Florence

by David Leavitt

  For McCarthy, Colonel G. F. Young, self-appointed defender of the Medicis and author of ‘a spluttering “classic” that went through many editions, arguing that the Medicis had been misrepresented by democratic historians’, was typical of the Anglo-American visitors who ‘expropriated Florence, occupying villas in Fiesole or Bellosguardo, studying Tuscan wild flowers, collecting ghost stories, collecting triptychs and diptychs, burying their dogs in the churchyard of the Protestant Episcopal church, knowing (for the most part) no Florentines but their servants’.

  No wonder the art historian John Pope-Hennessy, in later years, complained of her ‘astringent typewriter’! Her take on the Anglo-Florentines is typical of the unmitigated harshness that characterizes The Stones of Florence; if Acton, in Memoirs of an Aesthete, is the consummate insider, then McCarthy is the consummate outsider, determined to lay claim to the city by laying siege to it. And yet, if the overall effect of her book is to leave the reader feeling that she didn’t much like the town she had taken as her subject, this may have been – as her biographer, Frances Kiernan, points out – because, overall, the town didn’t much like her. Berenson teased her, while her guide, Roberto Papi, failed to be the cavaliere servente she hoped for. As Cristina Rucellai told Kiernan, ‘she cannot be positive because her experience was not positive’. The Stones of Florence, for all its flashes of charm and intelligence, is finally the cri de coeur of yet another tourist who felt shut out.

  That said, a touch of insecure American bluster may be just what it takes to cut through decades of cant, and we must be thankful to McCarthy for having the guts to call the foreign colony’s notion of Florence ‘bookish, synthetic, gushing, insular, genteel, and, above all, proprietary’. When she complains of the ‘sickly love’ that propels foreign residents to speak of ‘our Florence’ or ‘my Florence’, she echoes James in his diatribe against Ruskin a century before. Whatever Florence is, McCarthy argues, it is not ‘a dear bit of the Old World. Florence can never have been that, at any time in its existence.’

  One can imagine what her reaction would have been to the English gardens that were such a source of pride to the original Anglo-Florentines, in which, as Moorehead notes, olives and vineyards ‘were replaced with lawns and deciduous shade trees, herbaceous borders were planted with irises, crocuses, peonies and daffodils, woods and scrub were cleared, and steep dry-stone-walled terraces were covered with roses: Banksias, “Irene Watts” and “Madame Metral” ’.

  According to James Lord, when Harold Acton’s father, Arthur, bought Villa La Pietra (named for a stone pillar indicating a distance of one mile from the old city gate), the first task he undertook was the restoration of the gardens, which had been Anglicized in the nineteenth century. Like Edith Wharton (who coined the phrase), Acton Senior disdained ‘flower-loveliness’, preferring gardens that reinterpreted the Renaissance tradition. The Italian Renaissance garden was a narrative, the elements of which – fountains, hedges and statuary – worked together to elaborate a theme: the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, for example, described the labors of Hercules, while the Villa Lante at Bagnaia, built for Cardinal Gambara, Bishop of Viterbo, made a play on the similarity of his name to the word for crayfish (gambero) by incorporating crayfish motifs into its design. Giochi d’acqua – secret squirting fountains that doused the legs of unsuspecting visitors – were a common feature in these gardens, as were downhill water chains, musical water organs, ‘water tables’ on which the plates were floated during meals served al fresco, and statues of fantastic monsters, such as Giambologna’s famous Appennino statue at the Villa Demidoff in Pratolino, above Florence. The very ethos of the Renaissance garden put it into a different category from the English garden, the creator of which, in Florence, had to battle not only Italian tradition but a climate and soil that could hardly have been more resistant to British imports. Georgina Grahame’s 1902 memoir In a Tuscan Garden smacks of just the sort of jingoistic amateurism that sent McCarthy (and Wharton) over the edge. Such memoirs reek of colonialism – camphorated oil through which the ineradicable perfume of garlic, basil and tomatoes, set in a bowl of olive oil to sweat on a summer afternoon, persistently cuts.

