Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  A few months later, the Grand Duke Ferdinand returned to the city to the excited acclamations of the people. Elisa Bacciochi settled in Trieste where, calling herself Countess of Campignano, grumpy and embittered, immensely fat and almost bald, she died in 1820, bearing an extraordinary resemblance to Napoleon, who himself by then had but a few months left to live in sad exile on the island of St Helena. Joachim Murat was taken prisoner and shot in Calabria. The Grand Duke Ferdinand III settled down in Florence in apparent contentment, a benign and enlightened ruler enjoying the confidence of his people, guided in his policies by intelligent and experienced politicians, notably Count Vittorio Fossombroni, a highly capable mathematician and hydraulic engineer from Arezzo.

  Foreign visitors, so many of whom had abandoned Florence in Napoleon's day, now began to return; and, sooner or later, many of the more distinguished of them found their way to the palace of the Young Pretender's widow, the Countess of Albany. She and her lover, Count Alfieri, had thought it as well to leave Paris – where they had settled after their sojourn in Rome – lest they were forced to follow others of their kind to the guillotine. They had arrived in Florence in 1792, having had to abandon most of their possessions and all their furniture. For a time they had lived in lodgings with their French servants before moving into the Palazzo Masetti on the Lungarno Corsini.3 Here, in rooms on the top floor which he added, Alfieri read and worked, while in her large, barely furnished salotto on the piano nobile, the Countess held court, sitting by the fireplace in a simple wooden chair set apart from the others which were arranged as though for a lecture. For thirty years she conducted a salon into which her lover, increasingly crotchety, remote and gouty, seldom penetrated, an alarming figure when he did so, frightening the more nervous guests with his persistent scowl, as he looked around the room sucking the golden top of his cane, rarely unbending, although as the Countess's friend, Lady Holland, conceded, he was good company when he condescended to be so. Occasionally he could be seen leaving the palace, a skeletally thin figure with a deeply lined face, to ride about the Cascine like a man possessed.

  Driven from Florence by the approach of the French troops, Alfieri and his mistress had gone to live in a villa beyond the Porta San Gallo near the Villa Stibbert.4 When they had returned to the city he was more difficult than ever, shutting himself up in his room at the top of the house as he struggled to finish his autobiography, grumpy and ill, slamming the door when he returned late at night from one of his regular visits to a woman with whom he was supposed to be conducting an unhappy affair. He died in 1803 and the Countess was desolate. ‘I am now alone in the world,’ she lamented. ‘I have lost all – consolation, support, society, all, all!’

  In fact, she was not alone. For some time past she had had another companion, a Frenchman thirteen years younger than herself, a professor of fine arts at the university, who had fled from France to escape the Revolution in 1791. This was François-Xavier Fabre, an intelligent, alert and appealing painter, a former pupil of David, who had first been drawn to the Palazzo Masetti by his admiration for Count Alfieri. He helped the Countess in making arrangements for her dead lover's burial in Santa Croce and for the execution of his memorial by Antonio Canova, then at the height of his fame.5

  The Countess was fifty at the time of Alfieri's death. She had grown uncommonly fat, and, so Gino Capponi said, ‘was not in the least poetical and was dressed like a servant’, frequently wearing an apron over her dress and a fichu round her neck. She could no longer be seen walking briskly along the Arno as she so often had in the past, though occasionally she was glimpsed of an evening sitting in her carriage outside the Caffè del Bottegone, from which waiters brought her tea, cake or pistacchiata ‘which she consumed without getting out of her carriage’, James Lees-Milne recorded in his delightful The Last Stuarts. ‘The beggars from the steps of the Duomo, attracted by the elegant equipage, would congregate round it. Occasionally they would be tossed a coin and told to enter the west door of the Duomo and offer a prayer for their benefactress.’

  In the remaining twenty years of her life, she went out but rarely, spending long hours writing letters or reading in her library; but Fabre, who moved into the Palazzo Masetti after his parents and brother had all died, was her constant companion and her salon was not abandoned. Madame de Staël came; so did Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi, the Genevan economist and historian who was Madame de Staël's guide during her journey through Italy. Indeed, Palazzo Masetti had gained so notorious a reputation as a meeting place for opponents of the French regime that the Countess was summoned to Paris in 1809 for an interview with Napoleon.

