These two statements were taken as bearing only one interpretation: France and Piedmont were plotting a war against Austria. On 4 February an inspired pamphlet bearing the title Napoléon III et l'talie appeared in the Paris bookshops and mentioned this war as a distinct possibility, thus increasing the growing concern with which the prospect of such a war was viewed all over Europe, and in particular by the English Conservative government.
In England, Lord Malmesbury, the Foreign Secretary, referred privately to Piedmont as a ‘mischievous, conceited little state’ and professed that he thought it intolerable that ‘Europe should be deluged with blood for the personal ambition of an Italian attorney and a tambour major, like Cavour and his master’. The distasteful marriage that had seemed to be a prelude to this coming war, together with the fear that the war would, in its turn, be a prelude to a new era of Napoleonic conquest, had led to a cooling of enthusiasm for Italian nationalism throughout the country.
Elsewhere in Europe the fear that the war would endanger the Pope had roused the Catholics to determined protest; and with such powerful opposition raised against him, Napoleon began to back away from the undertakings he had given at Plombières.
But Cavour had gone too far to retreat. Helped by the Società Nazionale Italiana, he had done all he could to rouse his country to a fervour of patriotism. Italians from all over the peninsula had been encouraged to come to Piedmont to enlist in the forces he was assembling for a war that was presented as a crusade. He could scarcely hope now to dampen the enthusiasm that he had created without destroying his reputation and career. There was, also, an additional complication: he had been warned by Odo Russell, the British diplomatic agent in Rome, that feelings in Europe were running high against him and that if he declared war on Austria, he would lose all the sympathy of his former supporters.
This was a matter which had been discussed at Plombières. Napoleon III had insisted that the war must not appear to be a war of aggression, nor revolutionary in character. Austria must be provoked into the attack. Cavour was confident that she could be provoked. ‘I shall force Austria to declare war on us,’ he told Odo Russell confidently, ‘in about the first week of May.’
By the middle of April, however, it appeared that Cavour's dangerous gamble had failed. Napoleon III, retreating in the face of opinion in England and France, recommended Piedmont to agree to a suggestion made by the English government that there should be an agreed policy of simultaneous disarmament by all the countries involved. Cavour knew that to accept such a solution would mean the collapse of all he had been working for. In despair he locked himself in his room and contemplated suicide. Knowing that Piedmont could not flout the combined will of Europe, he eventually came to the view that he must agree to disarm. Before this was known in Vienna, however, the Austrian government had made up their mind to act.
On 23 April 1859 Cavour was stopped on the steps of the Chamber of Deputies by two Austrian officers who handed him a note from their Emperor. Austria peremptorily demanded the demobilization of the Piedmontese forces; and if a satisfactory answer was not received within three days the Emperor Franz Josef would, ‘with great regret, be compelled to have recourse to arms in order to secure it’.
‘It is half-past six,’ Cavour replied, hiding the gleam of triumph in his eyes by looking down at his watch. ‘Come back at this time on 26 April and you shall have your answer.’
When the officers had gone, he turned to a friend, rubbing his hands together as was his habit when he was excited. ‘We have made history,’ he said. ‘Now let's have dinner’.
From the first the war went well for the French and Piedmontese allies. On 4 June 1859, supported by volunteers from many parts of Italy, including Tuscany, they defeated the Austrians at Magenta; immediately afterwards they occupied Milan; and on 24 June, at Solferino, the Austrians were even more decisively beaten in a battle in which uncounted thousands of men on both sides lost their lives. For ever afterwards Napoleon III was to be haunted by their screams as they died. He decided that it was time for peace.
In Florence it had already been decided that the time had come to get rid of the Grand Duke Leopold. Towards the end of April 1859 street demonstrations of several thousand people, many of them wearing the nationalist symbol of the tricolour in their buttonholes, had been organized by members of the Società Nazionale, including Marchese Ferdinando Bartolommei and a revolutionary baker, Giuseppe Dolfi. There were loud shouts of ‘Viva l'Italia!’ of ‘Guerra all' Austria!’ ‘Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re d'Italia!’
