Giuseppe Tartini - Lettere e documenti / Pisma in dokumenti / Letters and Documents - Volume / Knjiga / Volume II

378 104. Tartini to Giuseppe Ximenes D’Aragona  56 On Friday I wrote to Your Excellency, and quite late in the evening Signor Zanobi arrived here without having had time to write another letter to notify you in the same post. Now he is here, I have examined him, I have heard him, and I wish him very well. He is happy with where he is living, and he has reason to be. Now it is important that I inform Your Excellency that I wrote to Signor Antonio and the Venturini Brothers, asking him to pay me ten zecchini to have sufficient money to try and cover all the expenses for two months, but they answered that they did not have these orders from Your Excellency, and that the payments of money collected from Your Excellency did not fall within such a timeframe. This is no bad thing in my relations with Your Excellency, for if you order me to spend what I have in the world, I shall spend it all. But it is very bad in my relations towards my other students, from whom in the last years I have had the expense of almost one thousand ducats, partly from money I spent for them out of necessity, partly from being defrauded of my fees. I wish to be able to swear to all my students that I do not, as regards this matter, distinguish between one and the other, but I beg Your Excellency to help me to maintain this state of affairs, otherwise I am sure that this awkward situation will happen to me again in the future, as I have four German students at my school, and the aforementioned awkwardness came to me from German princes and cavalieri ; never from Italian cavalieri , with whom I can swear that I have never lost even a penny. I reveal my cares and needs to Your Excellency, because I know who I am revealing them to. Now I think (given that such was the reply I received from Signor Venturini) that since I am the debtor towards this cousin of mine Salvator Maria Tartini of either fourteen or fifteen zecchini (a little more or a little less), Your Excellency should pay this sum to him there; in that way I shall have received it here from Your Excellency. Meanwhile, there will be time to give the Venturini brothers the precise orders they need, as from their reply they appear to me to be cautious and diffident. But Your Excellency should not say a word or give any indication about it, as it is sufficient for Your Excellency and myself to fulfil our purpose. I shall record any expense here, and I shall give a full and detailed account of everything to Your Excellency. The food expenses of the young man consist in roughly twenty soldi a day, and here that is the minimum and most meagre amount, for we are absolutely in a worse condition than Venice. His lodging (which is in the house of our parish priest, by his great grace, as I wrote to you) costs sixteen lira a month, and there he is provided with a lamp for the evening, cooking, and all his linen. During the winter, which is drawing near, one must pay an 56 For biographical information on Giuseppe Ximenes d’Aragona, and particularly on his activities as a patron in the Paduan music scene, see Cattelan, 1987.