4 - Life in exile

Summary

‘The man living in exile from his homeland is a dead man, and lives in a sepulchre, dying every day’, declared Evangelista Salvi, expressing his relief at being given permission to return from exile, in May 1485. His dramatic expression of his feelings is a counterpart of the words put into the mouth of Onofri Strozzi in Francesco Filelfo's dialogue ‘On Exile’. ‘Is anything more desperate or more miserable than exile?’ Filelfo was seeking to show his mettle in one of the classic genres of humanist literature, the consolatoria; in a dedicatory letter, he described this dialogue as a true test of skill, since exile was so often regarded as the supreme example of misfortune.

Whether the circumstances of Onofri, who lived with his father Palla in Padua and shared his literary interests and studies, would have seemed so desperate and miserable to many other exiles is open to question. If poverty was one of the evils of exile discussed by Palla and Onofri in Filelfo's dialogue, their poverty was relative. Compared to the wealth he had enjoyed in Florence before his exile, where he had been one of the richest men in the city, Palla was poor in Padua. Nevertheless, he still had enough money to build a pleasant house for his family, take men of learning into his household, and live a life of cultivated ease. In reality, Evangelista Salvi's living grave had been a fairly comfortable one, too.