  The Emperor opened the conversation by accusing her of making trouble in Florence where his sister, Elisa, was then Grand Duchess. But it soon became clear to him that the Countess was not much interested in politics, a subject not encouraged in her salon. He asked her if she had ever had a child by Prince Charles, and he seemed disappointed when she said that she had not: a Stuart placed on the throne in London by courtesy of Napoleon would have been a pleasant prospect.

  The Countess was permitted to return to Florence, where she resumed her old life, receiving guests at the Palazzo Masetti as in the past, befriending Ugo Foscolo, the poet and novelist, who resembled Alfieri (near whose tomb he was to be buried in Santa Croce),6 making much of the Comte de Flahaut, Talleyrand's natural son and the lover of both Napoleon's sister, Caroline, and of his stepdaughter, Hortense, Queen of Holland. She intimidated the future statesman, Massimo d'Azeglio – who, in nervously attempting to eat one of those hard, round ice creams known as mattonelle, deeply offended her by sending it shooting off his saucer on to the floor at her feet by way of the chest of the Sardinian minister and exasperated English visitors by her aloof manner and rudely impulsive comments. To one of these English guests, the Duke of Bedford's youngest son, Lord William Russell, she seemed a ‘cross, ill-natured old cat, speaking ill of everybody. Her house was crowded with vulgar English.’

  It was difficult to believe that this was the woman who not long before had fascinated Alphonse de Lamartine, secretary to the French Consulate in Florence, by her wit and conversation, her sparkling eyes and ‘graceful expression’, that this was the Countess of Albany whose favour and company had eagerly been sought in these same rooms by Stendhal and Chateaubriand and by almost every person of note who had passed through Florence since the time of the French Revolution. She died on 29 January 1824 and was buried in the Cappella Castellani in Santa Croce, near the tomb of her beloved Alfieri.7

  In 1823, the year before the Countess of Albany's death, Dorothea de Lieven, wife of the Russian ambassador at the Court of St James and mistress of Prince Metternich, arrived in Florence. She found the Countess a ‘source of entertainment’, but very few other residents of much interest. She went to ‘a great ball’ which was given for her by Prince Camillo Borghese. His house was ‘beautiful and decorated with taste’, but he himself could ‘scarcely breathe for fat, diamonds and stupidity’. She went to pay her respects at court where the Grand Duke remembered it was ‘exactly a year to the day’ since he had seen her for the first time at Verona: ‘You have to be a sovereign to possess a memory like that. How ridiculous that he should have nothing better to do.’ She went the usual rounds, but ‘felt like Madame de Sévigné, who said that what she saw tired her and what she did not see worried her’. At least she walked about a great deal and felt well.

  ‘And I look well,’ she told Metternich; ‘so much so that people laugh when I inform them that I came to Italy for my health. I am growing fat in the very teeth of providence. I cannot understand what has accomplished the miracle. However, as it happened in Florence, I do not see why I should leave such a miraculous spot [even though] what little society exists here is negligible.’

  The English society was presided over by Lord Burghersh, the tenth Earl of Westmorland's only son, a talented violinist who had been aide-de-camp

  Caption

  Sir Thomas
Lawrence's portrait of the Countess of Blessington (1789–1849), who stayed in Florence, at the Casa Pecori.

  to the Duke of Wellington and was to be minister at Berlin. His wife, Priscilla, a daughter of the Earl of Mornington, was a competent artist and accomplished linguist, but ‘a woman of severe social principle’, who was said to have ‘contrived to copy out portions of Byron's memoirs and then, curiosity satisfied, to have destroyed her copy with much public indignation’.

  Lady Burghersh was gracious enough to Madame de Lieven, but to another lady of more obviously unconventional morals, who also happened to be in Florence at this time, she was positively hostile. This was Lady Blessington, wife of the rich and extravagant Earl of Blessington, a friend of Lord Byron and of Count d'Orsay, with whom she was to live after her husband's death. On a subsequent visit to Florence in 1826, the Blessingtons found, to their relief, that the prudish Burghershes were away, and ministerial affairs were being attended to by Lord Strangeways and the Earl of Mulgrave's heir, Lord Normanby, one day to be British ambassador in Paris but then a foppish young man with an affected lisp and a passion for theatricals, which were performed in his private theatre in the Palazzo di San Clemente.

