by David Plante
The day after the funeral, New York University held a luncheon party at the villa to inaugurate its activities. La Pietra, Chigiotti said, was supplied with an avalanche of silverware, but the silver was gone. And never would Acton have had a marquee put up on the grounds, but there it was, huge. And never would he have walked with people about the garden with drinks (he always accompanied guests about the garden, didn’t leave them to wander on their own), but there hundreds of people were wandering in the garden with glasses. And many of the people invited to this luncheon Acton, who was very open about inviting people, would never have invited to his home – people he didn’t like, people who simply wanted to see where the royals had stayed, small functionaries from Florence.
Giuseppe Chigiotti, an attractive, clear-faced man with delicate eyelashes, held up his hands and shrugged.
Could he tell me why Acton left nothing to Florence, which had made him an honorary citizen shortly before he died? Chigiotti said that Acton’s relationship with Florence was ‘un po’ complicato.’ Certainly Florence had hoped to get something. The Uffizi was hoping they would get the Vasari, and the Bargello one or two statues.
But Acton knew that the Bardini collection, which had been given to the city, was destroyed by being dispersed, and he did not want La Pietra to be destroyed in the same way. It would be better to give La Pietra to an English or American university, with Harvard’s commitment to Bernard Berenson’s I Tatti as a good example of what an English or American university could do. La Pietra was offered first to Acton’s college at Oxford, Christ Church, who turned it down, then to New York University, who accepted.
However, there were other reasons why Acton didn’t leave anything to Florence that went back to his parents and the way the Italian Fascists had treated his mother. Mrs Acton refused to have anything to do, not only with Florentines who had been Fascists, but with all Italians, and spent most of her time in the villa, dressed in Chinese Mandarin clothes, drinking. Acton’s mother so repudiated Italy, she would go, once a month, all the way to Switzerland to have her hair done. And Joan Haslip said to me, ‘Because of the way his mother had been treated by the Fascists, Harold would never have dreamed of turning La Pietra over to the Italians.’
But Florence had never taken much interest in the Actons, as it had never taken much real interest in Berenson and his circle. As provincial snobs, the Florentine aristocracy had few relations with foreigners, and most of these few were entirely sexual, not social. Acton’s father had affairs with Florentines with whom he had illegitimate children, but there was the question of his own legitimacy (Arthur Acton, whose name does not appear in Burke’s Peerage, may have been illegitimate, and all the information Harold Acton gives about his father’s past in More Memoirs of an Aesthete is: ‘as an orphan he had been brought up by priests . . .’ ), which itself would have made him not quite respectable.
Though Harold Acton, after his mother’s death, did entertain Italians, including some members of the Florentine nobility such as the Frescobaldis, Florentines on the whole, if they thought of him at all, thought of him as too worldly for them. When he was knighted, Florentines were not impressed – they had thought Acton was a baron, which was in fact a title given to him by his domestics.
But by the time Acton did impress Florence by having the royals stay, particularly Prince Charles and Princess Diana, Acton lost interest in the city. He was invited everywhere, and, out of as much curiosity as a sense of duty, he went (though before he went to certain houses, where he knew he would be served only a scrawny battery chicken, he asked for sandwiches to be made at La Pietra for his return), and he was more and more disappointed. He had thought the city had something for him, had thought he would discover a Florence of interesting people, as interesting as Florence was in the twenties and thirties, when Orioli was publishing sexually explicit books that couldn’t be published elsewhere and there was an Italian avant-garde. He didn’t find it.
Florence, Chigiotti said, drained Acton. Even the British Institute, which his father had helped found and which he was for a while governor of, and where he was treated as a royal himself with an armchair in the first row for any lecture he attended, in the end disappointed him. It was for his services to the Institute – and not, he would say with a wry smile, for his writing – that he was knighted, but he argued with the director, his old friend Ian Greenlees, about Greenlees’ boyfriend, who behaved badly and insulted people and was simply not sortable (passed the jug of cream, he would, after pouring some onto his pudding, lick the spout before passing it on) but who was made by Greenlees the Institute’s librarian, and Acton distanced himself.
