Florence by David Leavitt Read Free Book Online Page B

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 amusedForster, 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: theblackmailer’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