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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Last farewells

The English cemetry of Florence

Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote an epitaph for one neighbour in the cemetery, Alice Cottrell, who died aged one in 1849: ‘And here, among the English tombs,/ In Tuscan ground we lay her,/ While the blue Tuscan sky endomes/ Our English words of prayer.’

Browning herself is buried around the corner in a neoclassical tomb designed by Lord Leighton, decorated with a profile of Poetry crowned with laurel. Nearby is her fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough, with his epitaph by Matthew Arnold — ‘The Last Farewell of his Affectionate Wife and Sister’. Like many in the cemetery, Clough died young, in 1861 at the age of 42, long before his poem ‘Say not the Struggle naught Availeth’ had found fame. The Italian climate, supposedly so good for dying Englishmen, was fatal, with its searing summers and River Arno damps. Not far from Clough is Fanny Hunt, dead at 33 after a blissful single year of marriage to the painter Holman Hunt. Hunt designed the pleasant, swelling lines of her sarcophagus.

I spent several happy hours trawling through the cemetery, digging up, as it were, splendid figures: Charles and Thomas Otley who, with Charles’s son ‘il biondo Enrico’, founded Florence’s jockey club in the mid-19th century. Princess Laura Pandolfina di Temple (died 1877), a British woman who married a Sicilian prince, lies near the poet Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864). A stone’s throw away is Trollope’s mother, Frances Trollope-Milton (1780–1863).

Despite these treasures, the tourist buses that rumble around the cemetery all day never stop off. A solitary couple came and visited in the course of my afternoon there. With few visitors, and limited Swiss funds, the cemetery came near to dereliction until the arrival of Sister Julia Holloway, a 70-year-old English nun, now the cemetery custodian, living in its gatehouse. One night when she was away, vandals smashed 30 tombs.

The daughter of an English journalist, Sister Julia was brought up in Sussex before moving to California. She married, had three children and taught medieval studies at Princeton, before being widowed. Fifteen years ago she returned to Sussex as an Anglican nun, and is now a Catholic Hermit of the Holy Family.

More articles from: Harry Mount | this section

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