Authors: David Leavitt
John Singer Sargent, though born in Florence, told Acton that he could not paint there. ‘The creative artist striving for self-expression must end by feeling oppressed by so much beauty,’ wrote Acton (who knew), ‘weighed down, like Atlas, with the whole world of art on his shoulders. Where taste is uniformly exquisite, where one is surrounded by masterpieces, one loses initiative in a cloud of wonder. All one’s efforts appear to be dwarfed. One asks oneself: what’s the use?’
On the other hand, in such an atmosphere the amateur flourishes; as Acton observed of his parents’ generation, ‘they wrote, they painted, they composed, they collected …’
When Mary McCarthy came to Florence in the late 1950s, she showed little patience for the city’s foreign colony, on which she blamed the dissemination of a ‘false idea of Florence … a tooled-leather idea of Florence as a dear bit of the old world. Old maids of both sexes – retired librarians, governesses, ladies with reduced incomes, gentlemen painters, gentlemen sculptors, gentlemen poets, anaemic amateurs and dabblers of every kind – “fell in love” with Florence and settled down to make it home.’
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: