Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  Most of her Casa Guidi Windows, declaring her enthusiastic support for the cause of Italian liberty, and the blank verse, Aurora Leigh, were written in Casa Guidi. So was much of Robert's best work; and their son, Pen, who was later to buy the house, was born here. Their maid, Elizabeth Wilson, an enterprising girl from Northumberland, fell in love with Ferdinando Romagnoli, her employers' dashing manservant, whom she married. Later she established herself as the landlady of a boarding-house in Florence where one of her temporary lodgers, the explosive Walter Savage Landor, having been thrown out of his own lodgings, hurled a dinner, which he pronounced revolting, out of the dining-room window.

  Americans were almost as often to be encountered in Florence as the English. James Fenimore Cooper worked here as correspondent for an American newspaper; so also, for a time, did Mark Twain. Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, came in a vain attempt to follow up that great success. The tower of the Villa di Montauto at Bellosguardo was used by Nathaniel Hawthorne as a model for the castle of Monte Beni in The Marble Faun. Henry James also lived for a time at Bellosguardo.5

  When he first arrived in Florence in the early October of 1873, aged thirty, Henry James found the days oppressively hot and the nights a torment because of the mosquitoes. He consequently moved on to Siena; but a few weeks later he was back in Florence, where he was joined by his older brother, William, who described him to their parents as

  wholly unchanged. No balder than when he quit [Massachusetts]; his teeth of a yellowish tinge (from the waters of Homburg, he says); his beard very rich and glossy in consequence he says of the use of a substance called Brilliantine of which he always keeps a large bottle on the table among his papers… He speaks Italian with wonderful fluency and skill as it seems to me, accompanying his words with many stampings of the foot, shakings of the head and rollings of the eye sideways.

  He had not yet achieved his great fame but was already a writer of exceptional promise, ponderous in manner, self-regarding, gregarious though emotionally withdrawn, most anxious to be taken for the distinguished master he aspired to be. He spent all morning writing in Florence, then went out walking and sightseeing, looking at pictures, gathering material for a series of articles on the city which were to appear in his Transatlantic Sketches.

  A portrait of Henry James by John Singer Sargent, who was born in Florence in 1856.

  After a visit to Rome and America, Henry James returned to Florence the following year and rented an apartment at No. 10 Piazza Santa Maria Novella which, although it had two bedrooms and a sitting-room, cost no more than $25 a month. ‘Blessed Florence!’ he wrote to his sister, Alice. ‘My literary labours will certainly show the good effect of my having space to pace about… Tell William I find the French restaurant in Via Rondinelli, with the lobsters and the truffles in the window, an excellent place to dine, so that I am altogether most comfortable.’

  ‘I am still lingering on here in Florence – one of the few survivors of the winter colony,’ he told his mother several weeks later when the hot weather had driven most other visitors away. In the piazza beneath the shuttered windows of his high-ceilinged room the cabmen slept in their boxes, ‘while loungers took their siestas half naked, flat on their faces, on the paving-stones’.

  ‘In the morning he took walks and sought the coolness of the churches,’ wrote his biographer, Leon Edel. ‘He lunched early in a beer-garden, in the shade of a trellis, and spent the long hot hours of the afternoon in his room working when possible, or simply taking a siesta along with the rest of the city. His novel was proceeding “not very rapidly, but very regularly, which is the best way”.’ This was Roderick Hudson, his first important novel, a work soon to be followed by Daisy Miller and Washington Square, which combined with them to ensure that when he returned to Florence in March 1880 their author had achieved an international renown.

  On this occasion James took a room in the Hotel de l'Arno overlooking the river, and here he began to work on the Portrait of a Lady, his writing set aside from time to time for social calls, for luncheons and tea parties, and for visits to a fellow American writer, Constance Fenimore Woolson, the thirty-nine-year-old great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, neat, bright, inquiring and rather deaf.

  Miss Woolson, who came to regard Henry James with a kind of devoted reverence, was then living at the Pensione Barbensi, later the Casa Molin on the Lungarno. She had fallen in love with Florence in the manner of so many of her kind. ‘Florence is all that I have dreamed and more,’ she wrote to a friend.

