Florence (12 page)

In 1996, the thirtieth anniversary of the flood, Italy’s Legambiente, using the Internet as a
tool, launched an international effort to track down the mud angels and invite them to return to Florence. Testimony was solicited, much of it humbling. Marika Spence Sales, then a student at McGill University in Montreal, wrote that after the flood, she and fourteen fellow students had traveled to Florence on their own initiative. As soon as they arrived they were sent to the Biblioteca Nazionale. ‘We worked in a chain system for 7-8 hours a day,’ she writes, ‘to pad the flooded books out with absorbent paper. We stayed at the National Library for three months. We were given food and lodging and at lunchtime ate a hot meal in the city council canteen. It was very cold in the Library. My university sent us parcels containing wellington boots and warm clothing … Our families sent us unperishable food instead, like powdered milk and tinned meals.’

Spence Sales met her future husband while she was in Florence, and stayed on in Italy. So did Susan Glasspool, who had just arrived from England to study at the Academy of Fine Arts when the flood hit. ‘I was staying at Trespiano, outside Florence,’ she recalled, ‘and on the morning of the flood, a landslide
had blocked the road close by the house. We didn’t realise that there had been a flood and thought that the bad weather was the cause of the lack of electricity, phone and water. My landlady somehow heard that something serious had happened in Florence and asked me if I could drive her down to see if her relations were in need of any help.’

Once they arrived, they discovered a city all but crippled; in particular, Glasspool was amazed that the Ponte Vecchio, ‘which was completely jammed up with tree trunks’, was still standing. She was quickly put to work ‘cleaning the mud out of the cellars at the University in Piazza Brunelleschi, or helping to clear out the Uffizi Archives, the Academy or other parts of the University’. John Schofield, who traveled to Florence from London at his own expense after the flood, worked first at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo and then in the Limonaia of the Boboli Gardens, which had been ‘converted for the controlled drying of shelf upon shelf of damaged pictures’. Under the supervision of the art historian Ugo Baldini, Schofield, who would go on to make a career as an architectural restorer, ‘learned to
treat the packs of the pictures against virulent, many-coloured moulds. I progressed from carefully removing caked-on mud to the fungicidal treatment of the paint surface of all the pictures in rotation – a task which left no time even for a visit to the Uffizi!’

Generally speaking, the Florentines greeted the mud angels as warmly as they had the troops of liberating soldiers who had marched into the city after the war; some, however, saw them as little more than freeloading hippies. Amy Centers, the American producer of an online ‘living guidebook’ to Florence, describes a student named Mario who had been a young teenager living near Santa Croce when the flood hit. ‘Florence in ’66 had yet to see the hippie movement,’ she writes, ‘and the mass of long-haired, tattooed, pot-smoking teenagers in sandals, tie-dye and cut-offs was a shock to the local population. People from all over the world descended on the city to help, but as it turns out, charitable intentions were about all they had. With little money and no place to stay, the Italians were forced to house and feed them. Mario said that everywhere he went people were handing him bread, which he
took, not wanting to appear rude. At the end of the night he’d go home to mountains of bread in his living room.’

And yet the last word must really be given to the students who, no matter how they dressed and how much bread they ate, came to Florence for only one reason: to help. In 1966, Catherine Williams of Bradenton, Florida, was taking her junior year abroad, studying at Florida State University’s Florence campus, which had just opened. The day before the flood, she wrote, had been ‘wet and miserable – I’d spent the day in Fiesole with a friend and came back in the rain to the Hotel. The next morning we heard that the Arno had flooded – the flood came up to our street [Via Aprile] and stopped – no lights, no water. We set out to explore and were met with cars wrapped around poles, mud caked on buildings – mud, mud everywhere.’

Over the next few days, Williams learned to brush her teeth with bubbly water. She and her fellow students ‘stood in line for water from the military tanks and spent the days in the basement of the library’, taking part in the famous human chain that Senator Kennedy
memorialized. ‘I spent my twentieth birthday at Florence in flood,’ she wrote upon learning of the Legambiente’s reunion. ‘I can think of no more fitting place to be for my fiftieth.’