  Food was no less a problem for the Anglo-Florentines. Curiously enough, many of the English who moved to Florence at the turn of the last century distrusted and disdained Italian cuisine. Spaghetti – Forster’s ‘delicious slippery worms’ – terrified them, because it defied years of training in how to eat politely. Although Ross’s Leaves from our Tuscan Kitchen seems quaintly old-fashioned today, its very emphasis on fresh vegetables made it, in the meaty England of the late nineteenth century, an almost subversive text. As early as 1614, Giacomo Castelvetro, a Venetian exiled in England, had complained of a certain English coarseness when it came to preparing salads: ‘You English are even worse [than “the Germans and other uncouth nations”],’ he wrote;

  after washing the salad heaven knows how, you put the vinegar in the dish first, and enough of that for a footbath for Morgante, and serve it up, unstirred, with neither oil nor salt, which you are supposed to add at table. By this time some of the leaves are so saturated with vinegar that they cannot take the oil, while the rest are quite naked and fit only for chicken food.

  By contrast, the Tuscans have always been great consumers of vegetables: eggplant, zucchini, legumes, spinach, borage, arugula and the famous Tuscan ‘black cabbage’ that is the basis of the Florentine soup known as ribollita. According to Castelvetro, the centrality of vegetables to the Italian diet owes in part to the fact that ‘Italy, though beautiful, is not as plentifully endowed as France or this fertile island with meat, so we make it our business to devise other ways of feeding our excessive population.’ The other reason he gives is that ‘the heat, which persists for almost nine months of the year, has the effect of making meat seem quite repellent, especially beef, which in such a temperature one can hardly bear to look at, let alone eat’.

  If today Florence is as famous for its immense steaks (bistecche alla Fiorentina) and slabs of roast pork (arista, a name derived, Norman Douglas tells us, from the Greek word for ‘excellent’) as it is for its vegetables, this is largely thanks to refrigeration. And yet vegetables continue to form the bulwark of the Florentine diet: chicory sautéed with hot peppers and garlic, white beans served at room temperature with fresh olive oil and pepper, cardoons (cardi) baked with cheese in a white sauce, not to mention the city’s famous soups: pappa al pomodoro, a simple tomato soup thickened with bread, and ribollita – literally, ‘reboiled’, since the dish was traditionally prepared with the leftovers of a previous meal. A good ribollita is made with beans, carrots, onions, cabbage, hot red pepper, and leaves of Tuscan black cabbage, the whole thickened, as in pappa al pomodoro, with stale unsalted bread. Indeed, so mythic is this soup that at Cocco Lezzone, a Florentine trattoria said to be favored by Prince Charles, a note at the top of the menu warns patrons that ‘the ringing of the cellular telephone may disturb the cooking of the ribollita’.

  Of course, few of the original Anglo-Florentines ate ribollita, or anything else Italian: instead they depended on British shops to provide them with the staples necessary to approximate the dishes of home. At Lord Acton’s, high tea was the customary social entertainment, with famously thin sandwiches. Even today, one can easily find Twining’s tea, Walker’s shortbread and Marmite in Florence, as shopkeepers cater to the English expatriate’s nostalgia for home – a nostalgia that sometimes seems to border on xenophobia.

  Their attitude toward dogs put them no less in conflict with the Italians, who even today tend to treat their dogs less as pets than as working animals. Indeed, the Anglo-Florentines may have introduced the idea of the cane di compania (the ‘companion dog’) into Italy. Vernon Lee’s mother, Lady Paget, claimed to have settled in Florence because British quarantine laws did not permit her to take her beloved dachshund back to England. (She also made her own shoes.) Ouida owned dozens of dogs, which she was reputed to feed lobster, petits-fours
and cream from Capodimonte teacups. An alternate version of her feud with Janet Ross, offered by Moorehead, puts the dogs at the center of the conflict; after one of them bit her son, Ross had the dog punished, provoking Ouida to retaliate by portraying Lady Joan Challoner as a dog hater.