  Lord and Lady Blessington and Count d'Orsay, who had come to Florence with them, got on extremely well with Lord Normanby, as they also did with Walter Savage Landor. This generous-hearted and explosively quarrelsome author, who had settled in Florence in 1821, was now living with his wife and four young children in rooms at the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi. The Blessingtons and d'Orsay were as often to be seen there as Landor himself was to be found at the house which the Blessingtons had taken, the Casa Pecori.

  The Blessingtons' pleasant sojourn in Florence was broken when Lord and Lady Burghersh returned. By then Lord Blessington had eccentrically decided to leave part of his fortune to Count d'Orsay, to whom he was devoted, on condition that the Count married his fifteen-year-old daughter by a former wife. When Blessington, in his usual genial, light-hearted way, apprised Lord Burghersh of this proposal, the minister was naturally horrified, believing as everyone else did that Lady Blessington and d'Orsay were lovers; and, in order to forestall the plan, he insisted that since d'Orsay was a French Roman Catholic, there must be a dual ceremony and that the Anglican ceremony must take precedence over the Catholic one. To this, as expected, the French minister in Florence refused to agree. So Lady Blessington ill-advisedly went to see Lord Burghersh herself, and he was predictably ‘very rude’ to her. So the whole Blessington ménage moved on to Naples, where the strange marriage took place, after d'Orsay had written to Landor to say he would very much like to cut off Lord Burghersh's nose.

  21

  RISORGIMENTO 1814–59

  ‘We have made history. Now let's have dinner.’

  CAMILLO CAVOUR

  The ten years that followed the Grand Duke Ferdinand III's return to Florence in 1814 saw numerous reforms and improvements in the government of Tuscany and the administration of Florence, in the police and in prisons, in hospitals and schools, in the judiciary and criminal law, in charities and public works. The grandly imposing Palazzo Borghese appeared in Via Ghibellina;1 a splendid façade was added to the villa of Poggio Imperiale;2 and the arcades on either side of Porta alla Croce in what is now Piazza Beccaria were completed, much to the satisfaction of the people attending the market held there every Friday.

  The Florentines evinced the greatest pleasure in the return of their agreeable and accommodating Grand Duke, who moved freely and chattily amongst his people, putting aside the strict ceremonial of the court. He entertained guests at the Pitti Palace with conjuring tricks and attended a ball to celebrate the reopening of the Pergola theatre in a plain frock-coat and a top hat from which hung a mask, indicating his approval of the revels without compromising the dignity of his high rank.

  The citizens' pleasure in the Grand Duke's return was, however, marred by one slight disappointment: the rather unpromising nature and somewhat unprepossessing appearance of his seventeen-year-old heir, the Archduke Leopold. Tall, thin and stooped, Leopold had been born in Florence and had spent his first years in the Pitti Palace; but he had been educated in Austria and spoke German better than Italian. He was known in Florence as Canapino (and later as Canapone) because of his straw-coloured hair, also as Il Broncio because of his generally lugubrious expression. His high, domed forehead was brushed by a prominent forelock; his dimpled chin, one day to be surrounded by prodigious side-whiskers, was smooth and pale. He was known to be not very intelligent and extremely pious.

  When he was twenty he was married in the church of Santissima Annunziata to the niece of the King of Saxony, Princess Maria Anna Carolina. The ceremony took place a few weeks after the marriage of his sister to the son of Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy, Prince Charles Albert, who was to become King of Sardinia-Piedmont in 1831 and the father of King Victor Emmanuel II. But after three years had passed the Archduke Leopold and his wife had failed to have a child; and the archduke's father, the Grand Duke Ferdinand III, whose wife had died in 1802, decided that he would have to attempt to secure the succession to the Grand Duchy himself. So he asked his son's father-in-law, Prince Maximilian of Saxony, for the hand of his other daughter. Although this princess was twenty-seven years younger than her ageing suitor, her father readily consented to the marriage, which took place, accompanied by the most elaborate festivities, on 6 May 1821 in the Duomo.

  The Grand Duke did not live long to enjoy the company of his pleasant young wife. Having been seriously ill with an acute fever shortly before his marriage, he was struck down again in the summer of 1824 after a visit to the marshlands of the Tuscan Maremma where his chief minister, Count Fossombroni, had instigated an ambitious scheme of land reclamation. Over two thousand of the Grand Duke's subjects called every day at the Pitti Palace to ask after him and to pay their respects; and, after his death on 18 June, for three consecutive days crowds of people lined up in the Piazza Pitti to file past his body, which was laid out on a catafalque in one of the state apartments of the palace.

