HISTORY OF MEDICINE IN
FLORENCE'S ENGLISH CEMETERY
Ages shall honour in their hearts enshrined/
Thee, Southwood Smith, Physician of Mankind/Bringer of air, light,
health into the homes/ Of the richer poor of the years to come.
It is fitting that this so-called 'English' Cemetery, still
owned by a Swiss church in Florence, should present its
history of medicine in an app, since it was the Swiss
Jean-Henri Dunant who founded the Red Cross. leading to the
Geneva Conventions, after witnessing the horror of the
wounded and dying in the Risorgimento 24 June 1859 Battle of
Solferino. Some of my earliest memories during WWII are of
my mother editing a news letter with photographs from
Germany acquired through the Red Cross of imprisoned British
soldiers to be shared with their families in England,
Canada, Australia, etc. In the Middle Ages and in the modern
period, pilgrims and medical personnel could cross enemy
lines, with the right of sanctuary that neutrality afforded
them, a concept recalled by the Médecins sans Frontiers.
This guided tour will centre on the diseases from
which our burials had suffered, and on the doctors buried in
this cemetery, giving its history of medicine.
Death stands above me, whispering low
I know not what into my ear;
Of his
strange language all I know
Is there is not a word of fear.
Walter
Savage Landor
You enter
first through the great gates in cast iron from the Grand
Duke’s foundry in Pistoia, next through the Egyptian columned
arch with closed lotus capitals symbolizing death, coming to
the avenues flanked by papyri and roses, given by Dr Vieri
Torrigiani Malaspina. Then on your left is Sector A. This
chapter will take you along three paths describing the tombs
you see there, giving their inscriptions and telling their
stories. This is a world before the discovery of
penicillin and other antibiotics, before the world of
successful surgery in sterile conditions, before
vaccinations for smallpox, diphtheria, whooping cough,
measles, before the draining of the Italian marshes against
mosquito-born malaria.
Sector A
Click to enlarge maps
Our third tomb on our left hand side is for Robinia Wilson,
the Scottish Protestant wife of a noble Catholic Cavalcanti.
He laments her death of cholera.
ALLA CONSORTE DOLCISSIMA ROBINA DI ANDREA E DI RACHELE
WILSON D'EDIMBURGO DONNA DI RARO INTELLETTO DI SINGOLARE
GRAVITA' DI COSTUME CHE PER ANNI XV TENNE CON PRUDENZA
AMMIRABILE IL GOVERNO DELLA FAMIGLIA, IL MARITO LEOPOLDO
CATTANI CAVALCANTI CUI FU DELIZIA E SOSTEGNO A TESTIMONIO
DEL SUO PERPETUO DOLORE, QUESTO MONUMENTO ERIGEVA,
DESOLATISSIMO DI NON POTERE COME LE ANIME IN VITA
CONGIUNGERE IN MORTE LE CENERE VISSE ANNI XLI M VII G XVIII
REPENTINAMENTE MANCO IL XXVII GIORNO DI LUGLIO NELLA
INVASIONE COLERICA DEL MDCCCLV/ AVE ANIMA INCOMPARABILE, LA
TUA MEMORIA SARA SEMPRE IN BENEDIZIONE FRA QUANTI AMARONO LE
TUE VIRTU// TO HIS MOST BELOVED WIFE ROBINA DAUGHTER OF THE
LATE ANDREW AND RACHEL WILSON OF EDINBURGH. A WOMAN OF RARE
INTELLECTUAL GIFTS AND SPOTLESS PURITY OF CONDUCT WHO FOR
FIFTEEN YEARS ADMIRABLY FULFILLED THE DUTIES OF HER MARRIED
LIFE, HER HUSBAND LEOPOLD CATTANI CAVALCANTI, TO WHOM SHE
WAS ALIKE SOLACE AND SUPPORT, AS A TESTIMONY OF HIS
PERPETUAL REGRET HAS RAISED THIS MONUMENT DEEPLY SORROWFUL
THAT WHILE THEIR SOULS IN LIFE WERE UNDIVIDED, THEIR ASHES
IN DEATH MAY NOT REST TOGETHER. SHE LIVED XLI YEARS VII
MONTHS XVIII DAYS AND WAS SUDDENLY CUT OFF DURING THE
CHOLERA EPIDEMIC IN MDCCCLV. HAIL MATCHLESS SOUL, THY MEMORY
WILL BE EVER BLESSED AMONGST THOSE WHO LOVED THY VIRTUES/
Married
like Elizabeth Barrett Browning for fifteen years, she has
died in Montecatini in the 1855 cholera epidemic. (John
Snow, 1813–1858, found a link between cholera and
contaminated drinking water in London in 1854.)The
1866 Mediterranean cholera epidemic will also affect this
cemetery. As with Elizabeth Barrett Browning's tomb,
this grave was first elsewhere in Sector E or F), then the
body moved for a more conspicuous place for its present
grand monument, which Pietro Bazzanti
copies from the base of the tomb of the Cardinal of Portugal
by Antonio Rossellino in San Miniato, both having marvellous
lions' claws.
