Authors: David Leavitt
Scott Moncrieff moved to Florence in the nineteen twenties. In
Adventures of a Bookseller,
G. Pino Orioli described him as ‘not what I should call a lovable creature; on the contrary, nobody was more prone to take offence. He liked quarrelling on every pretext and with every friend of his, though the quarrels never lasted for long, since he was one of those who cannot live without friends; but for this trait he would have lost them all for good.’
Orioli attributes Scott Moncrieff’s ill humor, at least in part, to his foot injury – which did not stop him from taking long walks and even walking tours. ‘We sometimes walked about the pine woods at Viareggio,’ Orioli recalled, ‘where I had an opportunity of seeing how he did his work.’
He carried in his left hand the French volume he was translating, read a few lines of it, interrupted his reading in order to talk to me, and then took a notebook out of his pocket and wrote in English the few lines he had just read, leaning against a pine tree. Then the reading would begin again, then the talk, then the translation into English. He was furious when I told him that I had passed through my Proust stage, and was utterly sick of Swann and that tiresome Albertine.
Scott Moncrieff followed another Anglo-Florentine tradition by converting to Catholicism; indeed, the intensity of his devotion perplexed Orioli, who recalled leaving him alone in the bitter cold of the Duomo in Pisa in the middle of Christmas Mass, ‘saying that I had no intention of catching pneumonia. He would not speak to me at all after that. On meeting him later in Florence he began the conversation by telling me that I was a heretic and would go to Hell.’
Orioli’s response to this threat illustrates the pay-as-you-go attitude of many Italian Catholics:
A fellow who translates a book about Sodom and Gomorrah written by a Jew deserves to go to Hell and certainly will, unless he repents. As for me, I can’t possibly go there, because we have been good Catholics ever since Catholicism has existed, and because we have had an endless number of pious priests in our family, not to mention Cardinal Orioli, my father’s grand-uncle. Wait till you have a Cardinal in your family. Then you can begin sending people to Hell.
This
riposte,
as Orioli cheerfully concludes, undid poor Scott Moncrieff, who had to ‘cross himself five or six times in order to keep calm’. Yet for the expatriate translator, already in bad health, the afterlife was not merely a subject for banter. In fact, he died not much later, at the age of forty. A poem he had written several years previously, called ‘Growing Old Early’ (a reply, perhaps, to Matthew Arnold’s pessimistic ‘Growing Old’), provides an epitaph not only for him but for many of the ailing Englishmen and women who settled in Florence:
Yet now, in Autumn’s granary, pent
From splitting frost and scattering wind,
Security in banishment,
Rest after growth I find.
Rest after growth.
Norman Douglas, visiting Scott Moncrieff on his deathbed in 1930, described him as ‘shrivelled into a monkey, and not recognisable’. Orioli, who accompanied Douglas on this visit, wrote that he ‘held a crucifix and a rosary in his hands, and wore a string of pious medals round his neck’. It was the moment just before ‘the colors deepened and grew small’ – as Wallace Stevens wrote in another poem, appositely titled ‘Anglais Mort à Florence’.
Florence is the only European city I can think of whose most famous citizens, at least for the last hundred and fifty years or so, have all been foreigners. With whom, after all, do we associate this city? Well, Harold Acton to start with, whose Villa La Pietra has recently become the Tuscan campus of New York University. (Better remembered for his conversation than his books, he was the reputed
model for Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited
– a ‘smear’ he spent much of his later life trying to erase.) Forster comes to mind, though he spent only five weeks in Florence as a young man. So does the great art historian Bernard Berenson.