  Here I have attained the old world feeling I used to dream about, a sort of enthusiasm made up of history, mythology, old churches, pictures, statues, vineyards, the Italian sky, dark-eyed peasants, opera music, Raphael and old Michael, and ever so many more ingredients – the whole, I think, has taken me pretty well off my feet! Perhaps I ought to add Henry James. He has been perfectly charming to me for the last three weeks.

  He took her with him on his walks and into churches and galleries and he clearly enjoyed himself displaying his knowledge, his taste and discernment. Mr James was a ‘delightful companion,’ she thought, ‘because he knows all about pictures‘. ‘He grew didactic and mystic over the round Botticelli of the Uffizi and the one in the Prometheus room at the Pitti. He invented as he went along, and amused himself not a little with his unusual flow of language. He delivered quite an epic upon Giotto's two little frescoes in the second cloister of Santa Maria Novella.’6 He took her to the Duomo which she had thought ‘a great gloomy space’ on a previous visit, ‘too vast and cold’; but ‘H. J. admired it’ and so ‘tried to make [her]

  A view of Florence by Samuel Palmer, who spent two years in Italy in the late 1830s.

  admire it too’. He also tried to arouse her enthusiasm for Michelangelo's statues in the New Sacristy at San Lorenzo.

  ‘The Statue of Lorenzo… is the finest statue, a thousand times over, I have ever seen,’ she wrote in one of her letters. ‘But I confess frankly that it is going to take some time for me to appreciate “the nude”.’ Indeed, the nude statues in the New Sacristry were ‘rather beyond’ her, she had to confess. She was not ‘sufficiently acquainted with torsos, flanks and the lines of anatomy’ to judge whether or not they were beautiful; and when James said that he presumed she found them so, she felt constrained to reply that no, she did not: they ‘looked so distracted’.

  ‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘distracted. But then!’ ‘Here words failed him and he walked off to look at a fresco, to recover from my horrible ignorance.’

  Six years later James and Miss Woolson were in Florence together again. This time Miss Woolson rented rooms in the huge Villa Castellani in Bellosguardo before taking a lease on the nearby Villa Brichieri-Colombi from the kindly novelist Isa Blagden, a friend of the Brownings, who had been born in India and had so dark a complexion it was supposed her mother was a native of that country. Miss Woolson sublet Miss Blagden's villa to James for a month before he moved down into Florence again to stay at the Hôtel du Sud on the Arno. Here he drove his pen steadily, as he put it; but found time as usual for an active social life amongst the ‘queer, promiscuous, polyglot (most polyglot in the world) Florentine society’, paying calls upon all kinds of people, throwing himself into that ‘whirlpool of idiotic card-leaving of which Florentine existence is largely composed’. He called upon the Marchesa Incontri, a mysterious and seemingly ‘rather dangerous’ literary hostess who wrote novels in English in a lovely villa near the Porta San Gallo; he dined with Dr W. W Baldwin, an American physician with an extensive practice in Florence, and with Maurice Barrès, then making a name for himself as a writer, whom he found ‘of a fearful precocity’, a ‘poseur and mystificator’. He went to see Janet Ross, the formidable and talkative Scottish author of Old Florence and Modern Tuscany, wife of Henry Ross, a banker in Florence, who lived in the charming villa of Castagnolo7 where she played on her guitar and struck him as being ‘awfully handsome in a utilitarian kind of way – an odd mix
ture of the British female and the dangerous woman – a Bohemian with rules and accounts’.

  James also spent a good deal of his time with Adolf von Hildebrand, the German sculptor and author of the influential Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst, who lived in the former convent in the Piazza San Francesco di Paola8 below the castellated towers and umbrella pines of Bellosguardo; and he saw much, too, of Violet Paget, producer of numerous novels, travel sketches and works on eighteenth-century and Renaissance Italy, who wrote under the name of Vernon Lee.

  James, who had first met Miss Lee in London in 1884 when she was twenty-seven, described her then as ‘a most astounding young female’ – Maurice Baring was later to observe that she was ‘by far the cleverest person’ he had ever met. She was born in France, the daughter of an English engineer who had been brought up in Warsaw and who, having fled from Poland after the insurrection of 1848, had become tutor to the future poet and novelist, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, whose widowed mother he married. Miss Lee had spent most of her life in Italy and was now living at No. 5 Via Garibaldi, where she presided over a kind of literary salon, receiving visitors in the early afternoons and in the evenings. She was a strange-looking, short-sighted young woman in mannish clothes, with short hair, protruding teeth, gleaming eyes behind little spectacles, an inveterate talker in several languages.

