Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  These letters, replete with detailed accounts of court ceremonial, masquerades, Florentine customs and characters, were described by Lord Dover, who published Walpole's brilliant replies, as being ‘particularly devoid of interest, being written in a dry, heavy style and consisting almost entirely of trifling details of forgotten Florentine society’. Yet since Mann acted as host for almost half a century to virtually every distinguished English person who visited Florence in his days as minister there, from the Dukes of York and Gloucester to Lord Bute, David Garrick, John Wilkes, Tobias Smollett and Samuel Johnson's former friend, Mrs Piozzi, the letters cannot fail, for all the tedium of their style, to contain much of more than passing interest.

  To cater for the ever-increasing number of foreign visitors to Florence in Mann's time, new inns were built and existing ones enlarged or moved into more commodious premises. The Aquila Nera was provided with a large annexe in Via Ognissanti; the Albergo di Monsù Massè was also extended; the Locanda dello Scudo di Francia moved from Via Maggio into a much larger building near the Badia; both the Locanda di Giacomo Megit in Santo Spirito and the Albergo della Gran Bretagna on the Lungarno Guicciardini were opened specifically for English guests, some of whom preferred, however, the rather more expensive Locanda della Rossa. All these inns catered for the tastes of English visitors, offering such familiar dishes as budino di riso all'inglese as well as brodo bianco and crostini.

  A notably inexpensive inn, warmly recommended by Horace Mann, was Carlo's, on the left bank of the Arno opposite the Palazzo Corsini. This was kept by Charles Hadfield, a man of Irish descent from Manchester, father of several children, four of whom were murdered by an insane nurse, and one of whom, Maria, survived to marry the miniaturist, Richard Cosway, and to become a gifted painter herself.

  Carlo's was a very well-run inn. ‘Almost all the English live in this house,’ Sir Lucas Pepys told his brother in 1767, ‘and considering all things we do not pay very extravagantly. Everybody pays 2s.6d. a day for his apartment, not quite 4s. for his dinner, 8d. his breakfast or tea, is. fire, and if any choose supper 1s.6d. This is very reasonable considering noblemen and all live in the same manner.’ A few years later, the twenty-one-year-old Angelica Kauffman stayed here with her father, ‘a painter of very mediocre talent’, going day after day for seven months to copy paintings in the Uffizi and, for small fees, undertaking portraits of Hadfield's guests and other people staying or living in Florence.

  Hadfield's was generally full, another guest recorded; and the dinner parties held there, ‘very lively occasions’, were frequently attended by Thomas Patch, who once painted himself holding aloft a punch bowl in a picture of a party commissioned by Lord Grey.7 Also to be seen from time to time at Hadfield's was Ignazio Enrico Hugford whose house became as hospitable a meeting place for foreign guests as was Horace Mann's. Sir

  Thomas Patch's impression of a coffee-house c. 1770.

  Joshua Reynolds stayed there; so did the art dealer Gavin Hamilton, the architects Robert Adam and Charles-Louis Clérisseau, and that most sociable of sculptors, Joseph Wilton, who, during his visit, worked on his fine bust of Mann's friend, Antonio Cocchi, the Anglophile Professor of Surgery at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova.

  Ignazio Hugford's father was a Roman Catholic exile who had been appointed watchmaker to the Grand Duke of Tuscany; his elder brother, Ferdinando Enrico, born in Florence, who became abbot of Vallombrosa, was a master craftsman in the working of scagliola, a material used since classical times to imitate marble, passing on the secrets of his craft to Lamberto Cristiano Gori.8 Ignazio himself was an artist of sorts, but, although he spent nine years studying under Antonio Domenico Gabbiani – whose work can be seen in the gallery of the Medici Palace9 and the Galleria Corsini10 as well as at San Frediano in Cestello11 – he never became as successful as a painter as he was stimulating and kindly as a teacher, discerning as a connoisseur and skilful, if rather unscrupulous, as a dealer.12

  Tobias Smollett, ‘a surly Scotchman’ in the opinion of one of his contemporaries, chose not to join the gregarious company at Hadfield's when he arrived in Florence a few weeks before Boswell, but put up instead at Vanini's. Although always prepared for the worst and usually finding it – and having already condemned most of the inns where he stayed in Italy as ‘abominably nasty’ – Smollett discovered Vanini's to be ‘an English house delightfully situated’, the landlady, herself an Englishwoman, ‘very obliging’ and the ‘entertainment good and reasonable’.