(His
villa, I Tatti, on Via Vincigliata, now belongs to Harvard.) Today, close to twenty-five American universities maintain campuses in Florence, with the result that the city teems with American college students. There is an American bakery, Carly’s, and an American bar, The Red Garter. Movies are shown in
versione originale
with subtitles, still a rarity in the rest of Italy. In Florence one often meets American women who came here as students, fell in love with Florentine men, and married them. My stepsister, Leslie Blumen, was one of these. During a semester abroad she met Marcello, with whom she lived for a couple of years in an apartment on Via delle Belle Donne. After they married they moved to Washington, DC, where she opened a shop selling Florentine paper. More commonly, American women who marry Florentine men stay in Tuscany. An example is our
friend Emily Rosner, who now runs, with her husband Maurizio, an American bookshop in Florence, the Paperback Exchange on Via Fiesolana. Their sons, perfectly bilingual, contrast sharply with the offspring of the original Anglo-Florentines, who were usually given over to Tuscan women to be raised. ‘Anglo-Becero’ these children were called – ‘Anglo yokels’ – because of the accent they picked up from their minders. By the same token, Florentine aristocrats often hired British nannies to raise their children, who ended up speaking cockney English.
According to Italians, Tuscans speak the purest Italian, if not the most beautiful. (The ideal is
‘una lingua Toscana in una bocca Romana’ –
a Tuscan tongue in a Roman mouth.) This may be why the city also abounds in language schools, most of them named after great Renaissance figures such as Dante and Michelangelo. Mark and I studied Italian at the British Institute, which Acton founded in the nineteen thirties with his friend the biographer Joan Haslip. Here most of our fellow students were English, many of them teenagers on their way to Oxford or Cambridge.
One of the girls, whose parents had a house in Chianti, complained that when she tried to speak Italian to ‘the peasants’, she could not understand their replies ‘because they haven’t got any teeth’. What she might actually have been hearing was the famous aspirated ‘C’ of Florence, which turns the word
casa
(house), for example, into ‘hasa’. A drollery in the rest of Italy is to go up to a Florentine in a bar and ask him to order ‘a Coca-Cola with a short straw’. (
Una Hoha-Hola
h
on un
h
annuccia
h
orta.
)
As the saying goes, however, the best place to learn a language is in bed, and so most of the American women we know in Florence speak flawless Tuscan Italian, right down to the aspirated ‘C’. Many live in rambling apartments, or farmhouses high in the hills, twenty minutes outside of town – a far cry from the pensions where they sojourned in student days. These pensions still thrive, though, and every year, more students arrive, tides of them, some of whom end up staying for the rest of their lives. They lend the city an atmosphere not unlike that of an American university town. Because of them, perhaps, pizza is
immensely popular here, though as a dish the pizza has its origins in Naples. One afternoon at Yellow Bar, an immense pizzeria on Via del Proconsolo, we ended up sharing a table with an American woman in her forties and a Roman man in his seventies. It turned out that she was the design director for Ferragamo and that he had opened the first-ever pizzeria in Florence, some twenty-five years earlier. Such a grouping is fairly easy to fall into here, and if I report it with some surprise, it is only because it took place not at the chic Trattoria delle Belle Donne, or at Cibreo, but at Yellow Bar with its Buffalo Bill posters, its menu in English, and its crew of touts sent out into the center every afternoon to hand out flyers: in short, at the very sort of ‘tourist’ restaurant that as a student visiting Florence in the early nineteen eighties I would have avoided like the plague. Yet it was also at Yellow Bar that we once saw Franz Brüggen, conductor of the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, having a pizza after a concert at the Teatro della Pergola; at Yellow Bar that we have often seen the earthily handsome Romeo brothers, owners of an office-supply shop on Via della
Condotta, whose penetrating eyes have provoked more than one art historian to spend twenty minutes choosing a pencil; at Yellow Bar, finally, that we sometimes see – still handsome after all these years, with thick, graying hair – the actor who played the carriage driver in the Merchant-Ivory film of
A Room with a View,
the one who sends Lucy into the violets to be kissed by George Emerson. Phaethon – as Forster called this driver – now runs a souvenir shop at the top of Via del Proconsolo. He is a regular at Yellow Bar, usually sitting at a corner booth, and often accompanied by a beautiful Japanese woman who may or may not have come to Italy to seduce him, after seeing her destiny spelled out one winter afternoon on the screen of an Osaka cinema, into which she had run to escape the rain … No, probably not. And yet something about Florence encourages one to the most sentimental speculation and fantasy.
