Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  Clubs and cafés were crowded. Senior bureaucrats favoured the Club dell'Unione in Via Tornabuoni; more raffish people chose the Casino Borghese in the Palazzo Borghese for dancing and gambling; customers of all kinds flocked to the Caffé Doney where the greatest Italian poet since Leopardi, Giosué Carducci, son of an old Florentine family, could frequently be seen on his visits from Bologna. Also often to be seen in Doney's were the writers Raffaele Lambruschini, Francesco Dall'Ongaro, professor of dramatic literature at the university, and Niccolò Tommaseo, compiler of a seven-volume dictionary of the Italian language, as well as two well-known and very rich foreign residents, Frederick Stibbert, collector, traveller and adventurer, who had fought with Garibaldi and lived in a villa beyond the Porta San Gallo, and Gladstone's friend, John Temple Leader, former member of parliament for Westminster, who bought and restored at great expense several old buildings in and around Florence, including the vast medieval castle of Vincigliata7 and a house in the Piazza dei Petti where he was to die at the age of ninety-two in 1903.

  A favourite haunt of artists was the Caffè Michelangiolo in Via Cavour. Here gathered the group of painters known as the Macchiaioli who, in reaction against hidebound academicians, turned to nature for instruction and often worked out of doors in the manner of the French Impressionists, contending that colour patches (macchie) in chiaroscuro were a highly significant aspect of painting. Most successful of the Macchiaioli were

  The Mercato Vecchio by Telemaco Signorini, one of the group of Florentine artists known as Macchiaioli.

  Giovanni Fattori, Telemaco Signorini, Silvestro Lega and, in the group's early years, Giovanni Boldini, who went on to become one of the most renowned portrait painters of his time.

  While Boldini was still painting in Florence, in September 1866, the great hero of the Risorgimento, Giuseppe Garibaldi, arrived in the city. Although the Prussian defeat of the Austrians at Koniggratz in July was to allow Venice to fall into the hands of King Victor Emmanuel, it had otherwise been a sad year for the armies of the Kingdom of Italy in their struggle to wrest the remaining territories in the peninsula from alien hands. The victories of Garibaldi's ‘thousand heroes’, which had led to the liberation of Sicily and the accession of King Victor Emmanuel to the throne of Naples, had been followed by the defeats of Italian forces by the Austrians at Custoza and Novara and by the destruction of an Italian fleet off the island of Lissa, a sad humiliation, which was to be compounded by the trial in Florence of the Italian admiral, Count Pellion di Persano, and his condemnation to demotion and the loss of his pension. The tragedy of Lissa was followed the very next day by the battle of Bezzecca in which Garibaldi's forces suffered terrible casualties at the hands of the Austrian army.

  Garibaldi himself was greeted in Florence that September as a conquering hero, one of the very few Italian leaders to have emerged from the recent fighting with any credit. He was driven through the streets of the city in a carriage accompanied by the voluble revolutionary baker, Giuseppe Dolfi, acknowledging the cheers of the crowd with grave dignity. His deeply set brown eyes, divided by the high bridge of a long and aquiline nose, gazed upon the faces around him without apparent emotion.

  Garibaldi was never to achieve his ambition of taking Rome, ‘the symbol of united Italy’, and handing it over to Victor Emmanuel as he had handed over Naples and Sicily, for, in November 1867, having paid another visit to Florence – where, having recruited a large number of volunteers, he had declared in a rousing speech, ‘We have the right to have Rome! Rome is ours! – he was overwhelmingly defeated by papal troops and their French allies at Mentana. Yet the incorporation of Rome into the Italian Kingdom was not now to be long delayed. In 1870 France declared war on Prussia; and by the time of the French surrender at Sedan on 1 September that year, nearly all the French troops had been withdrawn from Rome in a vain attempt to avert the catastrophe. King Victor Emmanuel's soldiers, commanded by General Cadorna, entered the Holy City after a token resistance by the troops of Pope Pius IX; and the whole of Italy was unified at last.