  From Vanini's, Smollett set about his sightseeing and, still in uncharacteristically complimentary vein, he told a friend, ‘Florence is a noble city that still retains all the marks of a majestic capital, such as piazzas, palaces, fountains, bridges, statues and arcades. I need not tell you that the churches here are magnificent, and adorned not only with pillars of oriental granite, porphyry, jasper, verde antico and other precious stones; but also with capital pieces of painting by the most eminent masters.’

  He went to all the usual sights, to the Duomo, the Baptistery and San Lorenzo, to the gallery of the Uffizi, the Pitti Palace, the Ponte Vecchio and ‘every thing which is commonly visited in this metropolis’. But he sensibly refrained from troubling his correspondent with ‘trite observations’, since ‘all these objects’ had been ‘circumstantially described by twenty different authors of travels’, notably by the indefatigable German author, Johann Georg Keysler, whose Travels had just appeared in an English translation and whose laborious descriptions, Smollett complained, he could never read without ‘suffering the headache’.

  Instead Smollett chose to dwell upon such curiosities as the city's improvvisatori, who had ‘the surprising talent of reciting verses extempore on any subject you propose’, on the chattering audiences at the opera who ‘did not seem very attentive to the music' and on the scene on summer evenings on the Cascine,13 where ladies sat in their carriages talking to their cicisbei, their recognized male attendants, who were, infrequently, their lovers, and who, in taking over the social obligations of a husband, allowed the actual husband to act as a cicisbeo himself, once he had secured the future of his estate by fathering an heir:

  Every carriage stops, and forms a little separate conversazione. The ladies sit within, and the cicisbei stand on the foot-boards, on each side of the coach, entertaining them with their discourse. Every married lady in this country has her cicisbeo, or servente, who attends her everywhere, and on all occasions; and upon whose privileges the husband dares not encroach, without incurring the censure and ridicule of the whole community. For my part, I would rather be condemned for life to the galleys, than exercise the office of a cicisbeo, exposed to the intolerable caprices and dangerous resentment of an Italian virago. I pretend not to judge of the national character, from my own observation: but, if the portraits drawn by Goldoni in his Comedies are taken from nature, I would not hesitate to pronounce Italian women the most haughty, insolent, capricious and revengeful females on the face of the earth.

  Smollett was also intrigued by the

  undoubted fact that in every palace or great house in this city, there is a little window fronting the street, provided with an iron knocker, and over it hangs an empty flask, by way of signpost. Thither you send your servant to buy a bottle of wine. He knocks at the little wicket, which is opened immediately by a domestic, who supplies him with what he wants, and receives the money like the waiter of any other cabaret. It is pretty extraordinary, that it should not be deemed a disparagement in a nobleman to sell half a pound of figs or a palm of ribbon or tape, or to take money for a flask of sour wine; and yet be counted infamous to match his daughter in the family of a person who has distinguished himself in any one of the learned professions.

  Smollett was equally fascinated by the ‘exhibitions of church pageantry’. One procession in particular, ‘attended by all the noblesse of the city in their coaches, filled the whole length of the street called the Corso’.

