Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  View of Florence with the Water-mills of San Niccolò. A print of a drawing by Giuseppe Zocchi, whose work was much favoured by foreigners on the Grand Tour. The bridge is the Ponte alle Grazie.

  place where the people of quality pay and receive visits, and converse as freely as at the Casino… I never was more surprised,’ he added, ‘than when it was proposed to me to make one of a whist party in a box which seemed to have been made for the purpose, with a little table in the middle. I hinted that it would be just as convenient to have the party somewhere else; but I was told good music added greatly to the pleasure of a whist party.’

  There was one great disappointment in Florence for men like Lord Lyttelton: the inhospitality of the upper classes. It was not that they could all plead poverty. Charles de Brosses, who travelled widely in Italy at this time, was struck by the amazing luxury which he observed in Florence in the men's clothes and the women's jewels, in the liveries of their servants and their extravagant carriages.

  Yet, while he himself had no cause to complain of inhospitality, later English visitors expressed great dissatisfaction. No one ‘ever received guests for dinner’, complained Arthur Young, the agriculturist. Marchese Riccardi had forty servants in his palace, Young said, many of whom even had their own servants to wait upon them, but an invitation to dinner there was very rare. The Ranuzzi, Young went on, ‘are even richer and even more people live at their expense; but there are no dinners, no parties, no equipages and no comfort’.

  Most of those who had hopes of being entertained by Prince Charles Edward Stuart were equally disappointed. The Young Pretender, son of the soi-disant King James III of England and VIII of Scotland, had come from Rome to live in Florence in 1775. He was then fifty-five years old; his wife, Louisa, the daughter of Prince Gustav Adolf of Stolberg-Gedern – described by the Duke of Hamilton's tutor as ‘a beautiful and agreeable woman, much beloved by those who knew her’ – was twenty-two.

  For a time they rented the Palazzo Corsini in the Prato;15 then, with their large household of more than forty attendants and servants, they moved into the Palazzo di San Clemente, a fine palace, designed by Gherardo Silvani in Via Gino Capponi.16 Ill-matched though they were, the Count and Countess of Albany, as they now styled themselves, had at first seemed tolerably content. While the prince had not abandoned all hope of returning in triumph to London, he was no longer an active participant in Jacobite plots for an invasion of England. He enjoyed listening to music and playing the violin, the bagpipes and the flageolet; he went for strolls in the Cascine attended by servants in livery; he practised fencing; he kept his royal hand in by touching the heads of people suffering from scrofula, the King's Evil.

  But as the months passed he started drinking heavily again; and, according to Sir Horace Mann, who had informants in his household, his health began to decline rapidly. He suffered from gout and colic, from diarrhoea, epileptic fits and sores on his legs. He was impotent, moody, dirty and utterly bored by life, ‘insupportable in stench and temper’. Yet he insisted on sleeping with his wife, and, between fits of coughing and vomiting, on trying to make love to her, and when unable to do so, treating her in the ‘most outrageous manner,’ Mann reported, ‘by the most abusive language, beating her, committing the greatest indecencies upon her and attempting to choke her’.

  Life would have been intolerable for her had she not been comforted by the presence in Florence of Count Vittorio Alfieri, a rich and handsome young poet as passionately devoted to her as she was to him. He was, as he readily admitted himself, self-centred, petulant, neurotic, pedantic and histrionic: he had once cut off his hair and ordered his servants to tie him up so that he could not force his attentions upon a lady who did not welcome them; he had afterwards contracted a venereal disease in Cadiz; and in London had had an affair with the wife of Lord Ligonier, the commander-in-chief. This had resulted in a duel in which, as he unashamedly confessed, he did not kill the field-marshal because he could not, and the field-marshal did not kill him because he chose not to do so. Yet for all his many faults, Alfieri was a tragic poet of remarkable gifts which he determined to use in attacking tyranny and in arousing the national spirit of Italy.

  He had come to Florence to improve his Italian since, although born in Piedmont, he was more used to expressing himself in French, still the language of the upper classes in Turin. He had not been long in Florence when he encountered the Countess of Albany, who was to remain dear to him throughout his life; and when she could no longer bear the behaviour of her husband and fled from the Palazzo di San Clemente to the nearby Convento delle Bianchette and thence to Rome, Alfieri followed her.