Though he didn’t think his life’s work was to be the custodian, the vestale, of La Pietra, what else was there for him to be? Because of La Pietra, Acton became worldly in a way he did not want to be. He became something of a tourist attraction in Florence, showing around strangers from England and America who had heard about La Pietra.
He became, Giuseppe Chigiotti said, a prisoner, not only of his duties toward La Pietra, but of his own illusions about his fame. Every time he walked down the main street of Florence, the Via Tornabuoni, he imagined people recognized him. Chigiotti would tell Acton about places he’d been to for a bit of amusement, and Acton, who was always very curious, especially about anything that had to do with sex, would say, Oooh, he wished he could go, but how could he, with La Pietra on his shoulders? Though he was not a puritan about sex, his grand sense of ufficialità would not allow him to be public about what he in private had no reservations about admitting, with a warble of pleasure. And he became especially concerned about his reputation when the royals began to visit, as he would have worried very much about his causing, as their host, any sexual scandal that might reflect on them as guests.
However, Acton learned to use La Pietra. The young friends of older friends were always welcome, and no doubt a handsome young man of twenty to twenty-five would be very impressed by Acton, as polite and deferential as a Chinese aristocrat, inviting him into his humble house.
In the end, he had lived in five rooms – his small study, the library, but only to pass through it to go to his study, the drawing room, the dining room, and his bedroom – and all the rest of the rooms were eternally closed.
Soon I will be in Lucca, in a flat Nikos and I bought for holidays, and here I find myself within yet another world among the many worlds I appear to live in.
Every year, for the past 1,168 years, a procession takes place in Lucca in honour of the Volto Santo, or Holy Face, a dark, wooden, Byzantine-like, life-sized figure of Christ which is supposed to have been carved by a disciple, Nicodemus, and which mysteriously reached the Ligurian shores in a boat pushed off from the coast of ancient Palestine, a long and circuitous way. Both the Pisans and the Lucchese claimed the Volto Santo, their dispute resolved when the statue was place in a cart with two white oxen on a road that diverged at one point toward Lucca and at another point toward Pisa, and the oxen took the road to Lucca. The Volto Santo became one of the most revered icons of the Middle Ages, and it is seriously revered, as everything in Lucca is. It is a conservative town, and when it celebrates the festival of the Volto Santo, called La Luminara, it does so with a certain calm, even grim, devotion. There is something even a little severe about the procession, with drums beating a slow, heavy march, and long periods when it progresses in total silence.
I was invited by a Lucchese woman to view the procession from the open windows of her palace. Along the old stone sill, held by rusted iron rings long ago inserted into the stone, was a row of flickering white votive candles in clear glasses. Across the square the palaces were all outlined, along window sills, around the architraves of doorways, along the lengths of façades, with flickering candles, so that the buildings appeared to disappear and Lucca, all other illumination turned off, became a transparent town made up entirely of candle flames. And when I leaned out the window, I saw the long line of the procession, the people in it c
arrying candles, enter a cathedral of light, the bell tower illuminated at each arched Gothic level with fire. The last people of the procession to enter the cathedral were dressed as they would have been dressed centuries ago, the men in doublets and the women in gowns with long, loose sleeves, their waists cinched in tightly.
The party I was invited to was held in an apartment with high, high-beamed ceilings and dull red-tile floors without rugs, and large paintings of mythological figures and tarnished mirrors in Venetian frames tilting out from the walls, where a cameriere, wearing a white, high-collared jacket, circulated among the guests, the women wearing pearl necklaces and the men somber ties, the cameriere offering glasses of red or white wine or orange juice. And at the end of the procession, the cameriere came in with a large steaming tureen of pasta. I was not only in a different world, I was in a different age.