  It was the anniversary of a charitable inst
itution in favour of poor maidens, a certain number of whom are portioned every year. About two hundred of these virgins walked in procession, two and two together, clothed in violet-coloured wide gowns, with white veils on their heads and made a very classical appearance. They were preceded and followed by an irregular mob of penitents in sackcloth, with lighted tapers, and monks carrying crucifixes, bawling and bellowing the litanies: but the great object was a figure of the Virgin Mary, as big as life, standing within a gilt frame, dressed in a gold stuff, with a large hoop, a great quantity of false jewels, her face painted and patched, and her hair frizzled and curled in the very extremity of the fashion. Very little regard had been paid to the image of our Saviour on the cross; but when his lady-mother appeared on the shoulders of three or four lusty friars, the whole populace fell upon their knees in the dirt…

  [I have never yet] discovered the least signs of fanaticism. The very disciplinants, who scourge themselves in the Holy-week, take care to secure their backs from the smart, by means of secret armour, either women's bodices or quilted jackets.

  Smollett does not mention Sir Horace Mann in his account; but Boswell, the great tuft-hunter, does so, of course. He found him agreeable, hospitable and ‘neat-talking’, and was much taken by an anecdote which Mann related about a Florentine witch who could say the Lord's Prayer ‘not only forwards and backward but sideways’. In the company of the Marchese Venturi, to whom he had been given a letter of introduction, Boswell visited all the usual sights, particularly enjoying the Boboli Gardens and the lions and tigers in the Grand Duke's menagerie.14 Afterwards he took flute lessons from Nicolas Dothel, whom he described as ‘one of the best teachers of the flute in Europe’; and attended a meeting of the Accademia della Crusca but, unable to concentrate on the lecture given there, left after half an hour, restless and lustful.

  Not long before, in Venice, he had visited a courtesan, taking with him a fellow tourist, four years younger than himself, the Prime Minister's son, Lord Mount Stuart, upon whom he was meant to be keeping a watchful eye and over whom he was supposed to be exercising a steadying influence. They both ‘catched a tartar’. After this ‘fine piece of witless behaviour’, as he admitted it to be, Boswell resolved not to risk further infection and ‘to maintain strict behaviour’.

  But, like so many of his similar resolutions, this one was soon broken. ‘Quite furious’ with lust, he rushed from the lecture hall to the Ponte Vecchio and picked up two girls, ‘poor craiturs’ as they were described by the doctor whom he was subsequently obliged to consult, Dr Tyrrell, an elderly Irishman long settled in Florence, where he was consulted by numerous tourists afflicted with venereal complaints. He confirmed that Boswell had caught gonorrhoea again and told him he could not engage in any further gallantries for the moment. Annoyed by this unwelcome counsel, Boswell aloofly informed Dr Tyrrell that he had wanted only ‘a little advice’ and decided to dismiss him. He did, however, also conclude that he had better take the opportunity of asking for condoms before moving on to Siena, where he found the ladies far more amenable and complacent than those in Florentine society, who, so he told Rousseau, were ‘very proud and very mercenary’.

  Charles James Fox, who arrived in Florence two years later aged eighteen, was at first also disappointed by the responses to his overtures in what he took to be a rather repressive society. ‘There was a woman of fashion put in prison lately for fucking (I suppose rather too publickly),’ he reported, ‘a piece of unexampled tyranny! and such as could happen in no place but this.’ Fox himself, as he told a friend the following year, had been a long time before he ‘could get a fuck’. ‘But in recompense for my sufferings,’ he added,

  I have now got the most excellent piece that can be allowed… There is a Mrs Holmes here, an Irishwoman more beautiful than words can express, and very agreeable into the bargain. Now it so happens that tho' this woman is exquisite entertainment for Charles, yet, as she is as chaste as she is fair, she does not altogether do for Carlino so well. There is also… a silver-smith's wife who is almost as fair as Mrs Holmes, but not near as chaste and she attracts me thither as regularly in the evening as the other does in the morning… This has led me to make verses and you shall soon have a poem of my composing upon the pox in Latin.

  For those with more aesthetic tastes than the young Fox, and less indulged by a rich father, Florence had much to offer. For a start, living there was quite cheap. ‘Noble houses unfurnished,’ wrote Mariana Starke, who was in the city in the 1790s, ‘may be hired by the year for, comparatively speaking, nothing.’ Besides, there was so much to enjoy that cost literally nothing. William Hazlitt never forgot his days in the city, his first sight of it in its circle of surrounding heights on which white villas, olive groves and vineyards sparkled in the sunlight. It was ‘a scene of enchantment, a city planted in a garden… Everything was on the noblest scale, yet finished in the minutest part.’