  Florence remains, by Italian standards, a remarkably dog-friendly city. When we lived there, we used to have frequent encounters with a madwoman who wore a white coat over her nightgown and could be seen every morning and every evening in the Piazza della Signoria, walking four dogs on four leads: small, nervous mongrels, one black, one brindled, one the color of unwashed sheets, and one pink, with a pink nose and an under-bite. To any passing stranger who patted the dogs’ heads, or even smiled at them, this woman would try to give one away, yet she never seemed to find a taker. She would haul them around for a while, then, quite suddenly, let them go; leaping, they’d spread out over the piazza, like the fingers of a splayed hand, riding the crest of some race memory in which they frolicked with leopards whose spots formed tiny fleurs-de-lis, and wriggled between the legs of knights (one purple, one white), and urinated against trees the foliage of which rose up in staggered tiers, like the tiers of the metal platters that display coconut slices at Italian station bars, and which a drizzle of water moistens. Such furious little dogs, which have been breeding in Florence since its beginnings, can be found in Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, as well as in any number of Annunciations, Last Suppers, and battle scenes. It was the English, however, who took them to their hearts. Perhaps this madwoman is really Ouida’s ghost.

  Why Florence? Why not, instead, Paris, New York, Berlin, Naples, Vienna? The self-aggrandizing answer (and the one that casts the Anglo-Florentines in the most attractive light) is, again, that they came for art. A stance of rigorous scholarly asceticism seems to have been crucial to the image of themselves that they wanted to promulgate, something that Forster captures perfectly when he has Reverend Eager describe to Lucy the residents of the villas they are passing as they ride into the hills. ‘Lady Helen Laverstock is at present busy over Fra’ Angelico,’ he tells her. ‘I mention her name because we are passing her villa on the left. No, you can only see it if you stand – no, do not stand; you will fall.’ Another resident has written monographs for the series ‘Medieval Byways’. Still another is ‘working at Gemisthus Pletho’. True to type, Harold Acton translated Gian Gastone and Vernon Lee wrote something called Euphorion; being Studies of the Antique and Medieval in the Renaissance. These works served the function of giving the people back home the impression that their authors had a reason to be in Florence. They also distracted attention from the real reason so many of them had settled there: until the 1970s Florence was astonishingly, one might even say scandalously cheap. ‘The villas are innumerable,’ James wrote in 1877, most of them ‘offered to rent (Many of them are for sale) at prices unnaturally low; you may have a tower and a garden, a chapel and an expanse of thirty windows, for five hundred dollars a year.’ He goes on to wonder whether ‘part of the brooding expression of these great houses’ resulted from their ‘having outlived their original use. Their extraordinary largeness and massiveness are a satire on their present fate. They weren’t built with such a thickness of wall and depth of embrasure, such a solidity of staircase and superfluity of stone, simply to afford an economical winter residence to English and American families.’

  A number of these were let to ‘distressed gentlewomen’. Orioli recalls one of these, ‘an old dear called Miss Lade’, who lived alone with her dog and ‘gave fancy-dress balls, ending in a supper of cold consommé which tasted like paint. Old as she was, she always dressed à la Carmen on such occasions – I suppose it was the only costume she still possessed, dating from the days of her youth. One day they found her asphyxiated in bed, with her dead dog beside her. She had tried to mend a leaking gas tube by herself, and had not succeeded.’

  Although most of the colony’s residents were English, there were also large numbers of Poles, French, Germans and Russians. This last group made a particularly vivid impression on the young Acton, who would later recall ‘their church with the glittering onions off the Viale Milton …’ Russian Grand Dukes and Duchesses visited frequently, as did significant Russian artists. In the 1870s, the Odessa-born pianist Vladimir de Pachmann was in Florence, studying with Vera Kologrivoff Rubio, who was married to the Florentine painter Luigi Rubio. In 1890 Tchaikovsky composed his opera The Queen of Spades in a hotel room overlooking the Arno. The writer Mikhail Kuzmin not only spent time in Florence, but set part of his 1906 novel Wings there. At one point he sends his hero, Vanya, on a tour led by a Tuscan Monsignor, who reveals to him the city’s many social and economic strata:

  Vanya met ruined marchesi and counts who lived in dilapidated palaces and quarreled with their servants over cards; he met engineers and doctors, merchants who lived the frugal, sequestered lives that their fathers had before them; he met budding composers who yearned for Puccini’s fame, aping him with their neckties and fat, beardless faces; he met the Persian consul, fat, solemn and benign, who lived near San Miniato with his six nieces; he met apothecaries; he met young men who were vaguely described as errand boys, English ladies who had gone over to Catholicism and, finally, Mme. Monier, an aesthetic and artistic lady who lived in Fiesole with a whole company of guests in a villa decorated with charming allegories of spring and commanding a view of Florence and the Valley of the Arno. Invariably cheerful and eternally a-twitter, she was tiny, ginger-haired and quite hideous.