Chapter Five

When Mark and I went to live in Florence in 1993, a friend of ours suggested that I should write a profile of the recently knighted (and now very old) Sir Harold Acton for
The New Yorker.
I put her off, just as I put off the various contacts who offered to introduce me to Sir Harold, and in February of the next year, he died. Opportunity missed – and entirely through my own resistance. And yet, if truth be told, I’ve never regretted that lost chance, just as I’ve never regretted not going to visit Hugh Honour and John Fleming, famed art historians in residence near Lucca, to whom a hundred friends offered to introduce us; or not accepting the invitation of Gil
Cohen and Paul Gervais, a rich American couple known behind their backs (homosexual circles are bitchy) as ‘Pill and Gil’, to spend a weekend in their villa, also near Lucca; or never getting a private tour of the palaces of the various Corsinis and Ruccelais and Frescobaldis, the princesses and barons and
marchesi,
whom it has been the ambition since time immemorial, or at least since Henry James, of American expatriates to cultivate … The fact is, neither Mark nor I has ever been very interested in meeting famous or titled people simply because they were famous or titled. In this regard we differed drastically from the vast majority of the foreigners who had settled in Florence, and for whom the totting down of noteworthy names under the categories ‘met’, ‘dined with’, ‘received letters from’, ‘was invited to drinks by’ and ‘slept with’ provided a crucial and consuming activity – an antidote to long winter nights and stifling summer afternoons. Acton was emblematic of this tendency; although, by his old age, he had become an icon in his own right (if a pinchbeck one), in his salad days he was merely another young seeker after the anointing
kiss of celebrity, planning his life, it sometimes seemed, around the objective of having something to write memoirs about when he was older. ‘Society’, the blandishments of the Emerald Cunards and Sybil Colefaxes of the world, entranced him, and to guarantee its approbation, he granted himself a fatal exemption from the rule of rigor and truthfulness. No writer can afford to be so polite, if he hopes to be remembered as anything other than a ‘character’.

I grew up in California, in a university town ruled by an etiquette far less daunting than that which obtained in Acton’s Florence, and which in any case my mother, never one to suffer fools gladly, flouted at every opportunity. American to the core, as well as slightly famous in my own right, I arrived in Florence not knowing who Principessa Giorgiana Corsini was, much less worrying how to wangle a lunch invitation out of her. Mark was the same way; we thought of ourselves as sons of Forster, and for Forster, ‘society’ had never been the bailiwick that it was for Acton or James. Instead it was the Florence of the Florentines that we longed to know, the streets and the
bars and the ‘authentic’ restaurants. Who cared about being invited to tea at La Pietra? What was the point, anyway, of having ‘tea’ when one could have a cappuccino? And so we never went, never ate the famously thin sandwiches, or received the tour of the gardens that Acton himself still sometimes gave. Others did; until his death visitors with connections, friends of friends, descended on La Pietra, if for no other reason than so that they could later say they had had tea there, seen both the villa and its legendary occupant, ‘preserved – or imprisoned – within it’, as James Lord wrote, ‘like some gorgeous prehistoric lepidopteran in a gem of amber’. Acton’s own fear was that he would be remembered only for the villa, not for his books, yet as Lord points out, the names of collectors – of owners – do not have the same staying power, in our memory, as those of artists. And that is the sad irony, that in the long run, Acton will probably be remembered neither for his writing nor for his villa; instead he will be remembered, if he is remembered, as the model for Anthony Blanche in
Brideshead Revisited;
the very ‘smear’ he most hoped to erase.

That said, in the early years of our Florentine idyll, we did touch on two of the surviving relics of Anglo-Florentine society, both of whom have since died. The first of these was Joan Haslip. Although she had lived in Florence since her girlhood, like many of the Anglo-Florentines, Haslip had never learned to speak Italian. Her mother, who was half-Austrian and half-Slav, had brought her and her sister, Lallie, there after the death of their English father, George Ernest Haslip. (Lallie went on to marry Pifi Gomez, the mayor of Florence under
Il Duce.)

