiavelli, Aretino, and Cellini, possessed fortitude, energy, subtlety, and courage, but they showed no appreciation of the fundamental social virtues, loyalty, trust, subordination of self to the general good; and for this reason they enable us to understand why Italy fell like a ripe apple, without resistance, into the lap of foreigners and lay helpless under Jesuit, inquisitor, petty duke, and Spanish viceroy, and why freedom to think and freedom to act faded from art and intellectual life as well as from political life. CHAPTER XXXI A SURVEY OF ITALY (1580-1581)