  The next year Italy transferred her capital to Rome and the King left the Pitti Palace to establish his court at the Quirinal, while the Pope withdrew into the Vatican, where he died, a self-styled prisoner, in 1878. The King also died that year, still homesick for Turin and much disliking the gloomy Quirinal, where, for a long time, foreign royalty, Catholic and Protestant alike, were unwilling to spend the night for fear of offending the Pope. For many years to come, indeed, the papacy and the new regime were to remain unreconciled and Roman society was to be torn by conflicting loyalties.

  Florentine society was, in general, thankful to see the government of the country, the officials and the foreign legations, depart for the south; and in the weeks before their departure, the city seemed to be celebrating in a kind of perpetual carnival. One gala ball followed another; parties were given night after night; the city's eleven theatres were all fully booked; and one evening at the Pergola, during a performance of Tosca, when Verdi was recognized in the audience, his fellow theatre-goers rose from their seats to give him a standing ovation.

  The Florentines' feelings about the departure of the court and government to Rome were well expressed in a popular epigram:

  Torino piange quando il Prence parte

  E Roma esulta quando il Prence arriva.

  Firenze, culla della poesia e dell'arte,

  Se ne infischia quando giunge e quando parte.

  Turin sheds tears when the King departs

  And Rome's exultant when the King arrives.

  Florence, fount of poetry and the arts,

  Cares not one whit in either case – and thrives.

  The attitude of the Florentines towards the government's departure was understandable. The King had been popular enough; but, despite the new building which his government's residence here had made necessary, the city was still overcrowded, the streets often blocked and resounding with the shouts of drivers, the cries of omnibus conductors and the persistent ringing of bicycle bells. It had to be conceded that the years during which Florence had been Italy's capital had brought benefits to the city: the Biblioteca Nazionale, for example, had become a copyright library for books published in Italy, with the right to receive a copy of every book printed in the country; newspapers had proliferated; several new theatres had opened; the university had prospered. But it was quite a relief, as a journalist put it, for the Florentines to be left alone to watch the world go by from the tables of the Caffè Michelangiolo, the Antico Fattori and the Giubbe Rosse,8 to go to the races at the Hippodrome, to have their photographs taken by the Alinari or at Giacomo Brogi's studio in Corso dei Tintori,9 to enjoy their own Tuscan way of life which, indeed, many Piedmontese bureaucrats who had reached retirement age had grown so much to enjoy that they decided to settle down in the city to spend the rest of their days there.

  Caption

  The Mercato Vecchio with the Tabernacle of Santa Maria della Tromba and the Column of Abundance by Guiseppe Moricci. The column, now in the Piazza della Repubblica, bears a copy of Donatello's original statue of Abundance, the Dovizia.

  The redevelopment of the city, accelerated by its brief reign as the capital of Italy, was still proceeding apace. Streets were being widened, lungarni being built, houses and towers demolished. The Via de' Panzani was built as an extension of the Via de' Cerretani to the Piazza Stazione; the Mercato Vecchio was transformed; so were Via Tornabuoni and Via Porta Rossa. The city in which Walter Savage Landor spent his last days was, indeed, as he said, scarcely to be recognized as that in which he had come to live nearly half a century before.

  After the transfer of the capital of Italy to Rome, Florence fell deeper and deeper into recession. The population dropped from some 200,000 to 167,000; and those who left in large numbers were the higher-paid members of the community, not only government officials, members of parliament, diplomats and courtiers, but also capitalists, many of them in the construction industry, who supposed they w
ould be able to make more money in Rome. For the poor the outlook in Florence was bleak; and the municipality, close to financial collapse, could do little about it, while the government would not help. The crime rate soared; there were more thefts, bankruptcies and suicides per head of the population than in any of the other principal towns in Italy. The rate of deaths from tuberculosis was the highest in the country because of the enormously high mortality in the poor quarters such as Santo Spirito and Santo Croce. In 1884 an epidemic of cholera claimed 8,000 victims. By then the Commune had been forced to declare itself bankrupt.

  Soon after this the government of Agostino Depretis was obliged to turn its attention to Florence's plight and a gradual recovery followed. New industries were founded and old ones expanded; banks and insurance companies were established. The railway was extended to Rome and to the Po valley by way of Pistoia and Bologna. In Florence steam-propelled tramways took the place of horse-drawn transport on some routes; and in August 1890 the first electric lights were switched on in the Vie Calzaiuoli, Cerretani and Tornabuoni. By the last years of the century, when the population had reached 200,000 again and was steadily rising, Florence seemed to the increasing number of tourists who went there as prosperous a city as any in Italy.

