Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  For dinner tonight, we’ve stopped at the rosticceria and picked up some divine gnocchi made from semolina flour. I’ve made a salad. Ed brings out the Ambrae from Montepulciano and holds it up to the light. Ambrae… must be Latin, possibly for amber. I take a sip – maybe it is ambiance, the way dew on lilacs and oak leaves might taste. Wine is light, held together by water. I wish I’d said that, but Galileo did.

  From the yard above the road, I see the cypresses graph a rise and fall against a sky blown clean of clouds by this afternoon’s wind. Stars are shooting over the valley, stars that fell even before the Etruscans watched from this hillside… Five, six, stars streak across the sky. I hold out my hand to catch one.12

  This is not a backward-looking city, however. Its president (that is, mayor), elected in February 2009, is a young, dynamic, centre-left politician, who is tipped to leap to the forefront of Italy’s national politics. Matteo Renzi (b. 1975) is demanding a clean-out of Berlusconi’s Augean Stables. His views are condensed in a book entitled Fuori! (‘Out!’). ‘I get nauseous thinking about Italy’s political class,’ he says; ‘it has done nothing in thirty years, and spends its time arguing on chat shows.’13

  *

  Florence guards its secrets well. Those who know the city best are aware of things that never cross the path of the average tourist. The British colony in Florence, for example, goes back to medieval times. It did not originate with the stream of temporary visitors, like John Milton in 1638, who came here on the Grand Tour but then returned home, though it obviously did much to enliven the stay of such artistic tourists. It has been graced, among others, by such notables as George Nassau, 3rd Earl Cowper and Reichsfürst of the Holy Roman Empire (1739–89); Lord Henry Somerset (1849–1932), songwriter, sometime comptroller of Queen Victoria’s household and former husband of Lady Isabella Somers-Cocks; Una, Lady Troubridge (1887–1963), sculptress and sometime wife of an admiral; the inter-war group of English ladies known as I Scorpioni (‘The Scorpions’), who featured in Franco Zeffirelli’s film Tea with Mussolini (1999); and most recently Sir Harold Acton (1904–94), author of the inimitable Memoirs of an Aesthete (1948). A parallel list of literary names would include Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943), author of The Well of Loneliness (1928); Violet Paget (Vernon Lee, 1856–1935), novelist and inventor of the concept of ‘empathy’; Violet Keppel-Trefusis (1894–1972), daughter of King Edward VII’s mistress;14 and the extraordinary double-bodied poet Michael Field (Katherine Bradley, 1846–1914 and Edith Cooper, 1862–1913), affectionately known as ‘the Mikes’. All of these exiles (and many more) can be described as art-lovers, bohemians and connoisseurs, and many were aristocrats, real or imagined. Yet they did not advertise the most important cause of their exile. All, or nearly all, were fugitives from the British law, and many were devoted to personal relationships that in Dante’s time – as in the case of Brunetto Latini – would have alerted the so-called ‘Office of the Night’. Habitual pretence was part of the game. Harold Acton threatened to sue on hearing that he might be ‘outed’ by a biographer and, while claiming to be merely observing ‘certain men in Florence’, coined the immortal phrase, ‘the queerer, the dearer’.15

  Another secret pertains to a further period of Florentine history, which followed the ‘Lorraine Period’ and preceded the Risorgimento, but which the city’s website fails to mention. For reasons not entirely clear, few guidebooks even mention its leading figure, the ghost that stalks the Florentine feast. He was a great man with Florentine roots, who transformed Europe and was said always to carry a copy of Il Principe on his person.

  II

  Napoleon Bonaparte, as he became, was not a Frenchman. Born in Ajaccio in 1769, he was a Corsican, and his native language was corsicano, an Italian dialect similar to Genoese. Admittedly, he was a French subject from birth, having entered this world just a year after France bought Corsica from the city of Genoa; but he did not start to learn French until he was ten, nor Frenchify his name until the age of twenty-six. Less well known is the fact that the Buonaparti were a family of Florentine descent. The main branch had been lords of Fucecchio between Florence and Pisa in Dante’s time, and a lesser branch left Tuscany for Corsica in the sixteenth century. Except for a flying visit in 1784, when he needed to obtain a certificate of noble origin in order to start officers’ training in the French army, Napoleon did not see Italy until his late twenties. When he finally arrived for a longer stay, on what might now be thought of as a business trip, one of the first things he did was to visit Florence and look up his long-lost relatives.

