Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  The arrival of Queen Victoria in Florence on 16 March 1894.

  Orford, who presided over her weekly salon chain-smoking black cigars and was sufficiently tolerant of the easy manners of Florentine society to contemplate an Italian lady playing whist in her drawing-room with her husband, her ex-husband and her lover.

  In the year of Queen Victoria's last visit to Florence, Oscar Wilde was also in the city in the company of Lord Alfred Douglas. It was shortly before Wilde's misguided legal action against Lord Alfred's father, the Marquess of Queensberry; and the relationship between the two younger men was already notorious, so notorious, indeed, that when André Gide, whose own homosexuality was suppressed, met them in a café in Florence, he did not at first mention the encounter in the letters he wrote regularly to Paul Valéry. When he did mention Wilde's name, he referred to Douglas merely as ‘un autre poète’.

  Wilde had hoped not to be recognized in Florence, but, as his biographer, Richard Ellmann, wrote, ‘his attempt to keep his presence a secret was perhaps doomed to fail, since his height and dress and theatrical manner made him conspicuous wherever he went’. He was invited one day to Via Garibaldi to see the invalid, Eugene Lee-Hamilton. It was evidently ‘a great success. Oscar talked like an angel, and they all fell in love with him, even Vernon Lee, who had hated him almost as much as he had hated her. He, for his part, was charmed with her.’

  Visitors to Florence in these years of the late nineteenth century were sometimes shocked by the apparent indifference of the inhabitants to the beauties round them, their easy tolerance of what Dickens called ‘an irregular kind of market’ in the Piazza del Duomo, where ‘stores of old iron and other small merchandise were set out on stalls’, their ready acceptance of both the principal hackney-coach stand and a busy omnibus station right in front of the door of the Campanile. ‘The hackney coaches, with their more or less farmyard-like litter of occasional hay, and smell of variously mixed horse manure,’ so John Ruskin complained, rendered it ‘impossible to stand for a moment near the Campanile… while the north side [was] enclosed with an iron railing and usually encumbered with lumber as well: not a soul in Florence ever caring now for the sight of any piece of its old artists' work.’

  The same sort of thing could be said of the Palazzo della Signoria, where hundreds of men, wrapped in long cloaks, stood for hours ‘as if they had

  The Ponte Vecchio by William Holman Hunt, who had a studio in Florence. His first wife died there in 1866.

  nothing else to do,’ Augustus Hare observed, ‘talking ceaselessly in deep Tuscan tones’. Near them in the Loggia dei Lanzi prostitutes strolled from side to side, while men shiftily offered objects for sale which were not easily to be found in the markets and were presumed to be stolen.

  Earlier, in a sour mood, Walter Savage Landor had complained, ‘Florence is, I fear, the filthiest capital in Europe; and I can speak from experience that it is impossible to walk through the market with dry shirts unless you go with a jacket.’

  A generation later William Holman Hunt, who had taken a studio in Florence where his wife had died, thought the people ‘the filthiest' he had ever known:

  Such stinks meet you on the street and wake you up at night that it seems Pestilence must be on the threshold with destruction for the whole city… What do you think of a boy of fifteen or sixteen in the blazing sunlight at one o'clock on Sunday, in Kensington Gore say, taking his breeches down for a necessary purpose which he performs while he still goes on with his game of pitch and toss with seven or eight companions some two years older who remain in a circle about two or three yards round him. Then again to an old gentleman of the utmost respectability… walking across the road at the Duke of York's column and taking down his black cloth breeches for the same purpose.

  In a letter to Holman Hunt, Edward Lear expressed a different opinion of Florence. For him it was all too much of a good thing: ‘plum-pudding, treacle, wedding cake, sugar, barley-sugar, sugar-candy, raisins and peppermint drops would not make a more luscious mixture in the culinary world’. It was as well to see the place; but for Lear a month of it was quite enough.