I spoke with a woman who is the minister of culture of the town. She is, she said, worried about mass tourism, bus loads of tourists who wander the narrow, traffic-free, medieval streets in large groups. Lucca doesn’t need tourism, she said; Lucca is a rich place. Smiling a little, I suggested shutting the town gates, those enormous, wooden, spike-studded doors, some quite rotted, which perhaps haven’t been shut since they were opened for Napoleon.
I left the party about eleven o’clock to go into the cathedral, all the high pillars draped in red damask, and to see, in a separate little temple behind a grill, the Volto Santo, wearing a golden crown, a golden apron and golden shoes which are for the rest of the year preserved in the cathedral museum.
And then I wandered, alone, around Lucca. Off the main streets – the principal one being the Fillungo, paved in endless semi-circles of small paving stones – I found myself completely alone, though the votive candles were still flickering along the outlines of the buildings. I felt, alone, not only safe, but secreted away in the town, and because secreted away in possession of the town. As I crossed a narrow side-street, I saw, where it ended at the town walls, fireworks exploding on the walls, and I stood and watched them, then walked on, and saw no one else, no one else at all, until I reached the medieval building where Nikos and I have an apartment. But I stood outside in the street for a while longer, amazed, I suppose, by the sense of everyone in the town behind locked doors and closed shutters, while their streets were still blazing with candles.
I heard, in the far distance, an odd sound. The sound became louder and louder until I saw, coming toward me, a woman on a bicycle. As she passed me, saying ‘Buona sera,’ I noticed the chain of her bicycle was hitting the mud guard and making the noise, that tiny noise echoing throughout the silent town. Then there was the deep, deep silence again.
I went to have a look around La Pietra, invited by Alexander Zielcke, a painter and photographer, and Acton’s companion for some thirty years. It was raining. Inside the gates of the grounds, the taxi passed, on the right of the avenue up to the villa, an olive grove with high, uncut grass. In the wild-looking olive grove was a very well-maintained, small garden and in that garden well-restored buildings identified by a sign as offices of OLIVETTI, who had the buildings on a lease from the estate. Just as the taxi left the olive grove a statue on a pedestal appeared, its forearm broken off, a rusted iron rod sticking out from an elbow.
The taxi circled a great stone tub in the midst of clipped hedges and stopped at large, nail-studded, double doors, shut. A woman, in a pink and white striped smock and a blue and white striped apron, was standing at a smaller door to the left. As I got out of the taxi, she said that she was the cook, Vanna, and that all the other servants had gone, and, also, that there was no one guarding the villa. She spoke in a high voice, as if I were very far away, and she apologized that she couldn’t show me in through the main entrance but must ask me to come in through this side entrance. This led into the chapel of the villa, grey and white, with tall candlesticks and two bottles of champagne on the altar. In the holy water font just to the side of the entrance were, I noted, some rags. The chapel looked dusty. When I asked if it had ever been used, Vanna said no, no, as if it had never occurred to her that it could have been used. It led into an anteroom with a telephone, and from this room I went into the main entrance hall of the villa.
The rotunda, built into what was originally the fifteenth-century central courtyard, had a fountain in the middle, a huge stone goblet with goldfish. A circular flight of stairs, with tapestries hanging on the curved walls, went up to the next floor.
The rotunda was where Harold Acton had been laid in state for three days.
Vanna took me beyond into the drawing room, il soggiorno, to show me the chair where il Barone always sat, a red, wing-back armchair among other armchairs and a red sofa. The upholstery of the chairs looked stained and threadbare.
From there, we went through a doorway at the side of a huge fireplace into the vaulted library, with medieval wooden polychrome statues of saints on top of the Renaissance shelves. Hanging over the long table in the center of the room from chains were three lights, the red, fringed shades shredded and decomposing. In a corner was a large Buddha.
The study, like the library, was vaulted and had Renaissance bookshelves, but as narrow as a passageway. The shelves were sagging under sets of books such as The World’s Best Literature, The Encyclopaedia Britannica, La stirpe de’ Medici di Cafaggiolo. Acton’s desk was a big table, narrow like the room, on which were piles of papers that looked as if they had been there years and years, untouched, and in the midst of the papers a framed, black and white photograph of a thin, elegant woman which appeared to have been taken in the thirties.