We met her only once, when we were invited on an hour’s notice to a luncheon at the five-star Hotel Helvetia-Bristol hosted by Fausto Calderai – a furniture expert and cog in Florentine society. The author of numerous biographies, among them lives of Marie Antoinette, Madame Du Barry, Lucrezia Borgia, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth of Austria (
The Lonely Empress
) and Lady Hester Stanhope, she was now in her early eighties. Decidedly poor – like most Anglo-Florentines, she had never bought property – she lived simply in a small house on the property of her friend
Costanza Ricasoli-Romanelli, attended by servants as old as she was, and surrounded by family furniture for which she was hoping to find a buyer who would let her continue to use it until her death.

Over drinks, Fausto asked her how she was feeling. ‘I’m terrible,’ she said. ‘My best friends are both dying.’ (She meant Acton – who left her nothing in his will – and John Pope-Hennessy). Haslip herself was arthritic and close to blind, yet when Principessa Corsini, another guest at the lunch, asked if she wouldn’t do better with a wheelchair, she pushed aside the suggestion with the same gesture she used to keep her hair aloft – no matter that Florence was full of history-besotted young men who would have enjoyed nothing better than taking her around town. After all, she was still a brilliant
raconteuse,
full of secrets about royalty and smuggled emeralds. Her coquettish wit suggested what Via Tornabuoni must have been like during her youth – those days when, in Acton’s words, the street was ‘aureoled with Ouida-esque romance’, and when she had written a breathless novel about Florence,
Grandfather’s Steps
(dedicated to Lallie), as
well as a poem,
Peonies and Magnolias,
published in a limited edition by Centaur Booklets, and of which the following lines are exemplary:

Luigi, Gianni, Mario

In pink and lilac shirts.

They are the vital topics,

The season’s fav’rite flirts.

When Pope-Hennessy’s friend Michael Mallon, to whom Haslip willed her library, asked if she might ever consider writing fiction again, she said there was no point: no one was interested in reading novels about the upper classes any more.

She had not given up biography, however. At the Helvetia-Bristol someone (perhaps the French consul) inquired if she was at work on something new. ‘I’m doing Napoleon’s sisters,’ she answered, ‘and they’re behaving
exactly
like the royal princesses.’ (This was before one royal princess died in a car crash and the other became a spokeswoman for Weight Watchers.)

Later, when Fausto told her (inaccurately)
that Mark was Margaret Mitchell’s grandson, she became exuberant. ‘It’s my favorite film,’ she said. ‘Tell me, are you still living off it?’

As lunch ended, she made a show of telling Fausto she’d brought the wrong purse, the one without the money: could he arrange a taxi for her?

Haslip’s other best friend, Sir John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy (fondly known as ‘the Pope’), died on Halloween of that year, which seemed weirdly apposite, given his legendary chilliness; after all, this was a man who had recalled a trip to the morgue to identify the body of his brother James – beaten to death by hustlers in a Ladbroke Grove maisonette (another arrow in your side, Labouchère!) – with the following words: ‘I was appalled by the dissolute, almost evil expression of his face. It was as though one were participating in a Jacobean tragedy.’

Although he had spent his summers in the city for forty years, Pope-Hennessy was a relative newcomer to the residential colony in Florence, having settled there only in 1986. (Before that he had lived in New York, where he served as Consultative Chairman in
the Department of European Paintings at the Met, and before that in London, where he was director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, then of the British Museum.) In Florence he rented a vast apartment in the Palazzo Canigiani on Via de’ Bardi, famous from George Eliot’s novel
Romola.
With its magnificent loggia overlooking the Arno and Fiesole, the apartment suggested the grand style, the cultured elegance, to which the Anglo-Florentines of a century earlier had accustomed themselves so quickly: at the end of the nineteenth century a castle could cost less than an antique majolica jar. There were several ‘important’ paintings, and much ‘important’ furniture, including a round porphyry and cherry-wood table that we particularly coveted. Yet the most memorable detail of the apartment was not grand at all: it was an odd little window in one of the corridors, a window that started halfway down the wall and ended at the floor, so that you could sit on the carpet and dangle your legs out.