  23

  ‘VILLE TOUTE ANGLAISE’

  ‘Florence is all that I have dreamed and more.’

  CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON

  To the brothers Goncourt, who were there in 1855, it seemed that Florence was a ‘ville toute Anglaise’. There were English shops in which English tweeds were sold and English mackintoshes, packets of tea imported from England, tins of digestive biscuits, tennis racquets and boxes of cards for playing bridge. In the bookshops there were English novels, in the tearooms muffins and seed cake, on the menus in restaurants English dishes. Visitors could have their ailments treated by English doctors, their teeth extracted by English dentists, their medicines supplied by English chemists, their money exchanged by English bankers.

  Walter Savage Landor, characterized by one of his biographers as being ‘for nearly ninety years a typical English public schoolboy’, moved, after his wife's death, to lodgings in Via Nunziatina, where he shocked various members of the English colony by his intimate relationship with an attractive, young American writer, Kate Field. Among Landor's numerous visitors were William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt; Keats's friend, Charles Armitage Brown; Algernon Charles Swinburne, who, like Longfellow, stayed at the Grand Hotel Royal in the Borgo Santi Apostoli; Francis Hare, ‘a monster of learning‘, whose delight it was to admit to sins of such appalling depravity that he sent priests fleeing from the confessional box; Charles James Lever, the cheerful, generous though generally impoverished Irish novelist, whose favourite amongst his own books, The Dodd Family Abroad, was written in Florence in the 1850s; Lever's friend, W. M. Thackeray, who was often to be seen in the Ristorante Laura in the Via dei Cerchi, where the fish soup so delighted his palate that he wrote a poem about it; Seymour Stocker Kirkup, an indifferent painter and most kindly man who was British consul in Florence and was to live till the age of ninety-two, having married a bride of twenty-two when he was eighty-seven. Charles Dickens, whose Pictures from Italy was soon to be published, came to Florence after Landor had returned for a time to England. ‘What would Landor like as a remembrance of Italy?’ Dickens had asked him before his departure. ‘An ivy leaf

  The Piazza della Signoria looking towards the Neptune Fountain and the Via dei Cerchi behind Giambologna's equestrian statue of the Grand Duke Cosimo I.

  Promenaders in the Cascine.

  from Fiesole,’ Landor had replied and this Dickens had picked and sent to him.

  Frequently in Landor's company also were Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who had come to live in Florence soon after the arrival of another English writer, Frances Trollope.

  Frances Trollope had settled in Florence with her eldest son, Thomas Adolphus, in 1843. She was then aged sixty-three, and by the indefatigable writing of numerous travel books and novels had restored the fortunes of the family, which had been dissipated by the wildly impractical schemes of her late husband, an irascible lawyer and failed farmer, salesman, property developer and encyclopedist. Thomas Adolphus, large, ugly and short-tempered, had also become a writer and was to become even more prolific than his mother, producing some sixty volumes in fifty years, most of them books on Italian history or novels with an Italian setting.

  The Trollopes lived at first on the second floor of the Casa Berti in the Via di San Giuseppe, next to the church of Santa Croce. In 1848 they moved to what became known as the Villino Trollope1 in Piazza Maria Antonia,2 a famously hospitable meeting place for English and other foreign authors then living in Italy, for various leaders of the Italian nationalist movement and for those numerous friends of the Trollopes who, like Mrs Browning, shared their interest in spiritualism and in the seances conducted by the celebrated medium, Daniel Dunglas Home. Thomas Adolphus's brother, Anthony, was to be seen here occasionally; and in 1860 George Eliot, who, for a time, had put up at the Pension Suisse3 opposite the Palazzo Strozzi, came to stay with them and began work on her novel about Savonarola's Florence, Romola, which was published in the Cornhill Magazine in 1862–3. To these and her many other guests, Thomas Adolphus's wife, Theodosia, also a writer and a translator of Italian verse, was a charming and attentive though nervous hostess, whose kindly nature was celebrated in Walter Savage Landor's To Theodosia.

