One superb perk of studying at the British Institute is access to the Harold Acton Library. Located in the Palazzo Lanfredini and looking out onto the Arno, it is as beautiful as it is historic, making it an ideal retreat from the tourist crowds. As students we are given temporary membership of the library, and so are able to borrow freely from its well stocked shelves. By way of background reading, this week I picked up Francis Henry King's A Literary Companion to Florence, which depicts with wonderful panache the lives and times of the international writers who have been exploring Florence from the days of Milton right up to the present. With many an exciting anecdote, it compelled me to explore the former haunts of these literary visitors, in the hope, perhaps, of imbibing the same inspiration that has produced such eclectic works as Shelley's Peter Bell the Third and E.M. Forster's A Room with a View. The writers influenced by Florence are obviously too many to mention, but here is a rather disorganised, whistle-stop tour of what I discovered.
When the Romantic poet Leigh Hunt first arrived in Florence in 1823, he wrote that the first two words he heard were ‘fiore’ (flower) and ‘donne’ (women) - which he took to be a good omen. This encapsulates rather well the fascination of the British literati with the Tuscan capital, but it was not a view shared by all. On the contrary, Byron, Hunt’s contemporary, disliked the British infatuation with Florence and Naples, describing them both as ‘their Margate and Ramsgate, and much the same company too, by all accounts’. Still, it was in Florence that he completed much of his great work Childe Harold, so his debt to Florence was greater than this remark reveals.
The first place I came across of significance was on the corner of the Via de' Cerchi and Via della Condotta, where William Makepeace Thackeray and the Irish writer Charles Lever would dine at the Laura Restaurant, famed for its fish soup. The building is now a pharmacy and bears no trace of its history. Thackeray's reputation as a gourmet chimes with the seventeenth-century poet Thomas Gray's travels here. Gray, known for his reclusiveness, led a rather solitary existence in the Casa Ambrogi on Via de' Bardi, overlooking the Ponte Vecchio. Far from delighting in the cultural hub, Gray thought that Florence 'is excellent to employ all one's animal sensations in, but utterly contrary to one's rational powers', and describes an almost grossly indolent lifestyle: 'We get up at twelve o'clock, breakfast till three, dine till four, sleep till six, drink cooling liquors till eight, go to the bridge [the Ponte Vecchio] till ten, sup till two, and so sleep till twelve again'. Dismissive though this account may be, none of these writings could prevent the city from becoming an obligatory destination on the Grand Tour during Gray's lifetime.
Back to the nineteenth century, Mary Anne Evans (known by her male nom de plume George Eliot) had her lodgings on the corner of Via de' Tornabuoni and Via della Vigna Nuova, now home to a boutique hotel and the flagship Gucci outlet. As I gazed from across the street at the commemorative plaque, I found it slightly amusing that she called this 'the quietest hotel in Florence' given that it stands on what is now one of the most popular upmarket shopping streets not only in Florence, but the world. Evans' affinity to Florence as the visual arts capital inspired her to write Romola, based loosely on the life of the infamous Dominican (in the monastic sense) demagogue Girolamo Savonarola, who had much of the city's cultural heritage burned in the Piazza della Signoria, known more famously as the 'bonfire of the vanities'.
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| The Palazzo Lanfredini (centre) viewed from the north side of the Arno. Picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Institute_of_Florence |
When the Romantic poet Leigh Hunt first arrived in Florence in 1823, he wrote that the first two words he heard were ‘fiore’ (flower) and ‘donne’ (women) - which he took to be a good omen. This encapsulates rather well the fascination of the British literati with the Tuscan capital, but it was not a view shared by all. On the contrary, Byron, Hunt’s contemporary, disliked the British infatuation with Florence and Naples, describing them both as ‘their Margate and Ramsgate, and much the same company too, by all accounts’. Still, it was in Florence that he completed much of his great work Childe Harold, so his debt to Florence was greater than this remark reveals.
The first place I came across of significance was on the corner of the Via de' Cerchi and Via della Condotta, where William Makepeace Thackeray and the Irish writer Charles Lever would dine at the Laura Restaurant, famed for its fish soup. The building is now a pharmacy and bears no trace of its history. Thackeray's reputation as a gourmet chimes with the seventeenth-century poet Thomas Gray's travels here. Gray, known for his reclusiveness, led a rather solitary existence in the Casa Ambrogi on Via de' Bardi, overlooking the Ponte Vecchio. Far from delighting in the cultural hub, Gray thought that Florence 'is excellent to employ all one's animal sensations in, but utterly contrary to one's rational powers', and describes an almost grossly indolent lifestyle: 'We get up at twelve o'clock, breakfast till three, dine till four, sleep till six, drink cooling liquors till eight, go to the bridge [the Ponte Vecchio] till ten, sup till two, and so sleep till twelve again'. Dismissive though this account may be, none of these writings could prevent the city from becoming an obligatory destination on the Grand Tour during Gray's lifetime.
Back to the nineteenth century, Mary Anne Evans (known by her male nom de plume George Eliot) had her lodgings on the corner of Via de' Tornabuoni and Via della Vigna Nuova, now home to a boutique hotel and the flagship Gucci outlet. As I gazed from across the street at the commemorative plaque, I found it slightly amusing that she called this 'the quietest hotel in Florence' given that it stands on what is now one of the most popular upmarket shopping streets not only in Florence, but the world. Evans' affinity to Florence as the visual arts capital inspired her to write Romola, based loosely on the life of the infamous Dominican (in the monastic sense) demagogue Girolamo Savonarola, who had much of the city's cultural heritage burned in the Piazza della Signoria, known more famously as the 'bonfire of the vanities'.
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| George Eliot described her lodgings as 'the quietest hotel in Florence'
It is perhaps Harold Acton himself, though, to whom writers working in Florence owe their gratitude. Acton was famed for his hospitality at the sumptuous Villa La Pietra in the hills just outside the city, and for this reason there is ample admiration for him to be found in countless books relating to Florence. Educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, the extraordinarily well-travelled aesthete rubbed shoulders with the luminaries of his generation, such as George Orwell, Graham Greene, Violet Trefusis, Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, and it is because of his legacy that the Institute's library was named after him in 1989. All of which brings us back to the Library: the very enabler for me to find all of this out in the first place! It is amazing where a little curiosity can take you...
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