by Iris Origo
PART TWO
5
Childhood at Fiesole
Sally go round the moon, Sally,
Sally go round the sun,
Sally go round the omnibus
On a Sunday afternoon.
NURSERY RHYME
I am not certain how it came about that my mother bought the Villa Medici, on the southern slopes of the Fiesole hill above Florence, but I do remember the spring day on which, from the little villa at Rifredi which we had taken for a few months, she took me for a drive up a long hill, first between high walls over which yellow banksia roses tumbled and a tangle of wisteria, then through olive-groves opening to an ever wider view; and finally down a long drive over-shadowed by ilex trees to a terrace with two tall trees—paulownias—which had scattered on the lawn mauve flowers I had never seen before. At the end of the terrace stood a square house with a deep loggia, looking due west towards the sunset over the whole valley of the Arno. There were three rooms papered with Chinese flowers and birds in brilliant colours, with gay tiles upon the floor and upstairs I was shown a little square room with green Florentine furniture, painted with Cupids and garlands of flowers, which, my mother said, would be my own.
“This is where we are going to live.”
Villa Medici
This, then, until my marriage fourteen years later, became my home, and certainly no child could have had a more beautiful one. The house had been built by the great Florentine architect Michelozzo for Cosimo de’ Medici on the foundations of another villa belonging to the Bardi called Belcanto, and it has always seemed strange to me that Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo should not have kept its original name, for it was in this villa—as in his other house at the foot of the hill at Careggi, the seat of the Platonic Academy—that Tuscan Humanism reached its finest flowering. It was at Careggi that Lorenzo gave a party every year on Plato’s birthday, while Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino discussed the ‘mysteries of the Ancients’. It was in the Villa Medici at Fiesole that Cristoforo Landino lived for a year, writing his Commentaries on Dante, and that Poliziano composed his long pastoral poem, the Rusticus (before he was sent off, as tutor to the Medici children, to the remote castle of Cafaggiolo in the Mugello, in the dreary company of Lorenzo’s wife, Clarice); and it was at Fiesole that banquets were held by the Medici brothers on spring and summer nights, followed by the reading aloud of poetry, dancing, music and love-making—each with the zest and vigour which Lorenzo brought to all his pursuits—while often the whole company would ride off the next morning at dawn, to hunt in the Mugello. One of these evening parties, however, on the night of April 25, 1478, nearly had a tragic ending, for the bitter rivals of the Medici, the Pazzi, having been invited to a banquet at Fiesole by Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano in honour of Cardinal Riario, planned to take this opportunity of murdering their hosts at their own table. It was only a sudden fit of gout of Giuliano’s that postponed the attack until the following day, when the murderers struck instead in the cathedral of Florence, Giuliano being killed by a dagger-thrust at the foot of the high altar, while Lorenzo barely escaped with his life.
Dutifully showing visitors round the Villa and telling them, like a diligent little parrot, about these events, I used to regret that the more dramatic scene of the conspiracy had not taken place in our own house; and sometimes, when my mother was out of hearing, I made up a story of my own about a daughter of the Medici murdered by her brothers for unfaithfulness to her betrothed, whose corpse had been buried beneath the stairs. Sometimes, I whispered, if my audience seemed sufficiently credulous, her ghost walked the house at night.
The Chinese wallpaper at Villa Medici
The main structure of the house, with its two deep loggias (one of which contained a bust of the last of the Medicean Grand Dukes, Gian Galeazzo), was still the same as it had been in Lorenzo’s time, but in the eighteenth century the house had passed into the hands of Horace Walpole’s sister-in-law, Lady Orford—a lady of dubious reputation but fine taste, to whom we owed the exquisite Chinese wallpapers which were designed especially for some of the drawing-rooms. She, too, held parties at Villa Medici, to which the English Minister in Florence, Sir James Hill, came, and Horace Walpole, and all the fashionable tourists of their day. The house was still in English hands when, in 1911, my mother bought it.