In no sense of the word is Florence a ‘big’ city, and this has always been part of its appeal. In Rome you depend on buses, in Paris the
Métro
and taxis. In Florence, on the other hand, you
can get pretty much anywhere you need to on foot, even the countryside, which opens out just beyond the Belvedere, at the top of Costa San Giorgio. Or perhaps I should say, you can get everywhere you need to on foot if you begin your trek within the limits of what Henry James called ‘the compact and belted mass of which the Piazza della Signoria [is] the immemorial centre’. Writing in 1873, James was already lamenting the ‘expansion’ of this mass, ‘under the treatment of enterprising syndics, into an ungirdled organism of the type, as they viciously say, of Chicago; one of those places of which, as their grace of a circumference is nowhere, the dignity of a centre can no longer be predicated’.
It would not please James to learn that a hundred and thirty years later, the expansion has only intensified, its most recent efflorescence being the construction of a tram to connect the city center with the suburb of Scandicci, where the novelist Ouida once lived, and which is now a glut of ugly apartment buildings. Such a tram the sophisticated tourist would be unlikely to take; as a rule he moves in more wholesome directions, out into Chianti,
for example, or up to Fiesole or Settignano, where Michelangelo grew up. For the tourist, despite all his claims to want to see the ‘real Florence’, isn’t interested in its urban sprawl; he is interested in what Bernard Berenson called ‘conoscing’, the object of which is the discovery of unsuspected marvels. (The term derives from the Italian verb
conoscere,
‘to know’.) He wants to bring home, if not photographic evidence, then at least the interior knowledge that he has partaken of all the marvels that Florence has to offer – as if that were possible in the course of a single human life.
And what marvels there are! Astonishingly, Florence houses almost a fifth of the world’s art treasures. A fifth! A thorough Florentine itinerary takes in architecture, sculpture and painting, major museums (The Bargello and the Uffizi) as well as small ones (the Stibbert and the Horne), public buildings, palaces and innumerable churches, Botticellis and Leonardos and Michelangelos and Giottos and Masaccios and Beato Angelicos and Gozzolis and Pontormos and Donatellos … And even if you see all of these things, even if you stay in
Florence a year, or five years, there will still be something that you’ve missed, some remote church known only to the cognoscenti of
conoscing,
about which you will be informed only on the eve of your departure.
Nineteenth-century travelers, who usually visited Florence for a month or even several months, were able to take things at a slower pace, to intersperse their art wanderings with tea and shopping and social calls. (William Dean Howells’s 1886 novel
Indian Summer
describes just such a Florentine ‘season’.) When Clara Schumann came to Florence in 1880, her hostess, Lisl von Herzogenberg, wrote to Brahms that in order to appreciate the city fully, more time would be required ‘than her round-ticket – awful invention – permits her …’ And yet her reaction to what she did see suggests that Madame Schumann might have been grateful for the round-trip ticket.
It has happened a couple of times that we found her sitting on her stool before a Signorelli or a Verrocchio looking very worried, rubbing her hands in fearful enthusiasm – she would not let herself be emotionally carried away or allow her soul, so capable of vibration, to stir.
Soon, of course, the round-trip ticket would give way to even more awful inventions, such as the commercial airliner; as travel became easier, the length of the average visit to Florence would shrink, so that today the habit is to see the city in a few days or even a few hours. The result is an even more intense version of the sensory overload that Madame Schumann suffered. By 1989, Graziella Magherini, a psychiatrist working at the Santa Maria Nuova hospital, had observed so many cases of foreigners quite literally collapsing from too much art that she labelled the phenomenon ‘Stendhal’s Syndrome’, after an episode in the novelist’s diary in which he recalled suffering palpitations and a falling sensation during a visit to the basilica of Santa Croce in 1817.
‘J’étais déjà dans une sorte d’extase,’
Stendhal wrote,
‘par l’idée d’être à Florence, et le voisinage des grands hommes dont je venais de voir les tombeaux. Absorbé dans la contemplation de la beauté sublime, je la voyais de près, je la touchais pour ainsi dire. J’étais
arrivé a ce point d’émotion où se rencontrent les sensations célestes données par les beaux-arts et les sentiments passionnés. En sortant de Santa Croce, j’avais un battement de coeur …; la vie était épuisée chez moi, je marchais avec la crainte de tomber.’