  Soon after Theodosia's death in 1865, Trollope, whose mother had also died two years before, moved out of the Villino Trollope – where the memories of his past happy life so deeply distressed him – and bought a house beyond the Porta San Niccolò, the Villa Ricorboli. It was already a large house with plenty of room for his extensive library and his collection of antiquities and curios; but Trollope had plans to make it bigger still, to build on a tower for his books and to tame the wild garden. When a young friend of the family came to act as governess to his daughter, Beatrice, then in her early teens, she found the house in confusion with half its roof missing and the builders actually living on the premises.

  This friend was Fanny Ternan, sister of the actress Nelly Ternan, whose relationship with Charles Dickens has been so well described by Claire Tomalin in The Invisible Woman. Fanny had been to Florence before. She

  The Via degli Strozzi looking towards the Piazza della Repubblica, with the Hotel (formerly Pensione) Suisse on the left and the corner of the Strozzi Palace on the extreme right.

  had come with her mother, at Dickens's expense, to study singing for a year under Pietro Romani, leaving Nelly in London with their sister Maria. On that occasion Fanny had stayed at the Villino Trollope, where Nelly had joined her for a holiday. At the Villa Ricorboli in 1865 she found that Alfred Austin was also in residence. Then thirty years old, he had abandoned the law for literature on inheriting a fortune from an uncle, and had already conceived so high an opinion of his gifts as a poet that his appointment as poet laureate in 1896 was to strike him as being quite as justly merited as his contemporaries found it ludicrous. Blind to his own faults, he dismissed the virtues of other poets from Tennyson to Browning with contempt. But Thomas Adolphus Trollope was fond of Austin and so was Fanny; while Trollope and Fanny themselves grew sufficiently fond of each other to marry; and, despite the differences in their ages, they settled down happily at the Villa Ricorboli, where guests were entertained as hospitably as they had been at the Villino Trollope in Piazza Maria Antonia.

  In the year that the Trollopes had moved to Piazza Maria Antonia, the Brownings moved back into a house in Piazza San Felice. They had left

  The Brownings' drawing-room at the Casa Guidi by George Mignaty, July 1861.

  Pisa for Florence the year before, largely for a more active social life, though Robert was warned that Florence was ‘English-ridden’.

  They had stayed at first in the Hôtel du Nord, then moved to rooms in a house in Via delle Belle Donne near the Piazza Santa Maria No
vella. Eventually, after an unsuccessful excursion to the Benedictine monastery at Vallombrosa – to which Mrs Browning and her maid were dragged in wine baskets by white bullocks and from which they were soon dispatched by the abbot, who did not like women in the vicinity, even in the guest-house beyond the monastery walls – they rented six high-ceilinged rooms on the piano nobile of the Casa Guidi.4 The house, once the property of the Ridolfi, before being sold at the beginning of the seventeenth century to Camillo Guidi, secretary of state to the Grand Duke, stood not far from the Pitti Palace and close to the church of San Felice in Piazza, whose walls overshadowed the terrace where the new occupants strolled up and down in the evening air. The rent was a guinea a week and this included admission to the Boboli Gardens, though not, unfortunately, for Mrs Browning's beloved dog Flush, which she had carried with her when she had left her father's house in Wimpole Street after her secret marriage. The Brownings' lease ran out after three months, and when Robert tried to renew it he was told that the winter rent was double the summer's. This being beyond their means, they moved out to a much smaller place opposite the Pitti Palace. By the spring of 1848, however, the turmoil in Italy and the fear of what might happen in Florence had driven so many of the English away that rented accommodation was being emptied by the day and landlords were being obliged to accept far lower rents than they would have considered the year before. The Brownings were, therefore, able to move back into a now unfurnished Casa Guidi for no more than twenty-five guineas a year, with permission to sublet whenever they wanted to. They remained there contentedly until 1861, the year of Cavour's death, a loss which profoundly affected Mrs Browning. ‘She wept many tears for him,’ wrote William Wetmore Story, the American sculptor. ‘This agitation undoubtedly weakened her and perhaps was the last feather that broke her down.’ She died three weeks later.