  Like many Corsicans, Nabuleone Buonaparte possessed a potent sense of family solidarity. His parents and their seven other children were to play a central part in his life. His father, Carlo-Maria Buonaparte (1746–85) died young, aged thirty-nine; his mother, Maria-Letizia Ramolino (1750–1836), lived fifty years a widow. Except for Giuseppe (Joseph, 1768–1844), all of Nabuleone’s siblings were born after him. His three younger brothers were Luciano (Lucien, 1775–1840), Luigi (Louis, 1779–1846) and Girolamo (Jérôme, 1784–1860); his three sisters were Maria-Anna (1777–1820), Maria-Paolina (1780–1825) and Carolina-Maria (1782–1839). They collectively milked the connection with their celebrated brother for all they were worth.16

  It was the Italian campaign of 1796 – Year V according to the revolutionary calendar – that brought the young General Bonaparte to the notice of the whole Continent, and vaulted him into the upper reaches of French politics and international affairs. He set out in the spring of that year to carry the war to the Austrian Empire, which had been a thorn in the flesh of the French Republic for the previous three years; and he ended the campaigning season having conquered great swathes of Austrian territory in Italy. He had been sent out from France as a servant of the collective leadership of the revolutionary Directory, and returned as the arbiter of its decisions. Surrounded by a crowd of imperial provinces, Italian duchies, Papal States and city-republics, he became the destroyer of crowns, a maker of kingdoms.17

  The sheer speed and brilliance of that first Italian campaign created the emotional shock which drove forward the subsequent torrent of political changes. The twenty-seven-year-old marched for the Alps immediately after marrying Joséphine de Beauharnais on 9 March. He crossed the Great St Bernard pass, before scattering the Austrians at Millesimo on 13 April and the Piedmontese at Mondovi on the 22nd. Within three weeks he had crushed the main Austrian force at Lodi, and on 15 May entered Milan. The Kingdom of Sardinia made peace, France annexed Nice and Savoy, and the puppet Lombardic Republic was launched. Fighting resumed in the late summer, ending with yet another victory for Bonaparte over the Austrians at the Battle of Arcola (15–17 November). By that time, the Cispadane Republic was already in business at Bologna.*

  General Bonaparte visited Florence during the summer interval between the two rounds of campaigning. On 29 June he arrived at the little town of San Miniato in the Val d’Arno,† and met the Abbé Filippo Buonaparte, who was described as his zio or ‘uncle’. They talked of changing family fortunes, and visited the family tombs in the church of San Francesco. San Miniato is often publicized as Italy’s ‘capital of truffles’, of which Napoleon was inordinately fond. ‘Triumphant on the battlefield,’ writes one connoisseur, ‘Napoleon also ate truffles for strength in his tussles between the covers with the fiery Josephine.’18 The Tartuffians do not record whether it was before or after his visit to San Miniato that he gained an appetite for the reputed aphrodisiac. Yet the encounter with his ancestors would undoubtedly have strengthened Bonaparte’s feeling that he and his siblings might be destined for greater things in Italy.19

  Bonaparte had driven to San Miniato from the coast at Livorno, which French troops had entered a couple of days earlier on the pretext of the French flag being insulted there. Livorno was the chief port of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, with which France was not officially at war, but everyone knew that Tuscan troops had been sent to bolster the Austrians and that Tuscany’s neutrality was ob
served in the breach:

  On the 27th of June the French entered [Livorno], and a few hours previous to their arrival, every English ship in the mole, twenty-three in number, sailed for Corsica, conveying a considerable quantity of merchandize, two hundred and forty oxen, and most of the families belonging to the English factory; for our minister at Florence, Hon.W. F. Wyndham, and our consul at Livorno [ John Udney, Esq.] who had both been indefatigable in procuring good intelligence, knew of the scheme long before its execution.20

  Livorno would not cease to be a source of trouble.