A5/ CATHERINE JANE (PENFOLD)
BARONCELLI/ ENGLAND
ON THE FOURTEENTH OF NOVEMBER/ 1860/ THROUGH A VIOLENT
DISEASE/ AND AT SIXTY YEARS OF AGE/ DIED/ CATHERINE
JANE/ DAUGHTER OF THE REVEREND PENFOLD/ OF STEYNING
SUSSEX/ WIFE OF JOHN BARONCELLI/ BLEST BY POSSESSION
OF HER WITH HAPPINESS/ FOR THE SPACE OF YEARS XXX/ A
WOMAN OF REFINED EDUCATION/ AFFABLE, INDULGENT,
CHARITABLE/ HER DESOLATE CONSORT/ IN ALLEVIATION OF
HIS UNREMITTING GRIEF/ THIS HUMBLE MONUMENT/ ERECTED//
NEL GIORNO XIIII NOVEMBRE/ MDCCCLX/ PER CAGIONE DE UN
VIOLENTE MORBO/ MORI DI ANNI LX/ CATERINA GIOVANNA/
FIGLIA DEL REVERENDO GIOVANNI PENFOLD/ DI STEYNING
SUSSEX/ MOGLIE A GIOVANNI BARONCELLI/ RESO DA LEI
FELICE/ PER LO SPAZIO DI ANNI XXX/ DONNA DI SQUISITA
DEVOZIONE/ AFFABILE TOLLERANTE CARITEVOLE/ IL DESOLATO
CONSORTE/ A SFOGO DE PERENNI DOLORE/ QUESTO UMILE
MONUMENTO/ LE POSE/
Five years later another foreign wife,
Catherine Jane Penfold Baroncelli, this time English and
from Sussex, married likewise to an Italian husband, this
time for thirty years, dies of a violent disease, again
likely cholera.Her
brother, Dr Christopher Rawson Penfold, a medical doctor and
vintner, successfully emigrated with his wife and daughter
to Australia.
Along the edge we come to three tombs for
doctors:
A48/ SIR DAVID DUMBRECK/ SCOTLAND
Sir David
Dumbreck
Commander of the Order of
Bath Crimea medal
with 4
clasps
Turkish
medal, Crimea
Order
of the Medjidie
SIR DAVID DUMBRECK K.C.B./ BORN IN
ABERDEENSHIRE 1805/ INSPECTOR GENERAL OF ARMY HOSPITALS
AND/ HONORARY PHYSICIAN TO THE QUEEN SERVED WITH/
DISTINCTION IN THE CRIMEA WAS PRESENT AT THE BATTLES OF
ALMA BALACLAVA INKERMANN AND THE SEIGE OF SEBASTOPOL, FOR
WHICH HE/ RECEIVED THE CRIMEA MEDAL WITH 4 CLASSES/ THE
TURKISH MEDAL AND THE KNIGHTHOOD OF/ THE ORDER OF THE MEDJIDIE/
HE DEPARTED THIS LIFE AT FLORENCE JAN 24 1876/ /
UNIVERSALLY REGRETTED/ THIS MONUMENT HAS BEEN ERECTED TO/
HIS MEMORY BY HIS SORROWING WIDOW/ BLESSED ARE THE DEAD
WHICH DIE IN THE LORD/ REV. XIV.15/
NDNB/Wikipedia entries: Prior to the
breaking out of the Crimean War he was dispatched on a
special mission early in 1854 to the expected seat of war,
and traversed on his mission Serbia, Bulgaria, and part of Roumelia, crossing the Balkans
on his route. He was subsequently for a short time principal
medical officer with the army, and served with it in the
field as senior deputy inspector-general, and was present in
this capacity and attached to headquarters at the time of
the affair of Bulganac, the Alma, capture of Balaklava,
battles of Balaklava and Inkerman, and siege of Sebastopol.
His rewards were a medal with four clasps, the fourth class
of the Medjidie, and the Turkish medal. He was gazetted C.B.
on 4 February 1856, became K.C.B. on 20 May 1871, and was
named honorary physician to the Queen on 21 November 1865.
On 19 July 1859 he was promoted to be an inspector-general
of the medical department in Cape Town, and on 1 May in the
following year was placed on half-pay and received a special
pension for distinguished services. He had married, on 27
February 1844, Elizabeth Campbell, only daughter of George
Gibson of Leith. He died at 34 Via Montebello, Florence, on
24 January 1876, and his will was proved on 21 March under
£12,000. His widow has lent his medals from the Crimea to
the sculptor for his tomb and they are replicated exactly,
only in white marble, not colour. These photographs come
from his descendant, Robin Dumbreck. Sir David and Florence
Nightingale would have known each other.
A47/ DOTT. BARTOLOMEO ODICINI/ ITALIA/URUGUAY
Dr Odicini and his children,
Uruguay
Bartolomeo
Odicini
This doctor, born in Genova, treated
Anita Garibaldi and her starving children in
Montevideo, Uruguay, and, later, Garibaldi himself
after the Battle of Aspramonte. It is interesting that
the two doctors, Sir David Dumbreck and Bartolomeo
Odicini, are buried side by side.