The government ministers handed in their resignations at Pitti Palace on the evening of 25 April. There were further demonstrations the next day when the ministers were advised to stay at home; and on 27 April another huge demonstration was mounted in the Piazza Maria Antonia where tricolour cockades were distributed among the crowds. From many windows tricolour banners were already flying; and the demonstrators were encouraged and comforted by the appearance of an immense tricolour flag on a pole on the Forte di Belvedere. Rapturous applause and cheers greeted the arrival in several carriages of the actors and actresses of a French company then appearing at the Cocomero Theatre.
From the Piazza Maria Antonia the crowd began to march, column after seemingly endless column, to the Piazza della Signoria. At the Palazzo Pitti the Grand Duke had been advised to abdicate by his old tutor, Marchese Cosimo Ridolfi. But he had refused to do so, preferring to leave the city without surrendering his rights. So at about six o'clock in the evening, the Grand Duke and his son Ferdinand joined the rest of their family in the carriages which had been provided for them. They passed through the Porta San Gallo and into Via Bolognese. The people standing by the roadside watched them depart in silence. When his escorts rode back to Florence he parted from them with the word ‘Arrivederli’, as though expecting to return once more. But this time there was to be no return. His heir, to whom he abdicated his rights, was never to reign as the Grand Duke Ferdinand IV. The quiet city they left behind had achieved a bloodless revolution. ‘Amazing!’ the French minister declared. ‘Not even a window broken.’
22
THE CAPITAL OF ITALY
‘Frightful in his person, a great, strong, burly athletic man, brusque in his manners, unrefined in his conversation, very loose in his conduct, very eccentric in his habits.’
CHARLES GREVILLE
In the middle of the night of 15 March 1860, the minister of justice in the provisional government which had been established in Florence appeared at a window of the Pitti Palace to make an announcement to the crowds standing expectantly in the piazza below. It was just after twelve o'clock but orders had been given to the bell-ringer not to sound his midnight bell until the announcement for which the crowds were waiting could be made, since it might be taken to be a bad omen were the news to be released on a Friday. So, at a time later to be officially given as a quarter to twelve on Thursday night but in fact at five past on Friday morning, the minister began to speak. By an overwhelming majority, he declared, the people of Tuscany had voted for the unification of the former Grand Duchy with the constitutional monarchy of Victor Emmanuel II, King of Piedmont.
Five years later Victor Emmanuel arrived in Florence to take up residence at the Pitti Palace in the Stanze della Meridiana, which had been specially redecorated for him. A squat man with immensely strong, thick legs and an enormous moustache which swept up towards his little grey eyes in a ferociously intimidating crescent, he was described by the English diarist, Charles Greville, who met him on a visit to London, as ‘frightful in his person, a great, strong, burly athletic man, brusque in his manners, unrefined in his conversation, very loose in his conduct, very eccentric in his habits’. Untidy in his dress, with the hard, rough handshake of a giant and the suspicions of a brigand, he detested official banquets and preferred to eat huge peasant dishes of steaming ragout smothered in garlic and hot onions. His appetite for women was equally voracious and expressed in the bluntest language. His patie
nt and popular wife had had to grow accustomed to his numerous affairs and his passion for his favourite mistress, the luscious, wanton daughter of a sergeant-major in the Piedmontese army whom he had created Contessa di Mirafiori and for whom he had the Medici villa of Petraia restored and redecorated.1
By the time he arrived in Florence in February 1865 the city had become the capital of the new Kingdom of Italy in accordance with the so-called Convention of September, much to the anger of the Piedmontese, who protested in riots which left almost two hundred people dead in the streets of Turin, and much to the annoyance of the King, who expressed his dismay at having to leave Piedmont, where he could so readily indulge his passion for hunting in the forests and mountains. Nor was Victor Emmanuel too sure that he would get on very well with the members of Florence's older families, most of whom were inclined to look down upon the House of Savoy as interloping parvenus and many of whom had recently been tactless enough to attend a funeral mass celebrated at the church of Santa Felicita on the occasion of the death in Germany of the widow of the Grand Duke Ferdinand II. Nor, indeed, was the King too confident of gaining the respect of ordinary Florentine people who, he was told by one of his officials, were very jealous of their old traditions as firm enemies of tyranny and champions of liberty, as exemplified by their most cherished statues, Michelangelo's David, Donatello's Judith Slaying Holofernes and Cellini's bronze of Perseus trampling on Medusa and holding aloft her severed head. Nor had the King much ground for hope that he would be welcomed by the numerous foreigners living in Florence, so many of whom had been such enthusiastic supporters of Mazzini and Garibaldi. Indeed, one of these, Jessie White, the red-haired daughter of a Hampshire shipbuilder, who, with her revolutionary husband, Alberto Mario, had served in Sicily with the Garibaldini, actually shouted an imprecation at the King from the door of the Caffè Doney on his formal entry into the city on 3 February 1865.
