Last farewells
The English cemetry of Florence
Just outside Florence’s city walls, marooned in the middle of a huge great ring road, lies a foreign field that is for ever England.
Well, it’s really for ever Switzerland. The English Cemetery of Florence is owned by the Swiss Reformed Evangelical Church and is officially called the Protestant Cemetery of Florence. But, because the English presence looms so large in Florence, the Florentines call it the Cimitero degli Inglesi.
Certainly, most of the 1,700 dead interred since the cemetery’s foundation in 1827 are British, with many fewer Swiss, Americans, Russians and Protestant Italians. There are still 70 x 70 cm plots for urns available, now open to anyone of any religious persuasion.
Most of the epitaphs, too, are in English. There is something peculiar — yet intensely moving and enjoyable — about stumbling around broken Doric columns under a harsh Italian sun, shaded by soaring cypresses, and reading English poetry.
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