  James was most intrigued by her. He described her as ‘exceeding ugly, disputatious, contradictious and perverse’, able to discuss ‘all things in any language’, ‘a really superior talker with a mind – almost the only one in Florence’.

  Her mother lived with her, a ‘grotesque, deformed, invalidical, posing woman’. So did her father, the Polish-educated engineer, a man ‘in the highest degree unpleasant, mysterious and sinister’, who lived quite separately from the rest of the family, with whom he had not sat down to eat for twenty years. Also living in the house in Via Garibaldi was Miss Lee's half-brother, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, by then in his early forties and an invalid, prostrated by a nervous illness which, having cut short a promising career in the diplomatic service, now confined him to a sofa in his room where he received visitors as assiduously as Miss Lee herself and dictated verse to an amanuensis. He was eventually to recover sufficiently from his illness to marry an English novelist, Annie Holdsworth, with whom he went to live in a villa between Florence and Fiesole. When he was nearly sixty his wife gave birth to a daughter, whose death the following year was held responsible for her father's deep depression, which culminated in a stroke. He was buried in the new Protestant cemetery outside the Porta Romana.9

  It was from Eugene Lee-Hamilton that Henry James heard the story upon which he was to base The Aspern Papers. Lee-Hamilton himself had been told the story by John Singer Sargent, who, living with his parents at the Villino Torrigiani, No. 115 Via de' Serragli and later at No. 15 Via Magenta, was a student at the Accademia di Belle Arti.

  Sargent was born in Florence at Casa Arretini next to the Palazzo Sperini in the Lungarno Acciaioli. His father was an American doctor, who had brought his wife to Europe on what was intended to be a brief holiday for the sake of her health but turned out to be permanent exile. On the birth of his child he interviewed various Florentine women as prospective wet-nurses, one of whom was so anxious to obtain the appointment that she presented herself twice, the second time with her hair dyed to disguise her appearance, and on both occasions lying brazenly. When he was old enough John was sent to a school kept by a Frenchman, Joseph Domengé, in the former convent I Servi di Maria in the Piazza Santissima Annunziata. He also attended dancing lessons in a house at No. 43 Via Romana, where one day a handsome old lady came into the room to play the piano for the class. This old lady turned out to be Claire Clairmont, the stepsister of Percy Bysshe Shelley's wife Mary, who had been a part of the Shelley ménage in their travels around Italy and was the mother of Byron's daughter, Allegra. She had taken music lessons in Rome, taught music in a Russian family in Moscow and, before coming to live in Florence, worked as a governess.

  In the house in Via Romana, which she shared with a middle-aged niece, she had a strange lodger, an American named Edward Augustus Silsbee, who had once been a seaman but had decided to sell his merchant ship and settle in Italy. According to a man who knew him slightly, Silsbee, having spent some time in Venice before coming to live in Florence, ‘talked of nothing but Art and Poetry & was christened “Heavy Venice”… He has quite a gift of language, but as he has not been thoroughly educated, he cannot become what his ambition desires, an Essayist, so he frets… Italy is the best place for him.’

  He had a consuming interest, verging upon mania, for the poems of Shelley who, upon his first arrival in Florence, had immediately decided that it was ‘the most beautiful city' he had ever seen. Silsbee would quote Shelley at length without the least encouragement and endlessly copied out the poet's works. He would sit in an armchair, so Vernon Lee said, ‘looking like a deep sea monster on a Bernini fountain, staring at the carpet and quoting his favourite author with a trumpet-like twang quite without relevance to the conversation’.

  He knew that Miss Clairmont possessed a collection of Shelley's papers and so anxious was he to acquire these that he never left Florence and, so it was said, rarely left the house in Via Romana in case his old landlady died while he was away. In 1879, however, he was obliged to sail for America and in his absence Miss Clairmont did die. He raced back to Florence, determined to get hold of the papers before they were dispersed. On his return to Via Romana he learned that they had been inherited by Miss Clairmont's niece, by now in her mid-fifties. He asked her about them. Yes, she did have them now. Could he acquire them from her? Yes, he could have them all. Indeed, she would give them to him. But there was one condition: he would have to marry her first. In Lee-Hamilton's version of the story, Captain Silsbee was ‘still running’.