This, however, was an unusual outburst. The King was warmly greeted at the railway station by a delegation of senators and deputies of the Italian Parliament and of such distinguished citizens as the blind old Marchese Gino Capponi, doyen of the Florentine patriarchy. He was loudly cheered on his drive through the streets to the Palazzo Pitti; and, on his arrival there, he was called to the balcony time and time again by an immense and enthusiastic crowd, which did not disperse until midnight.
He soon settled down in the palace to an established though eccentric routine, waking at four o'clock in the morning, being out and about by five, and seeing ministers on Thursdays and Sundays before eight. A meal at noon was followed by a siesta, then by work on his correspondence with a secretary and on appeals to his charity, which were often scribbled on bits of paper and lobbed into his carriage when he went out driving. He paid particular attention to these appeals as well as to the newspapers, which were marked for him by a special press secretary. The rest of the afternoon was spent driving about in his carriage. In the evenings, when not in the strong and comforting arms of his mistress, Rosa di Mirafiori, at the Villa della Petraia, he was often to be seen at the theatre or going through a postern gate in the Boboli Gardens to take his dogs for a walk in Via del Campuccio. Occasionally he was host at a ball in the palace, and three times a year he gave a gala dinner. He was a regular visitor to the horse-races in the Hippodrome in the Cascine and was to institute a race for three-year-olds trained in Italy, the Derby Reale, which did not, however, survive his departure from Florence for Rome.
Just as the King had regarded his move from Piedmont with annoyance and apprehension, so had the Florentine people accepted the promotion of their city to capital of the kingdom with mixed feelings. As officials and functionaries took trains from Turin for Italy's new capital, shopkeepers and rentiers, hoteliers and lodging-house keepers looked forward to making profits from increased sales, inflated prices and higher rents. But those who could not depend upon a rise in their standard of living looked askance upon the new arrivals, deriding their strange Torinese accents, disliking their women, who showed off their dresses and jewels as they drove through the Cascine in their cabriolets, and complaining of their ability to pay rents which rendered numbers of native Florentines homeless. And why, it was asked, did there have to be so many of them? The Grand Dukes had managed with a mere handful by comparison. Besides, largely for their benefit, the appearance of Florence was to be changed for ever. The plans for new buildings, piazzas and roads, which were considered essential for the city's new status, entailed the destruction of much that was loved or at least pleasantly familiar. Existing buildings were to be put to fresh purposes; transport was to be transformed; Florence was to become, as one enthusiastic developer put it, ‘worthy of her great destiny’.
The population of the city had grown from about 60,000 during the Napoleonic occupation to over 114,000 at the time of the 1861 census; and with the arrival of some 20,000 to 30,000 bureaucrats and office workers with their families from the north, the opening up of the city and the construction of new housing became matters of extreme importance. Two commissions were accordingly appointed, one to study proposals for changes within the old city, the other, under the chairmanship of an experienced and imaginative architect, Giuseppe Poggi, to draw up a comprehensive plan for the development of the area around and beyond the old city walls.