  Others wrote of the delights of driving along the Arno valley beside rows of mulberry bushes, cypresses and umbrella pines, walking with friends in the Cascine past girls with baskets full of carnations, mignonette, yellow roses and orange blossom, strolling down clean, well-paved streets and across the bridges, listening to street musicians, delighting at night in the brilliance of fireflies, wandering in the Boboli Gardens where the ilex cast shadows in the moonlight across the white statues, and going about without fear of footpads, who infested so many other cities. Here in Florence, one visitor wrote, although there were plenty of poor people in rags and half-starved beggars, as there were everywhere else in Italy, there were ‘no assassinations, no robberies and no great crimes’.

  Horace Walpole, who considered Florence ‘infinitely the most agreeable of all the places [he] had seen since London’, remembered how he ‘had done nothing but slip out of [his] domino into bed and out of bed into [his] domino. The end of the carnival is frantic, bacchanalian. All the morning one makes parties in masque to the shops and coffee-houses, and all the evenings to the operas and balls. Then I have danced, good Gods! how have I danced!’

  Robert Adam also much enjoyed the carnival:

  You cannot conceive what a scene of madness and distraction among all ranks of people reigns at this place during the carnival… Every mortal masked, from a marquis to a shoe-black, traversing the streets from morning to night. Then began the Corso. This is a procession of all the equipages who go to the great square, ride around making a tour through some of the streets of the town, return to the square again – one set going, another coming – by which means those acquainted with the coach they meet, pop their heads out, say a witty thing, then take them in again.

  Half a century later, Walpole still recalled those ‘delicious nights on the Ponte di Trinita’, wearing his ‘linen dressing-gown and a straw hat, with improvvisatori and music, and the coffee-houses open with ices’. And he remembered, too, the lovely Elizabetta, Marchesa Grifoni, whose cavaliere servente and perhaps lover he became.

  He had to confess that he had not been over-conscientious in his sightseeing. ‘Except pictures and statues, we are not very fond of sights,’ he admitted. ‘Don't go a-staring after crooked towers, and conundrum staircases… have left off screaming Lord this! and Lord that!… Instead of being deep in the liberal arts, and being in the Gallery every morning, we are all in idleness and amusements of the town.’

  So were many of his friends. Thomas Lyttelton, later ‘the wicked’ second Lord Lyttelton, took a perverse pride in boasting in his garrulous way that he saw no point in bothering with all this sightseeing and poking about in galleries, the sort of thing done by Edward Gibbon, who was a visitor to the Uffizi gallery on at least fourteen occasions during a single stay in Florence. Men like Lyttelton were quite content just to take a quick look round the Tribuna and stroke the bottom of the Venus de' Medici as all English tourists were expected to do. They would not dream of being as assiduous as Joseph Spence, professor of poetry at Oxford and a travelling tutor to various young Englishmen, who
went to the Uffizi about a hundred times. They preferred to spend their days drinking wine at the Porco, coffee at the Caffè Castelmur, Florence's first coffee-house, which had been opened by a Swiss in Via Calzaiuoli, or chocolate at Panoni's in Via Por Santa Maria. Or they might go to one of the city's twenty theatres, as often as not to the Pergola, where Goldoni's plays were especially popular, or to punch parties held in private rooms in the inns, or to eat ice cream, specially made for them from a Neapolitan recipe in Florence's first gelataria near the Cocomero theatre. Or they might go to the opera, but probably not to listen to the music, which was no more the thing to do then than it was a hundred years later when, as an American visitor observed, the audience almost drowned the music by their conversation and even turned their backs upon the stage. The Scottish physician, John Moore, travelling tutor to the young Duke of Hamilton, observed that the ‘Opera at Florence is a