  Left behind in Florence, her husband was lonely and miserable, rarely now seen in public even at the opera, and then so drunk that he was liable to be sick on the floor. He decided to send for his daughter, Charlotte, whom he had not seen for twenty years, the child of his long-discarded Scottish mistress, Clementina Walkinshaw. Charlotte could not come immediately: she had been living in a French convent where she had caught the notice of the Archbishop of Bordeaux, to whose third illegitimate child she had just given birth.

  When she did arrive in Florence, aged thirty-one, she was described as ‘a tall and robust woman of a very dark complexion and coarse-grained skin with more masculine boldness than feminine modesty or elegance, but with easy and unassuming manners’ and a ‘voluble tongue’. She was said to have become ‘a great favourite in Florentine society’. Certainly she looked after her father dutifully. Created by him Duchess of Albany, she nursed him when he was ill, which he usually was; she tried to help him sort out his financial problems; she accompanied him to the theatre covered in the jewels he had given her; she saw to it that he did not drink more than the specified amount of Cyprus wine which she allowed him. When he decided to move back to Rome, she went with him and was with him when he died there in January 1788, dying herself of what was probably cancer of the liver soon afterwards.

  British visitors, while so often disappointed at not receiving invitations to dine at the Palazzo di San Clemente and other palaces in Florence, were at least grateful that the price of meals in most of the city's inns was as reasonable as it was at Hadfield's, so they had plenty of money to spare for the numerous articles they were expected to buy in Florence and to have sent home to friends or family – leatherwork and medals, books and coins, paintings and copies of paintings, melon and broccoli seeds – as well as more expensive items for the family home or the house, in the style of one of the Italian masters, which many of them hoped to build one day for themselves: vases and chimney-pieces, pietre dure cabinets, copies of antique statues, scagliola table tops, engravings of Florentine views by Giuseppe Zocchi.

  Having arranged his purchases the tourist moved on, leaving Florence, so one of them said, ‘with a wish, common to nearly all of us, one day to return’.

  19

  THE GRAND DUKE PETER LEOPOLD 1765 – 91

  ‘Now at last I see my joy returning;

  All my wounds are healed, my wealth's recaptured.

  There is he for whom Etruria's long been yearning,

  There is he for Flora rules, enraptured;

  Behold him: Leopold!’

  LORENZO PIGNOTTI

  From the day of his arrival in Florence, the Grand Duke Peter Leopold had endeavoured to show the Tuscans that he had their interests rather than those of Austria at heart. Within a short time of his moving into the Pitti Palace, he had been required by his brother, the Emperor, to hand over an enormous sum to the treasury in Vienna as a contribution to the costs of the Seven Years' War, a contribution which Tuscany could ill afford after two disastrous harvests and a winter of the most bitter cold. It had to be partly met, not only by heavy borrowings from Genoese financiers, but also by recourse to the Grand Duchess's dowry, some of which arrived in Florence in the form of gold coins loaded in cases on the backs of a baggage train of fifty mules. The Grand Duke made amends for this early display of his Austrian connect
ions, however, by dismissing the unpopular Botta-Adorno, by pensioning off most of the civil servants from Lorraine and by seeking the advice instead of various Tuscan ministers well known for their reformist views, including Giulio Rucellai. He also earned the citizens' respect by speaking Italian in private as well as in public and by having his baby son baptized Giovanni, after Florence's patron saint. The Florentines were further appeased when a large part of the furniture, pictures and other valuables, which had been removed from Florence in the time of the Grand Duke's father, was returned to the Pitti Palace.