So now and in the years that followed there took place a wholesale transformation of the city by various contractors, under the general direction of the Società Anglo-Italiana, which soon handed over operations to the Florence Land and Public Works Company, an affiliate of the Anglo-
Michelangelo's David being transferred from the Piazza della Signoria to the Accademia in 1874.
Italian Bank, of which the principal directors, and chairmen by turns, were Baron Bettino Ricasoli, twice Prime Minister in the 1860s; Sir James Lacaita, a Dante scholar and politician, a naturalized Englishman with an English wife; and Sir James Hudson, former British minister in Turin and, according to Lord Malmesbury, ‘more Italian than the Italians themselves’.
Under the direction of the Florence Land and Public Works Company, ring roads and viali were built encircling the city; new squares appeared like the Piazza d'Azeglio2 and the Piazza della Repubblica,3 together with sweeping avenues such as that which climbs up from the river and passes below San Miniato al Monte to Piazzale Michelangelo. Residential areas were built over the old city walls; open spaces were cleared for markets, notably that around the east and north of San Lorenzo; old houses were demolished for parks and gardens: the Giardino dei Semplici, for example, near San Marco4 and the Giardino dell'Orticoltura off Via Bolognese.5
The Chamber of Deputies conducted their debates in the Palazzo Vecchio, in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, which had once accommodated Savonarola's Grand Council; senators met in the Sala dei Dugento or in a large room at the top of ninety-seven steps in the Uffizi, which prompted one of them to comment breathlessly, ‘It is not for nothing that they call us the Upper Chamber.’ Officials, secretaries and clerks moved into a variety of palaces and convents, into the Palazzo Medici and Santa Croce, into Palazzo Frescobaldi, Palazzo del Cepparello and San Firenze, into parts of the convents of Santa Maria Novella and the Badia, settling down to work in rooms all over the city on both sides of the Arno.
Receptions were held in the house of the mayor, Ubaldino Peruzzi, in Borgo de' Greci, where Emilio Visconti-Venosta, a friend of Cavour and several times minister of foreign affairs, could be seen talking to General Count Raffaele Cadorna, the minister for war; there, too, the historian Pasquale Villari, biographer of Savonarola and Machiavelli, encountered the novelist, poet and short-story writer, Edmondo De Amicis.
De Amicis was also to be seen at the Thursday evening soirées at Casa Rattazzi in Palazzo Guadagni,6 which were presided over by the dashing wife of Urbano Rattazzi, twice Prime Minister in the 1860s. The daughter of the Irish politician and diplomat, Sir Thomas Wyse, and of Laetitia Bonaparte, Napoleon I's niece, she was the author of rather scandalous novels
published in Paris and had achieved a lasting reputation for outré behaviour by appearing as a scantily clad bacchante at one of the first balls she attended in Florence. The entertainments she provided at the Palazzo Guadagni were a mixture of review sketches, which she wrote and performed with friends in a small theatre installed in the palace, and a succession of athletic cotillions which lasted all night. The Prime Minister and his friends usually withdrew after supper, before these high jinks began.
Receptions were frequently held also by the Principessa Eleonora Corsini Rinuccini at the Palazzo Corsini sul Prato, by the Marchesa Ginori in her palace in Via Ginori, by Cavour's granddaughter, the Marchese Giuseppina Alfieri in Casa Alfieri in Via della Dogana, and in the houses of the diplomatic corps, notably in those of Sir Augustus and Lady Paget, of the American George Perkins Marsh, President Lincoln's first minister to Italy, author of Man and Nature and master of twenty languages, of the Russian Count Kisselev, renowned for the expertise of his chef, and of the Turkish minister, always readily recognized by the fez which he seemed never to remove. At the Belgian legation the extremely rich Baron Adrian van der Linden Hoogvorst and his Florentine wife gave the most lavish parties, at one of which a large table collapsed, scattering dishes of food, candelabra, porcelain and silver in all directions, but it was so quickly replaced by another table piled high with a fresh burden of delicacies, plates and ornaments that Florentine guests told each other that the disaster had been engineered to display the wealth of their hosts.
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