  A proclamation was immediately issued in the name of the new Grand Duke Leopold II announcing his succession and confirming all the existing ministers, as well as magistrates, officials and army officers, in their posts. At the same time Count Fossombroni arranged for the whole grand-ducal family to be moved out of Florence to the villa of Castello to keep them out of reach of the Austrian minister, who was expected to seek a private audience to convey to the Grand Duke advice and instructions from his uncle in Vienna, the Emperor Francis II. As had been feared the Austrian minister did, indeed, attempt to talk to the Grand Duke on behalf of the Emperor; but Count Fossombroni succeeded in keeping him at bay, with the excuse that his master was so overcome by grief at the death of his father that he could see nobody.

  The independence of Tuscany was not, however, threatened only by the Austrian Emperor, the embodiment of conservatism in Europe: in Fossombroni's view, its independence was equally threatened by the increasingly powerful movement for the unification of Italy. This movement, the Risorgimento, took two forms, the one monarchical, as represented by the Grand Duke's brother-in-law, Charles Albert, King of Sardinia-Piedmont and later by Charles Albert's son, Victor Emmanuel II, the other republican, inspired by the Genoese idealist and conspirator, Giuseppe Mazzini, and promoted by Mazzini's movement, Giovane Italia. The policy of the Tuscan government – in the early years of Leopold's reign left largely in the capable hands of Count Fossombroni and his principal colleagues, Neri Corsini and Francesco Cempini – was to assert Tuscan independence against Austrian interference, while at the same time resisting populist pressures for a unified Italy, without outright repression of liberal views.

  Indeed, the Florentine authorities were so tolerant of dissent at this time that the city became a haven for moderate liberals and for the literary lions of the Risorgimento. The poet and novelist, Ugo Foscolo, came to Florence from Venice; from Recanati, south of Ancona, came Giacom
o Leopardi, some of whose most tragic poetry was inspired by his love for a beautiful Florentine woman, Fanny Targion-Tozzetti; Leopardi's friend, the scholar, Pietro Giordani, came from Piacenza. The Neapolitan historian, Pietro Colletta, wrote his celebrated Storia del reame di Napoli in Florence. Alessandro Manzoni arrived from Milan and rewrote his great novel, I promessi sposi, adopting in each successive edition more and more Tuscan language into the text.

  These men, and others like them, were in the habit of meeting in the large Gabinetto Scientifico-Letterario in the Palazzo Buondelmonti in the Piazza Santa Trinita. This had been founded by Gian Pietro Vieusseux, a scholar of Swiss descent who was born in Liguria and had settled in Florence in 1819 at the age of forty. Vieusseux had soon made friends with the Marchese Gino Capponi, a cultivated liberal aristocrat and author of a highly regarded history of Florence, and with the Florentine poet, Giuseppe Giusti; and in the large club room of the Gabinetto, where articles for forthcoming issues of Italy's leading review, Antologia, were eagerly discussed, Vieusseux welcomed foreigners as well as Italian visitors, among them Chateaubriand, Heine, Byron and Shelley.3

  The Grand Duke Leopold regarded this intellectual activity with a benign eye. Occasionally, under pressure from Vienna, he was persuaded to take action against some over-zealous reformer or some too-liberal publication: in 1833, for instance, he approved the suppression of Vieusseux's Antologia. Yet he seemed for the most part to be on the side of enlightenment, progress and the advancement of scholarship. He welcomed the attachment of several leading Tuscan scientists to the Egyptian expedition led by the great French Egyptologist, François Champollion; and he subsequently founded the Egyptian Museum in the Museo Archeologico.4 He organized and financed two congresses of Italian scientists; he encouraged the construction of new roads and bridges, and, although Pope Gregory XVI strongly condemned them as likely to ‘work harm to religion’, he approved the expansion of railway networks throughout Tuscany. In his time tracks were laid between Pisa and Leghorn and soon afterwards the line was completed, joining Prato to Florence, where a railway station was erected near Santa Maria Novella. Moreover, for the first time in Italy, telegraph wires were suspended beside the railway tracks.