  To Nathaniel Hawthorne's wife Sophia, it seemed that the most unprepossessing of all the citizens of Florence were the priests, who always appeared anxious to get through their ‘endlessly repeated tasks’ in church so that they could ‘go and eat and drink’. Doubtless there were many among them truly devout, she conceded. ‘But the appearance of the clergy of Florence is almost invariably repulsive and gross, and they are said to be peculiarly depraved. They are mostly fat, with flabby cheeks, chins and throats, of very earthly aspect. There is nothing to compare them to but hogs.’

  Sophia Hawthorne's husband was almost as uncomplimentary about Flor-ence's festivals, once so exciting a part of the city's life. The Feast of St John, like the Carnival, had, he thought, degenerated into ‘a meagre semblance of festivity, kept alive factitiously, and dying a lingering death’. His fellow American, Fenimore Cooper, was almost as unimpressed by the corsi dei cocchi in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella. The setting was pleasant enough, for there was ‘much scenic painting, a good parade of guards, both horse and foot, a well-dressed population, and a background of balconies garnished by tapestry and fine women, to say nothing of roofs and chimneys’. But the chariots were small and clumsy, and so constructed that there was little likelihood of their upsetting the charioteers as they turned by the obelisks. Indeed, ‘one may witness the same any fine evening in New York, between two drunken Irish cartmen on their way home’.

  At least the ceremony of the Scoppio del Carro (the Explosion of the Cart) on Easter Day in the Duomo had not lost its charms. Janet Ross described how, during Mass, the attention of the congregation was concentrated upon a cord stretched above their heads and ‘a small white speck which, we were informed, was the famous dove’, a rocket shaped like a bird.

  When the Gloria had been sung, a man went up a ladder with a lighted taper, which he applied to the dove. There was a great spitting and hissing, and all at once she shot forward down the cord, a streak of fire and sparks. There was a stir and hum in the crowd, and a few little screams from some of the women; the dove vanished out of the door, and then there was a series of explosions from outside, while the dove returned as fast as she had gone, and remained still fizzing for a few seconds.

  Then all the bells of Florence, which had been silent since twelve o'clock on Thursday, began to ring merry chimes, and the great organ pealed out a triumphal melody. We made our way out of the Duomo as fast as we could, and were in time to see the last of the fireworks on the chariot; they made a tremendous noise… When all the squibs and crackers were finished, four magnificent white oxen, gaily decked with ribbons, were harnessed to the cart, which moved off slowly with many creaks and groans round the south side of the cathedral towards the Via del Proconsolo. The crowd was immense… The four white oxen were unharnessed and taken away, and a cord being put from the door of the Pazzi Palace to the cart, another dove again flew to the fireworks, and the popping and fizzing was renewed, to the intense delight of the crowd. The dove had flown swiftly and well this year, so the contadini returned home joyfully, spreading the glad tidings as they went – ‘La colombina è andata bene’ (‘the dove has flown well’).

  24

  RESIDENTS AND VISITORS

  ‘Iron bedsteads should if possible be selected, as they are less likely to harbour the enemies of repose.’

  KARL BAEDEKER

  Soon after Queen Victoria's first visit to Florence, one of her favourite writers, the novelist who called herself Ouida, was obliged to leave the city, unable to pay her rent, after having lived there for twenty-three years, for most of them in extravagant comfort. Born in Suffolk of a French father and an English mother, Ouida was a small, plain, arrogant woman of affectedly eccentric manners. When in London she stayed at the Langham Hotel, where she gave grand parties, notifying her guests by a prominent notice that morals and umbrellas were to be left in t
he hall. She and her mother had settled in Florence in 1874, at first staying at the expensive Hôtel d'Italie in the Piazza Ognissanti, then renting the Villa Vagnonville, before moving to the Villa Farinola at Scandicci, where she lived in a most prodigal way, spending large sums on furniture and decorations and wearing clothes designed by Worth which did not suit her. She soon had a wide circle of acquaintances including the imperious, generous-hearted Countess of Orford, and the fastidious Marchese della Stufa, who also lived at Scandicci. But her friendship with Janet Ross was destroyed when she began to harbour the improbable suspicion that Mrs Ross was a rival for the homosexual Marchese della Stufa's affections.