  Kuzmin’s account, with its catalogue of ‘types’, its reliance on semicolons, its faint whiff of a homosexual demimonde, is fairly typical of the period, yet it also suggests Florence’s catholicity and richness of character. Although social barriers exist, for foreigners, they seem to melt on contact, so that Vanya can move from the houses of the aristocracy to those of the middle classes to those of artists and ‘errand boys’ with an ease that would be unthinkable at home. (The Monsignor’s immunity to class distinction owes to his office; no ordinary Italian could have made such a pilgrimage.)

  As for the English ladies ‘who had gone over to Catholicism’, they may be the loudest presence of all. Even before the onslaught, Florentine society, with its entrenched aristocracy and class-consciousness, was distinctly English in tone, especially when compared to Rome or Milan. As Acton writes, many of the old Florentine families had ‘Anglo-Saxon ramifications’, which may have attracted the English. ‘They took root among the vineyards and became a part of the landscape,’ he continues. ‘Their eccentricities flourished in the clear Tuscan light.’ In A Tuscan Childhood, Kinta Beevor, who grew up in Florence, wrote that the city offered an ‘escape from the hidebound formality and false deference of home’; yet it also replicated the atmosphere of home, in that the region’s much-vaunted relaxed attitude came draped in the vestments of a social order as hidebound as any to be found in England. Thus in Florence, wealthy merchants were obliged to address titled, though penniless, aristocrats using the formal ‘Loro’. The intricate etiquette of correspondence amused Forster, who in Where Angels Fear to Tread describes a letter sent by a young Tuscan to some English people:

  Gino wrote in his own language, but the solicitors had sent a laborious English translation, where ‘Pregiatissima Signorna’ was rendered as ‘Most Praiseworthy Madam’, and every delicate compliment and superlative – superlatives are delicate in Italian – would have felled an ox.

  More sensitive, perhaps, to the nuances of a world in which he spent only a few weeks than many of those who lived in it their whole lives, Forster appreciated the ‘delicacy’ of Tuscan society, which smiled on the very fluidities against which England was at that moment constructing dams. The smile was as subtle, as ambiguous, as the Mona Lisa’s, but it was a smile nonetheless. In Florence you could chat with a fellow expatriate at Doney’s or La Giocosa, attend a formal ball at the palazzo of a Frescobaldi, and then at midnight stroll over to the Loggia dei Lanzi,
where boys always loitered, happy to barter sex for money or cigarettes. What was absent was threat: the blackmailer’s as much as the officer’s. Firbank captured the town’s split personality perfectly in a description, from Sorrow in Sunlight (1924), of the imaginary Caribbean capital Cuna-Cuna:

  Now, beyond the Alemeda, in the modist fauborg of Faranaka, there lived a lady of both influence and wealth – the widow of the Inventor of Sunflower Piquant. The veto of Madame Ruis, arbitress absolute of Cunan society, and owner, moreover, of a considerable portion of the town, had caused the suicide indeed of more than one social climber. Unhappy, nostalgic, disdainful, selfish, ever about to abandon Cuna-Cuna to return to it no more, yet never budging, adoring her fairy villa far too well, Madame Ruiz [sic], while craving for the International-world, consoled herself by watching from afar European society going speedily to the dogs. Art-loving, and considerably musical (many a dizzy venture at the Opera-house had owed its audition to her), she had, despite the self-centredness of her nature, done not a little to render more brilliant the charming city it amused her with such vehemence to abuse.

  Cuna-Cuna is also a city in which ‘the number of ineligible young men or confirmed bachelors’ provides ‘a constant source of irritation’ to mothers seeking husbands for their daughters.

  Chapter Three