  On 1 July, the general paid a visit to Grand Duke Ferdinando III of Tuscany at the Pitti Palace in Florence. The grand-ducal residence, one of Florence’s most historic buildings, lacked nothing for such important occasions, its external surroundings in the Boboli Gardens being no less splendid than the grand interior:

  The Palazzo Pitti was begun after the design of Filippo di Ser Brunellesco, the most celebrated architect of the fifteenth century, and finished by Ammannati. In the courtyard is the basso-rilievo of a mule, who constantly drew the sledge which contained the materials employed in the building; and over [it] is a statue of Hercules, and near it a group like that called Ajax Telamon, of a soldier going to inter his dead comrade. The ceilings of this palace painted in tempera by Pietro de Cortona and his scholars, represent the patriotic action of the Medici family, under emblems taken from heathen mythology…

  The Royal Apartments are splendidly adorned with gilding, beautiful tables of Florentine mosaic-work, superb silver statues, and some of the most celebrated pictues in the world, namely by Salvator Rosa, Rubens, Fra Bartolomeo, Titian, Carlo Dolci, Raphael!!!, Andrea del Sarto, Vandyck!!!, Buonarotti!!!, and Rembrandt!!!…

  The Giardino di Boboli is very large, and contains several pieces of sculpture, the most remarkable of which are the fountain of the great walk decorated with a colossal Neptune standing on a granite bason, by Giovanni di Bologna… [It] is open to the public.21

  The Pitti would soon see many new faces, and many of its art treasures would disappear to Paris.

  The grand duke was a prominent member of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, the ruling house of Austria, against whom Bonaparte had been fighting. His late father, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, had been grand duke of Tuscany before him; the present emperor, Francis II, was his elder brother. His grandmother, the Empress Maria Theresa, had been the dynasty’s matriarch for forty years, and it was her husband, Francis of Lorraine, who had gained possession of Tuscany after the death of the last of the Medici. In the young Corsican’s eyes, these people were quintessential aristos, international parasites of the sort that the French Revolution was intent on driving out.

  Grand Duke Ferdinando was obviously unable to refuse the general’s proposed visit and received him politely. Yet the meeting was necessarily fraught: the grand duke was nephew to the late French queen, Marie-Antoinette, whose head had rolled under the guillotine only three years earlier. A near-contemporary account confirms the dinner guest’s insolent mood:

  Bonaparte… resolved, that the brother of the emperor should pay for his presumed inclinations. For the present, the Florentine museum and the grand duke’s treasury were spared; but [Livorno], the seaport of Tuscany and the great feeder of its wealth, was seized without ceremony. The grand duke, in place of resenting these injuries, was obliged to receive Bonaparte with all the appearance of cordiality, and the spoiler repaid his courtesy by telling him, rubbing his hands with glee, during the princely entertainment provided for him, ‘I have just received letters from Milan; the citadel has fallen; – your brother no longer has a foot of land in Lombardy.’ ‘It is a sad case,’ said Napoleon himself, long afterward, ‘when the dwarf comes into the embrace of the giant, he is like enough to be suffocated; but it is in the giant’s nature to squeeze hard.’22

  In effect, the upstart general was putting his host on notice: Florence could go the same way as Milan. More to the point – there was no need to spell it out – Ferdinando’s head could end up in the same sort of bloody basket as that of his aunt.23

  A different account of the event suggests that the grand duke played his part very skilfully:

  Bonaparte came to Florence accompanied by Berthier [his chief of staff ] and part of his état-major, but no privates except those who commonly attended his person, and these mounted guard at the Pitti Palace, while the Tuscan troops attended the French general who was invited to dine with the Grand Duke. The entrance of the French was orderly, but… not one Tuscan subject welcomed them with ‘Viva la Repubblica!’

  The Grand Duke, however, received Bonaparte with affability, untinctured by fear; making him magnificent presents, and doing the honours of a splendid table with apparent ease and cheerfulness; and though during dinner a French courier arrived to announce that the citadel of Milan had surrendered, the Grand Duke was so master of himself as to betray no concern: but conversed with his guest respecting the Bonaparte family, which is of Tuscan origin, and at the general’s instance conferred upon his uncle the order of S. Stefano.