  Energetic and inquiring, not to say inquisitive, the Grand Duke Peter Leopold interested himself in every aspect of Florentine life, poking his nose in everywhere, as one of his ministers put it, asking questions, impatiently waiting for answers, sometimes losing his temper but quickly making amends. He concerned himself with agriculture, promoting the draining of the marshes in the Maremma of Grosseto and discussing problems with the recently created Accademia dei Georgofili, which he reorganized as the Royal Academy of Sciences. He took notice of technological developments from ballooning to methods of crystallizing salt. He signified his approval of the discussions held in the Biblioteca Riccardiana where Giovanni Lami, founder of Florence's literary periodical Novelle letterarie, met his friends.1 He busied himself with the problems of education, and supervised the foundation of schools in each of the four quarters of the city for the children of the poor. He authorized the promulgation of a new penal code and took great pride in abolishing torture and the death penalty in Tuscany long before executions had been abolished elsewhere. He proclaimed a wish to see improvements in public health, advocating the beneficial qualities of the waters at Montecatini, urging the building of public baths outside the Porta al Prato, and the enlargement and modernization of the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, where patients were thoroughly washed, barbered and manicured on admission, given a clean nightshirt, provided with a better diet than most could have afforded at home, and charged only if they could spare the cost of their treatment. Moreover, the Grand Duke took it upon himself to act as what he termed an ‘external bishop’, studying theological works, issuing lists of suitable books for the clergy and banning contentious texts from convent libraries.

  Having a passion for classification and arrangement, he immersed himself in the organization of Florence's archives, supervising the cataloguing of the libraries of the Laurenziana and the Magliabechiana,2 as well as of the Archivio di Stato, founded in his reign.3 He also added to the city's collections by buying any private libraries, such as that of the Strozzi family, which happened to come on to the market and reorganized the Crusca and another academy, the Apatisti, in a new Accademia Fiorentina.4 He created the Accademia di Belle Arti from the old Accademia del Disegno,5 and encouraged the new director of the Uffizi, Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni, in his transformation of the gallery – large glass windows were fitted to improve the lighting, the Sala della Niobe was created for the display of the sculpture brought from the Villa Medici in Rome6 and the public was admitted free of charge. He found much work for the architects Gaspare Maria Paoletti and Francesco Zanobi del Rosso, the first of whom designed the Palazzo Torrigiani for the natural-history museum known as La Specola,7 the second of whom rebuilt the church of the Carmine after most of it had been destroyed by fire. He provided a scholarship for the Florentine composer, Luigi Cherubini, and encouraged the historian, Riguccio Galluzzi, in the writing of his History of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany under the House of Medici.

  Turning his attention to politics, the Grand Duke asked one of his principal bureaucrats, Francesco Maria Gianni, to provide the state with a written constitution and, while this had to be shelved for fear of what his brother in Vienna would have to say about such a document, he welcomed the election of a city government which was responsible for improvements in the city's drainage system, for moving the coal and straw market away from its unseemly location in the Piazza San Giovanni, for the building of a large restaurant in the Cascine, and for putting up street signs. With characteristic persistence, he urged the Commune to add to its reforms by improving the city's street lighting, which was then limited to some eighty oil lamps at street corners; and when the Commune baulked at the cost of installing and maintaining the forty-six extra lamps which he proposed, he badgered them until at least twenty-three lamps were authorized.

  The Commune were only too well aware of how expensive his reforms and building programmes were proving to be. Having disbanded both the Tuscan navy and the army, as unnecessary extravagances, he sold two naval vessels, disposed of a large amount of military material to the British government and even entered into negotiations with the Russians, then at war with the Turks, for the sale of the island of Elba as a base for the Tsar's fleet in the Mediterranean. This, though, was too much for his mother, who put her imperial foot down and stopped the transaction from proceeding any further. Prevented from raising money in this way, the Grand Duke turned to the Church, greatly increasing the taxation of church benefices, and appropriating much church property. The Jesuit order in Tuscany, like the Inquisition, was suppressed. Ecclesiastical censorship was also abolished; and, while a civil censor remained in office, he was rarely allowed to intervene to suppress publication: book and magazine publishers both flourished.

  It had to be admitted that the Grand Duke himself was not very consistent in the matters of freedom of expression and public morality. He liked to present himself as a champion of free speech, yet he closed down more than one theatre and saw to it that critics of his rule were reminded of their obligations to him as their sovereign. He condemned ‘the indecent practice’ of swimming in the Arno without proper bathing attire, yet he was a notorious womanizer, carelessly exercising a kind of droit de seigneur during his regular travels around his domain. ‘He constantly portrayed himself as a religious moralist, one who prescribed black dress at court, outlawed prostitution and prohibited dice and card playing,’ Eric Cochrane observed.