The library at Villa Medici
She restored the Villa’s formal garden to its original design and furnished the house from the Florentine antiquari—at a cost which then seemed high but would now seem moderate—with the help of two gifted young architects, Geoffrey Scott and Cecil Pinsent, who were then working for the famous art critic Bernard Berenson, at his villa at Settignano, I Tatti, and sometimes with the Olympian advice of B.B. himself. What would be the novelty today, I used to wonder, as I came downstairs from the schoolroom for lunch. Sometimes it was a Capodimonte bird to adorn the red lacquer cornice of the library and once a bright-feathered one in a gilded cage, which, when you turned a key, spread its wings and whistled a little melancholy tune; sometimes an inlaid writing-table or a small bronze statue for the fountain; sometimes (f rom Geoffrey) the tale of the latest incident in the Loeser-Berenson feud, or (from Cecil) a map of an unexplored road in the Mugello, leading to a half-deserted villa. No picnic or expedition was complete without Cecil; no luncheon or dinner-party, without Geoffrey’s stories.
For my mother, it must have been a fulfilling and stimulating time but, for my part, I must confess that the immediate effect of being exposed so soon and so intensively to so much art and culture was that I soon came to associate any talk about garden design, Venetian writing-tables, Florentine cassoni or lacquer cabinets, with a tedium which did not fade until, after acquiring a house and garden of my own, I suddenly found that I possessed information which I had consciously rejected, but which had somehow remained with me, like sea-wreck on the shore when the tide has gone out. Though whether this is, or is not, an argument in favour of introducing children early to subjects which still bore them I really do not know.
I have said that I was not consciously aware of the beauty around me; yet I now realise how much more I did take in than I knew, and how much I owe to the space and solitude of those early years. (An understanding of these needs was, I think, the most creative element in the theories of Signora Montessori, who never mistook for sheer naughtiness what she called ‘a child’s defence of its molested life’.) Whenever I was free of my governesses, I escaped into the garden, not to the formal terrace, with its box-edged beds and fountains where my mother took her guests, but to the dark ilex wood above it or the steep terraces of the podere, partly cultivated with plots of wheat or of fragrant beans, partly abandoned to high grass and to the untended bushes of the tangled, half-wild little pink Tuscan roses, perpetually-flowering, le rose d’ogni mese. This became my own domain. The great stone blocks of the Etruscan wall were as good for climbing, with their easy footholds, as were the low-branched olive-trees; the high grass between the rose-bushes was a perfect place in which to lie hidden with a book on a summer’s day, peering down, unseen, at the dwarfed figures of the grown-ups staidly conversing on the terrace far below; and the deep Etruscan well in the midst of the ilex wood, its opening half-concealed by branches and leaves, was dark and dank enough on a winter evening to supply the faint eeriness, faint dread, without which the sunny hillside might have seemed a little tame. It was, I now know, a very small wood, but it was large enough to feel alone in. To dare oneself to venture into its shadows at twilight, to smell the dank rotting leaves and feel one’s feet slipping in the wet earth beside the well, was, for a solitary child, adventure enough. It was not a dread of ‘robbers’ or even of any ghost from the past that overcame one then, but an older, more primitive fear—half pleasurable, wholly absorbing. It is one of the penalties of growing up that these apprehensions and intuitions gradually become blunted. The wall between us and the other world thickens: what was a constant, if unformulated, awareness, becomes just
a memory. It is only very rarely, as the years go on, that a trap-door opens in the memory and a whiff of half-forgotten scents, a glimpse of the mysteries, reaches us once again.