  Although she worked assiduously, Ouida's popularity as a novelist gradually declined. Deep in debt, she and her mother were ejected from their villa and forced to return to Florence, where her mother died and was buried in a pauper's grave. Ouida herself lived to hear of the death of Queen Victoria and the accession of King Edward VII, an event she commemorated with the comment, ‘At least he is a man of the world and won't publish silly books in bad English.’

  English as it seemed to the Goncourts, Florence held a strong appeal for other foreigners, too, as it had done in the eighteenth century, when the Americans John Smibert, John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West had

  Ladies in a garden by John Singer Sargent. The gardens of the Torre del Gallo were reconstructed by Stefano Bardini in 1904 – 6.

  come to paint, when Heinrich Heine had written poems here and the art historian Johann Winckelmann had come from Prussia to complain about the city's architecture; when Count Aleksey Grigoryevich, who had played a leading part in the coup d'état which brought Catherine the Great to power, rode in from Russia, and when Giacomo Casanova came from Venice, both to enjoy the pleasures of the Carnival.

  The immensely rich Anatoly Nikolayevich Demidoff, whose father had lived and died in Florence and whose wife was Napoleon's niece, Princess Mathilde, was considered almost as an honorary Florentine citizen because of his generous benefactions to the city and its people.1 By the time of his death in 1870, Florence had a large Russian colony for which Demidoff, who had bought himself the Tuscan title of ‘Principe di San Donato’, built the Russian Church in Via Leone X.2 Among the most distinguished and richest of the church's congregation was Princess Woronzoff, whose collection of jewellery was so astonishing that people gathered to watch her pass by, wearing her twelve ropes of splendid pearls that reached to her knees. It was a sad day for the Florentines when the Tsar summoned these Russian exiles back to Moscow by ukase in 1885.

  There was a large German colony in Florence, too. This centred on the former monastery of San Francesco di Paola, where the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand entertained a succession of his fellow-countrymen and countrywomen, among them the art theorist, Konrad Fielder, the painter, Hans von Marées, Wagner and Franz Liszt, Clara Schumann and Richard Strauss. ‘Liszt played this evening,’ Hildebrand recorded in his diary one day in 1876. ‘First Chopin, then something Austrussian-Viennese, just to make the women faint.’

  An edition of Karl Baedeker's Italy: Handbook for Travellers, published when Adolf von Hildebrand was living in the city, estimated the likely ‘expenditure of a single visitor to Florence [at] 20 – 25 francs per day, or at 10 – 15 francs when a prolonged stay is made’, that was to say between 8s. and £1 a day, or $2–5. Gold, silver and copper coins from other countries circulated in Florence, Baedeker continued. But ‘the traveller should be on guard against base coin, worn pieces, coins from the papal mint, Swiss silver coins with the seated figure of Helvetia, Roumanian and South American coins. All foreign copper coins (except those of San Marino) should be rejected.’ It was advisable to change gold pieces of 10 or 20 francs into paper money at a money-changer's office: ‘the French monetary system is now in use throughout the whole of Italy’.

  Travellers were also warned to be on guard against giving their nationality away by talking in their native language, for they would be more than likely to be ‘made to pay “all'Inglese” by hotel-keepers and others, i.e., considerably more than the ordinary charges’.

  Where tariffs and fixed charges exist, they should be carefully consulted. In other cases the traveller must make a distinct bargain… since in Italy the pernicious custom of demanding considerably more than will ultimately be accepted has long been prevalent… The fewest words are best; and travellers will find that calm preparations to go elsewhere will reduce obstinate hagglers to reason much more quickly than a war of words… Prudence is useful at all times; but an exaggerated mistrust is sometimes resented as an insult and sometimes taken to indicate weakness and timidity.

  The Handbook goes on to warn travellers against the wiles of guides and the importunities of beggars, drivers, porters and donkey attendants who ‘invariably expect and often demand as their right a gratuity (buona mano, mancia, da here, caffè, sigaro) in addition to the hire agreed on’. ‘The traveller need not scruple to limit his donations to the smallest possible sums’; but since ‘there is no other country where one has to give so many gratuities as in Italy, or where such small sums are sufficient’, he should always be supplied with an abundant supply of copper coins. The impudent attempts at extortion by railway porters should be firmly resisted.

