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米开朗基罗 Part 02

The Rome of a sweaty, yelling crowd, a hundred thousand of them jostling in the markets and the piazzas, the Rome of sour wine, old garlic, street urchins, shifty part-time soldiers who'd cut your purse or your throat, just as soon as look at you.

The Rome of beggars, buskers, tumblers, quacks and whores.

Thousands of them working away in the Ortaccio, the evil Eden down by the river Tiber.

This was Caravaggio's Rome, cheap rooms and drunken nights with other perpetually broke painters, living on their wits and shady credit, up for bother, always on the fly.

Their motto as they prowled the streets, Nec spe, nec metu, ''Without hope, without fear''.

Shove this up your arse.

Of course, he wasn't born a thug, just a boy from small-town Lombardy, the small town of Caravaggio.

His father looked after the house and the land of a local aristocrat, respectable, not poor, not rich.

But plague was the enemy of expectations, the even small once, and it killed off Caravaggio's father, and his grandpa on the same day, when he was just five.

When he was 19, his mother died, so the children sold up and got out.

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