The greater part of my childhood, however, was of course not spent in this private world, but on the everyday level of what one was told was real life: meals and lessons, getting up and going to bed, brushing your teeth and saying your prayers. Like other children of my generation, most of my time was spent upstairs, in the nursery or schoolroom. I came down, with my governess, to lunch in the dining-room, and again, when my mother was well enough, to the drawing-room after tea—for an hour of reading aloud, which I have already described. But the rest of my day was spent in a monotonous round of lessons and walks and early schoolroom suppers, and of meals as unvaried as my routine. My mother, having been treated for years for chronic colitis, following the cure of a Swiss specialist, Dr. Combe, decided to forestall any similar tendency in me by also making me follow his strict diet, so that every day, for over two years, the same wholesome, unappetising meal lay before me. I was not a particularly greedy child, but there were days in which the stodgy, unflavoured food simply would not go down, and I can remember the envy with which I would see other children at parties helping themselves to chocolate cake or ice-cream. Visitors to the house, too, made matters worse by commiserating with me, in particular the kind but silly wife of the famous French nerve-specialist, Dr. Vittos, who paid us a visit during that period.
“Pauvre petite,” she would exclaim as she saw my meal, “c’est affreux! C’est une torture!”
I can still feel the facile tears of self-pity rising to my eyes, and hear the dry tones of her husband’s reply:
“Mais non, ma chère, c’est une discipline comme une autre.”
I liked Dr. Vittos, and the plain common sense in his voice was at once convincing. I stopped, once and for all, complaining about my food.
As for company, some little girl chosen by my mother generally came to tea on Sundays, most often a well-behaved, gentle child called Marie-Lou Bourbon del Monte, half-Italian and half-American, whom for many years I considered my ‘best friend’, not because we had much in common, but because she had so sweet a nature that it was impossible not to become fond of her. Later on there was also a very fair, clever English girl, Elnyth Arbuthnot (who later on married, like me, an Italian, a delightful Florentine naval officer, Ferrante Capponi), and a gifted, musical little American girl, Paquita Hagemeyer. Together we formed the nucleus of what we pompously called a ‘Cosmopolitan, Literary, Artistic and Dramatic Society’, the CLADS, which met once a week and published a quarterly magazine. Then there was the weekly excitement of the Saturday dancing-class, the highlight of the week; and the rarer, still greater delight of the few parties to which I was allowed to go at Christmas and Easter. To these occasions I looked forward with an intensity denied to children who had company of their own age every day, though the pitch of my expectations made some disappointment inevitable.
I can still feel myself catching my breath with excitement as, in the crowded little dressing-room of the Florentine palazzo in which Miss Flint’s dancing classes took place, we changed our shoes, smoothed out our accordion-pleated skirts, and then, as the tinny piano struck up, ran to our places. Skipping-ropes, clubs, the five positions, the formal measures of the minuet and gavotte, the valse and the polka, and then—Miss Flint’s speciality—‘expressive dancing’.
“Now, the dance to the Sun-God. Iris, you try it alone today.”
Pride, alarm, ecstasy; rigid with these emotions I twirled, I knelt and raised my hands to heaven, I sank to the ground in worship. At the end came Miss Flint’s verdict: “You’d do very nicely, dear, if you didn’t try so hard.”
At parties, however, I did not try at all, but was content to ‘stand and stare’. They remain in my memory as a brilliant phantasmagoria: the day in Casa Rucellai on which, gently protected by the elder sister Nannina who became my life-long friend, I saw my first children’s play; the annual Christmas party at the Actons’, where the tree and the presents were larger and more expensive than anywhere else, but our young hosts’ most valuable possessions—rare shells from the South Seas and small objets d’art—were locked away in glass cupboards before we arrived; and finally a wonderful fancy-dress dance in our own house, when I was about ten years old, which started at four o’clock for the children and went on until next morning for the grown-ups, and at which Marie-Lou and I, dressed as Renaissance pages, were allowed to stay up until the end, handing round a silver loving-cup.
These parties, glamorous as they were in recollection, took place too seldom for any real friendship to be formed with other children, even if I had known how to make friends. All I did was to look on—quite happily, and entirely unaware that to the other children, who saw me always watched by my governess, restricted to my dull diet, forbidden to come at all if the weather was bad, and often snatched away before the party’s end, my lot seemed a most unenviable one.