  Changing the scene of his story from Florence to Venice, Henry James began work on The Aspern Papers at the Villa Brichieri-Colombi at Bellos-

  A windy day in 1887 on the Lungarno Acciaioli by the Ponte Santa Trinita.

  guardo, in the rooms he had taken from Miss Woolson. He worked in the garden there or on the terrace which looked down upon what he described as ‘the most beautiful view in the world’. For once he largely shunned ‘the vain agitation of particles’ which was Florentine society, but occasionally went down into the city, since 1887 was the year in which the façade of the Duomo, for long concealed by scaffolding, was at last to be revealed, and the King and Queen of Italy were to attend some of the city's festivities. James himself went to a fancy-dress ball in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Palazzo della Signoria, ‘looking lovely’, so he told a friend afterwards, in a red lucco and a black velvet cap; and he later watched a marvellous procession of citizens marching through the streets in the costumes of the time of Lorenzo il Magnifico, members of several of Florence's oldest families riding along with them, mounted on horses splendidly caparisoned, indulging that love of splendour and ceremony which the Florentines have never lost.

  The next year the Queen of England visited Florence for the first time. Although she travelled incognito, variously describing herself as the Countess of Balmoral, the Countess of Kent or the Countess of Lancaster, no one could doubt that la Regina d'Inghilterra had arrived. She was accompanied by scores of attendants and servants, including Scottish Highlanders and Indians, by her dresser, her chef, doctors, secretaries and grooms with their horses and ponies, by innumerable trunks and cases, by various evidently indispensable pieces of furniture in addition to her bed and desk, and by several favourite pictures, hundreds of photographs, mementoes and trinkets. She stayed in Florence at the Villa Palmieri, from which – as soon as she had finished work on the dispatch-boxes that were brought to her with relentless regularity by Queen's messengers – she was escorted, at her own insistence, on protracted rounds of sightseeing, accompanied through the streets by her Indian servants, much to the astonishment of the Florentines who took t
hem for princes from her distant empire. Having spent several hours being wheeled around the Uffizi, she passed sadly by the Casa Gherini where Prince Albert had stayed in 1838. She remembered how he had marvelled at the sculptures of Donatello, which were ‘far more beautiful’ than he had ‘ever imagined’, and how he had developed that taste for Italian primitives upon which he was to spend a large part of his then small income.

  The Queen also listened sadly to the music of the organ in the Badia which Prince Albert had played. He had played the piano, too; but this had not been a success, since the only instrument he had been able to hire in Florence was old and out of tune.

  One day during the Queen's visit in 1888, an English boy, the Hon. George Peel, saw ‘policemen clearing the way for a little carriage in the Piazza del Duomo’. ‘In it was an old lady with a companion,’ Peel told Sir Harold Nicolson over sixty years later. ‘It was Queen Victoria. She stopped the carriage, fumbled in her corsage, and drew out a locket which she held up to the [recently completed] façade [of the Duomo].’

  The Lady-in-Waiting afterwards told Peel that it was a miniature of the Prince Consort. She thought it would interest him to see how the Duomo looked after being repaired. Peel had been so impressed by the incident that he wrote a long account of it to Mr Gladstone. He had himself forgotten all about it, but his letter was recently found among Gladstone's papers and returned to him.

  Queen Victoria was ‘much taken’ with Florence and returned to the city in 1893 and again in 1894 when she stayed at the Villa Fabbricotti.10 Yet before she had personal knowledge of the place herself, the Queen warned Princess Mary Adelaide of Teck against taking her daughter, Princess May, who was to marry the future King George V, to continue her education there. It was, she said disapprovingly, ‘a town full of attractions and temptations to expense’. In the event, the sixteen-year-old Princess May at first found Florence, which she was taken to see on excursions from the Hotel Paoli,11 ‘rather a dull place’, but after a time, when she had finished trailing round the churches, she decided ‘it certainly grows upon one’. Society here was undoubtedly very lively. The great families, like the Corsini and the Torrigiani, rarely gave parties but when they did so they were very grand affairs; and fancy-dress balls went on until breakfast time. The acknowledged leader of the English colony at that time was Lady