  In the evening the Duke accompanied Bonaparte to the theatre, where the audience received their prince with uncommon plaudits. – ‘You seem to reign in the hearts of your subjects, sir’, said the general; ‘but have you always such full houses as this?’ ‘Usually a great deal fuller,’ replied the Duke.24

  Soon after leaving Florence, Bonaparte was told that the Royal Navy had seized the island of Elba. Activity at sea was one of the few things that the British could do to impede French progress. Elba, though adminstered from Naples as part of the Stato dei Presidii, otherwise known as the ‘Tuscan ports’‚ lay within historic Tuscany; and its loss would have prompted the grand strategist to contemplate further conquests as a means of protecting his fragile gains. For the British, Tuscany held no great strategic interest. Its main claim to fame at the time lay in the Etruscan-style pottery that was all the rage among Britain’s wealthy classes. Josiah Wedgwood, who had died the year before, had called his ceramics factory in Staffordshire’s Black Country ‘Etruria’.

  Bonaparte returned to Paris in November, leaving the French army in Italy to the command of General Charles Leclerc (1772–1802). But he was soon forced to retrace his steps, and had to spend a second year campaigning in Italy before a firmer peace with Austria could be signed at Campo Formio in October 1797. In the process, the French army wrested the Romagna from the Papal States, marched into Tyrol, and sent off an expedition to capture the Ionian Islands. A new crop of French-sponsored republics sprouted in its wake – the Ligurian at Genoa, the Lemanic at Geneva, then the Helvetian in Switzerland and the Roman in the realms of the pope. The Cisalpine Republic engorged itself by swallowing the Cispadane.

  A powerful backlash followed this avalanche of change, and in 1798–9 French forces in Italy struggled to contain it. Bonaparte, who sailed romantically to Egypt in May 1798, could not intervene in person. The exiled pope, Pius VI, implacable after being stripped of his temporal powers, inspired resistance. Britain marshalled a second anti-French coalition. The Russians sent a powerful army into Italy under Field Marshal Suvorov, and a fleet under Admiral Gorchakov to join the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. The king of Naples, seizing the opportunity provided by Bonaparte’s absence in Egypt, recaptured Rome, only to flee as soon as the French counter-attacked, sailing in haste from Naples aboard Nelson’s flagship. Pending Bonaparte’s return to Europe, all arrangements necessarily seemed temporary.

  Italian affairs were vastly complicated by the far-reaching tentacles of the House of Bourbon. The late Louis XVI of France had been a Bourbon; the king of Spain was a Bourbon; the king of Naples was a Bourbon; and so, too, was the duke of Parma, whose possessions almost touched Tuscany in the north. The duke tried to secure his position by paying the French a million livres and sending twenty-five of his best paintings to the Louvre, hoping to turn himself into a key pawn on the political chessboard. It was of the Bourbons that France’s foreign min
ister, Talleyrand, was much later to say: ‘They have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.’25

  French diplomacy at this point was juggling with half a dozen issues, most of which had a Tuscan aspect. Negotiations with Spain, which eventually led to the secret treaty of San Ildefonso (October 1800), aimed to facilitate the purchase by France of Spain’s American province of Louisiana; Tuscany was being dangled in front of the Spanish Bourbons as an inducement to accept the deal. Negotiations with Naples were conducted in Florence, where the Neapolitan Bourbons were being offered the restoration of their kingdom on condition that their ports remained closed to Britain’s Royal Navy. Negotiations with Portugal sought likewise to exclude the British. Negotiations with Britain itself at Amiens were leading at snail’s pace towards a formal treaty that would not be signed until March 1802; the British were characteristically most concerned about the freedom of maritime trade. Negotiations with the papacy assumed that revolutionary, anti-religious fanaticism was running its course; the proposed Concordat would restore Catholicism to France but not the Papal States to the papacy.

  Tuscany, which depended on overseas trade and was the immediate neighbour of the Papal States, could not be indifferent either to commercial negotiations or to the Franco-papal conflict. The French army’s occupation of Rome in February 1798 caused passions to rise, and the grand duke’s decision to welcome the fugitive pope raised tensions. The grand duke was acutely aware of French suspicions, so when he gave shelter in 1798–9 not only to the pope but also to a varied company of ‘reactionary’ exiles, including the king of Sardinia, he cannot have been totally surprised by the consequences. Pius VI, frail and eighty-one years old, was accommodated throughout the winter in the Forestiera or ‘Forest Lodge’ of the Carthusian Certosa di Galluzzo near Florence, a favourite destination for day trippers from the city: