Florence by David Leavitt Read Free Book Online Page A

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 thatForster 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 hundreddollars 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. Thislast 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