I said to Vanna that must be Acton’s mother.
Vanna sighed and said yes, a beautiful woman. He loved her very much.
On the desk was a silver pen holder which had in it, along with old pens and pencils and stamps and paperclips, chestnuts. Touching them, Vanna said il Barone thought they brought luck.
He was a Catholic, wasn’t he? I asked.
Oh yes, Vanna said, il Barone was religious. He kept in the breast pocket of his jacket silver medals and crosses. No, he didn’t go to church, but he believed. He received Extreme Unction and Communion before he died.
Vanna bit her lips, as if hesitant, then said that three days before il Barone died he called for her to come to his room. He was suffering so much. He asked her to put her hand on his back, and she did, and that helped him. He thanked her sincerely. Tears rose into Vanna’s eyes. Il Barone was a very special person, she said, unique, a gentleman who even when he was in carpet slippers always wore a suit with a vest. She missed him very, very much. Would she stay on when the villa was taken over by the University? She looked around and more tears rose to her eyes, and wiping them away, said she didn’t know, but she was very attached to the villa. ‘Sono molto attaccata alla villa.’
At the rear of the study were closed double doors, and when I wondered what was behind them, Vanna opened them into what she thought was a sala d’attesa, a waiting room. On first view, the room, Venetian-like, with delicately painted walls and sconces with porcelain statuettes, gilded armchairs upholstered in yellow silk, a birdcage on a scagliola-topped table, appeared grand, but the more I looked the more I saw flaking, nicks, worn patches, a fine greyness over everything, and I thought no one had sat in one of the chairs for ninety years, which was since Acton’s father, Arthur Acton, had bought the fifteenth-century villa and had it redone.
Vanna asked if I wanted anything to drink, and I said, yes please, a glass of mineral water. Because I wanted to see as much of the villa as I could, I followed her down a passage into a large, vaulted anteroom to the kitchen, with glass-fronted cupboards all round the walls filled with piles of plates and wine glasses, and silver salvers and silver platters with covers. On the walls over the cupboards were pock-marked frescos of landscapes in tromp l’oeil. Vanna took a glass from a cupboard and a silver salver from another and placed the glass on the tray, and I followed her into the kitchen proper where there
were plastic bottles of mineral water on a table.
The kitchen was stark, with two large working tables in the middle, a stainless-steel sink, and a gas stove which Vanna said was getting too old to cook on, and was no longer good for the soufflés il Barone had liked so much.
She told me how every Monday the maggiordomo, the butler, came and told her he was in his armchair in the soggiorno ready to talk to her, and how il Barone would, gentilemente, tell her to sit by him, and they would go through the guest list of the week, arranging menus according to who was coming. When the Prince and Princess of Wales had stayed, they’d eaten her food, though they ate little.
Then, as if she couldn’t not tell me and had been waiting for the moment, she told me, breathlessly, that she had seen il Barone, he had appeared to her, but, looking around to make sure we were alone, she said people would think her mad for saying this. ‘Io sono molto sensibile,’ she said. She sensed presences. She was sweating, and said there were presences around which were making her sweat. Then she began to weep more.
From another part of the villa, someone called, ‘Vanna, Vanna,’ and she, anxious, ran, I behind her, to the room with the telephone, where Alexander Zielcke, a large, pale, middle-aged German with grey, longish hair combed smoothly back and leaving his ears exposed, was waiting. In a slightly false voice, Vanna told him that she had been telling me how il Barone and she used to discuss the week’s menu.
Zielcke, impatient with her, said, No, il Barone never was so concerned about the week’s menu.
He was, Vanna insisted.
‘No, no,’ Zielcke said, turning away abruptly. Then he turned back and asked Vanna for coffee to be brought up to the office and she went back to the kitchen. Zielcke left me to wander alone, which I could not have done while Acton was alive.