  Under the heading ‘Public Safety’, Baedeker warned that ‘ladies should never undertake expeditions to the more solitary districts without escort; and even the masculine traveller should arrange his excursions so as to regain the city not much later than sunset… Weapons cannot legally be carried without a licence. Concealed weapons (sword-sticks and even knives with spring blades, etc.) are absolutely prohibited, and the bearer is liable to imprisonment without the option of a fine.’

  Passports were not required; the examination of luggage at the customs houses was lenient, cigars being the articles chiefly sought for (only six passed free). The guardie and carabinieri were ‘thoroughly respectable and trustworthy’; the railway trains, although often behind time, were very moderate in cost and tolerably comfortable, except for the third class, which was ‘chiefly frequented by the lower orders’. The diligenza, or ordinary stage-coach, was not so comfortable, and its passengers ‘not always select’; but it conveyed travellers ‘with tolerable speed’. When travelling either by road or by rail, tourists were urged to place their heavy articles in small packages since ‘the enormous weight of the trunks used by some travellers not infrequently causes serious and even lifelong injury to the hotel and other porters who have to handle them. Furthermore, articles of value should not be entrusted to the safekeeping of any trunk or portmanteau, however strong and secure it may seem, as during the last few years an extraordinary number of robberies of passengers’ luggage have been perpetrated without detection.’

  As for hotels in Florence, those of the first class, such as the Hotel Excelsior, were ‘comfortably fitted up’ with rooms available from 3s. a night, though rooms with baths cost rather more and guests who did not dine at the table d'hôte might also find the prices raised. Luncheon cost about one dollar and dinner about a dollar and fifty cents. The pensioni and the second-class hotels, like the Savoy in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele (now the Piazza della Repubblica), ‘though Italian in their arrangements’, were ‘much more comfortable and more modern in their equipment’ than of late. Soap, however, was an extra for which a high price was charged, and, ‘if no previous agreement' had been made, an extortionate bill was not uncommon. ‘Iron bedsteads should if possible be selected, as they are less likely to harbour the enemies of repose.’

  In restaurants it was to be noticed that Florentine customers had no hesitation in sending away at once ill-cooked or stale dishes, nor sometimes on insisting on inspecting the meat or fish before it was cooked. The approved way of attracting the attention of the waiter was by knocking on the table. ‘If too importunate in their recommendations waiters may be checked with the word basta.’ Osterie were to be avoided as ‘favourite haunts of the lower classes’, the rooms be
ing ‘generally dirty and uninviting’. Cafés were tolerable for breakfast and luncheon, though not for dinner, since they were often crowded until a very late hour at night and the tobacco smoke was most objectionable. Cigars were ‘a monopoly of government, and invariably bad… Passers-by [were] at liberty to avail themselves of the light burning in every tobacconist's without making any purchase.’

  Wherever they were staying visitors to Florence were warned that they were likely to suffer from diarrhoea, which was ‘generally occasioned either by the unwonted heat, the injudicious use of fruit and iced drinks or the drinking water’. Insect bites were also only too common: a note added to the listing of even the first-class Grand Hotel in the Piazza Manin (now the Piazza Ognissanti) read, ‘On the right bank of the Arno, best situation (mosquitoes troublesome).’ Additionally, visitors must always beware of the ‘sudden and frequent transitions of temperature, so trying to persons in delicate health’.

  Arnold Bennett may well have had this handbook with him when, in 1910, he came to Florence, where much of his novel Clayhanger was written. He stayed at the Pensione White, which cost him no more than 8 lire (less than £1) a day inclusive of all meals, and very good meals they were too: the Italian manageress, who had become ‘almost English in her very soul’, served a ‘really A1 dinner’ even when her guests came back to the house as late as eleven o'clock at night. Two years later, André Gide did even better at a pensione at No. 20 Lungarno Acciaioli where he had ‘a very pleasant bedroom and sitting-room (primo piano on the quay) at 3 lire a day’.