Much of their sympathy was misplaced. My childhood at this stage was not unhappy: it was merely disconcerting, in its swift alternations between excitement and tedium, between caviare and bread-and-milk. At the age of twelve, for instance, in the last weeks before the First World War, I was taken for the first time to the theatre in London, to see The Merchant of Venice at the Old Vic. The illusion was so complete that I resented my mother’s faint smile, when, at the words, ‘how far a little candle throws its beams’, a brilliant shaft from the footlights lit up the whole stage. A few days later, I was taken to Covent Garden, to see the Russian Ballet. It was the last year in which Nijinsky was dancing in London: I saw him in Le Spectre de la Rose, and, most unforgettable of all, I saw Pavlova in the Dying Swan. It was then that, for the first time, beauty and delight reached me through my eyes and not through a book. Then we sailed for America and, a few months later, returned to Italy, and I never entered a theatre again (far less a cinema) until I was seventeen.
There was a hardly less vivid contrast at Villa Medici between the social life downstairs, of which I had brief glimpses, and my own schoolroom, in the undiluted company of my governesses—a long and dreary dynasty. Fräulein Hodel, a round cheerful girl, entirely absorbed in the young Italian ragioniere who (to my great interest) played the guitar under her window at night, was perhaps the silliest of these ladies; Mademoiselle Nigg was the most sentimental, Mademoiselle Sanceaux the most neurotic, Mademoiselle Gonnet (who frequently remarked that her neck was considered to resemble the Duchess of Marlborough’s) the vainest. These weaknesses I observed with the cold, unwinking, inhuman eye of childhood. The only governess from whom I learned something of value—a little German and some interest in history and geography—was Fräulein Weibel, a good teacher and an able woman and (I now realise) a very unhappy one, embittered—for she had an illegitimate daughter, whom she called her niece—by caring for another woman’s child instead of her own, grudging me the pretty clothes and the pleasures which she could not give to her own Liselotte. At the time I merely dimly knew that she disliked me for some reason which I could not understand, and considered me in every way inferior to the pig-tailed ‘niece’ whose photograph stood on her bedside table. “Liselotte would never do such a thing,” was the daily refrain. I hated Liselotte.
Two things were harmful to me in the succession of these ladies. The first was that I spent my time in a constant conflict of loyalties (unknown to children today) between the standards of the drawing-room and those of the schoolroom. All of my governesses disliked my mother—partly, I think, from jealousy of her pretty looks and clothes and quick wit, of the agreeable men constantly in and out of the house, and of the general aroma of luxury, and partly because her charming manners to them imperfectly concealed an abysmal indifference. All this was conveyed to me, by sniff and innuendo, as soon as we went upstairs again.
My mother, on the other hand, never spoke to me directly about my governesses, except in terms of respect. “I hope,
darling, you do just what Fräulein Weibel tells you”; “I do wish you could have as beautiful a French accent as Mademoiselle Gonnet”; but it would have been a very deaf child who did not overhear the aside, to one of her own friends, after Mademoiselle Nigg left the room, about the Swiss being a sentimental race—and a blind one, who did not observe that never, except to talk about my work, did she spend ten minutes in Fräulein Weibel’s company.
I felt, in short, uncomfortable when governess and parent were in each other’s presence. Moreover, my mentors were also bad for me in a more important way. I was, by nature, not only a law-abiding little girl, but one who needed to respect and admire her elders. When scolded my instinct was never to say to myself, as I have often heard my own children say, “Fräulein’s so cross today”, but rather to feel “How naughty I am!” This instinct, however, was undermined by undeniable facts. Fräulein Weibel was so irritable as to be unfair. Mademoiselle Gonnet flirted with the convalescent British officers who stayed with us after Gallipoli, shaking her chestnut curls and arching her swan-like neck, in a manner both embarrassing and common. I observed all this and despised these ladies—failing, however, to perceive the loneliness beneath Mademoiselle Gonnet’s flirtations and the longing for her own daughter beneath Fräulein Weibel’s crossness. Because I thought Mademoiselle Gonnet silly, I refused to learn, to my lifelong regret, what she could have taught me: correct and fluent French. I became, in short, a supercilious and self-satisfied little prig.
