Abstract

[A servitude with promiscuous tasks. Re-reading Carlo Porta’s “La nomina del cappellan” (“The chaplain’s appointment”)]. According to Attilio Momigliano, Carlo Porta was the Milanese poet who collected together the legacies of the bosin, Lombardy’s traditional storytellers, but “elevated their soul and united their trends in a form of art in-comparably higher than in the tired old tales”. As an admirable example of such art, La nomina del cappellan (The Chaplain’s Appointment, 1819) describes how a high-born Milanese lady takes a new domestic chaplain into her service. Always ironic and quite often very funny, this poem offers a devastating critique of the pompous, decaying nobility, as well as of the sad fate of priests in search of a “living” that would save them from misery. Both the environmental context and the characters, among others, offer abundant evidence of the legal conditions imposed in a typical master-and-servant relationship, the imbalance between concessions granted but reversible and non-negotiable, promiscuous duties of all kinds.