  Indeed, he set an example of civic behaviour by walking to public events at the Uffizi instead of adding to the already chaotic carriage traffic. But every time he made a tour of the country, he left behind a string of violated peasant beds. While in Florence he spent most of his free nights not with his rather homely consort, who was almost always pregnant [and was to give birth to sixteen children] but with Lord Cowper's wife or, after 1786, with a charming young dancer named Livia Raimondi. And Livia gladly repaid him by diligently doing the reading he assigned her in Thomas á Kempis, Fénelon, and a whole shelfful of Jansenist moral theologians.

  He had met this pretty girl from Rome when she was performing in the theatre as a ballet dancer. She was a most indifferent dancer and her performances were frequently greeted by catcalls and rude shouts from the university students who filled the upper seats. The girl's father took it upon himself to take her to the Palazzo Pitti where he complained about the audience's behaviour to the Grand Duke in person and asked him to intervene. The father was soon found a post in some government office, while the daughter was taken to the Grand Duke's bed and later installed in the Palazzina Livia8 on the west side of the Piazza San Marco.

  The visit of Livia Raimondi's father to the Pitti Palace was not an exceptional occurrence. Callers were encouraged there and notices were placed on the doors advising them that it was as offensive to offer a tip as to receive one. Occasional parties were given in the Boboli Gardens, where hundreds of guests, irrespective of class, were regaled with food, wine and music. Yet in their own homes the poor still lived sparely. The numerous employees of the government were ill-paid and firmly denied the customary bribes which had formerly supplemented their incomes. The workers in the cloth and silk industries, of whom there were still over 25,000 in a population of about 78,000 when Peter Leopold became Grand Duke, also had good cause to complain of their lot, of low wages and of the prices fixed by the official department known as the Abbondanza. These prices were, in any case, largely ignored by the
peasants who came in from the contado to sell their wares in the market in the Piazza dell'Olio behind the Palazzo Arcivescovile.

  Visitors to Florence in the late 1780s, however, were unconscious of any unrest in the city. Even the storming of the Bastille in Paris appears to have had few repercussions here. The theatres in 1789 were packed as usual; the Aquila Nera hotel was fully booked; the Grand Duchess gave a dinner at the Pitti Palace for about forty of the most notable foreign visitors. The police heard rumours of some sort of uprising being planned by two dissidents, one a baker, the other a second-hand-clothes dealer, who were reported as having gone to inspect the Forte di Belvedere, which, since the disbanding of the army and the subsequent dismissal of the militia, was virtually defenceless. But there seemed little danger that the conspiracy would come to anything.

  Then, on 20 February 1790, the Emperor Joseph II died in Vienna; and soon afterwards his brother and heir, the Grand Duke Peter Leopold, followed by the Grand Duchess and their numerous children, together with wagonloads of furniture from the Pitti Palace, made their way north for the Alps and Austria.

  Within weeks the Regency Council, which had been appointed before the Grand Duke's departure, had a full-scale riot on their hands. A mob armed with sticks and hatchets burst into the market in the Piazza dell' Olio shouting for a reduction in prices and scattering the peasant dealers before rampaging off down the Via de' Cerretani and the Via dei Rondinelli to ransack the houses of two well-known landowners and oil merchants, one of whom narrowly escaped being thrown out of a window of the Palazzo Vernaccia.

  Another mob invaded the Mercato del Grano, brandishing axes, pushing aside the peasants there and selling off their stocks of grain, sack by sack, at the first price offered. The rioters then rushed off to the Palazzo Serristori,9 the home of Antonio Serristori, the elderly president of the Regency Council, who sent them away to the house of a fellow senator, Francesco Maria Gianni, where they immediately made their way to the wine cellar. Sent from there to the house of yet another senator, Marco del Rosso, who, they were assured, would listen understandingly to their requests, they were at length persuaded to disperse.