A43/ VICOMTE HENRI DE LA
BELINAYE/ FRANCE/ENGLAND
ICI REPOSE LE VICOMTE HENRI DE LA
BELINAYE/ FILS DU MARQUIS DE LA BELINAYE/ NE A LONDRES
LE 19 NOV 1799/ DECEDE A FLORENCE LE 9 IANVIER 1873/
REQUIESCAT IN PACE// A LA MEMOIRE/ DE MON
EXCELLENT EPOUX BIEN-AIME/ DANS L'ESPOIRE/ DE NOTRE
REUNION ETERNELLE/-/ VENEZ A MOI/ VOUS TOUS QUI ETES
FATIGUES ET CHARGES/ ET JE VOUS SOULAGERAI/ MATTH.
XI.28/
He was born, 19 November
1799, the younger son and third of four children of
the Marquis Armand Marie de la Belinaye (d. 1836) by
his wife Marie Louise Julia (1771-1859), Breton
aristocrats who emigrated at the time of French
Revolution. His parents were married in a Roman
Catholic chapel in London and later re-married in a
civil service in Paris, 15 August 1821. He and his older brother
Armand were educated in part at the French Academy,
Penn, near Beaconsfield, Bucks. He qualified as a
surgeon, had a Harley Street practice from 1823 to
1842, and served as physician to the French,
Austrian, and Russian Embassies, as Physician
Extraordinaire to the Duchess of Kent, and as
surgeon to an Italian troupe of opera singers which
included Giulia Grisi. During this time he dropped
his title, resuming it after 1842 when he closed his
medical practice, for instance, in October 1836 he
received a ticket of admission to the British Museum
Reading Room as "Henry Belinaye, Esq." He lived at
17 George Street, Hanover Square; later in Fulham;
married before 1840; was widowed before May 1847,
when he married Sarah Maunch. By the first marriage
he had at least one daughter, Evelina Anne, who in
1858 married Thomas Lance. At some point Belinaye
moved to Florence, Italy, where he died on 10
January 1873.http://www.victorianresearch.org/Obscure_contributors.html#belinaye
There is a 4/1851 mortgage of Northlands to him by
Charles Crosbie, who is also buried in this Sector (A20).
Below Sector A's wall lie another row of tombs, of
which three interest us, one
because of a death by drowning, another of a
doctor, the third of a patient of the
Gottingen-trained Scots Dr Wilson.
Click to enlarge
AB3/ HENRY HOWELL/ ENGLAND
IN MEMORY OF/
HENRY HOWELL/ OF BIRMINGHAM ENGLAND/ WHO WAS
DROWNED AT/ SAN VINCENZO TUSCANY/ 30 MAY 1876/
AGED 52 YEARS
He was
perhaps a Birmingham
silversmith, the Web giving the hall mark for
Jonathan Howell of this firm in 1895. His tomb
tells us he drowned at San Vincenzo, near
Livorno, in Tuscany.
AB5/
CORNELIA (AMORY GODDARD)
LORING/ AMERICA
Harvard,
General Charles Greeley Loring
Jr, Cornelia Loring's stepson
CORNELIA/
AMORY/
GODDARD/ LORING/ OF BOSTON/ MASSACHUSETTS/ BORN
SEPT 27 1810/ DIED MAY 15 1875/
From Boston Brahmin families in America we have
further information that she shared Doctors Gresanowsky
and Wilson
with Elizabeth Barrett Browning. See ebbdeath.html, also A109.
Lilian Whiting in Kate Field adding 'Dr.
Gresanowsky was a Prussian who, for political
reasons, had left his country and domiciled
himself in Florence, where he became one of the
habitues of Casa Guidi. Mrs. Browning frequently
had long talks with him as they both sat on Isa
Blagden's terrace on Bellosguardo, and to Kate
and her mother this liberal and cultivated
Prussian became a valued friend'.) Nicholas
Loring Hadden transcribed the archival letters
preserved by his great great grandfather, her
stepson, the Civil War General, Charles Greeley
Loring Jr, who was also Curator of the Boston
Museum of Fine Arts. He explains that Cornelia's
first husband died in a carriage accident,
leaving her to raise their son George Goddard,
and that she married secondly State Senator and
Harvard Overseer Charles Greeley Loring,
acquiring two stepchildren, the second of whom
became the wife of Asa Gray of Gray's Anatomy.
Amy Lowell was at Cornelia's side during her
illness, and was supported by their cousin Mrs
Greenough, married to the sculptor. Amy Lowell's
letters describe their earlier visit together to
the 'English' Cemetery in Florence, Cornelia
expressing the wish to be buried there and her
persuasion of Louisa
King's sisters not to have Louisa's body
shipped home. Amy recounts the medical visits of
Doctors
Gresanowsky and Wilson (Wilson spoken of
here as the ablest physician in Florence) and
their careful treatment of the patient, their
conclusion that it is a latent cancer, the
laying out of her body dressed in a simple black
silk dress with white lace collar and cuffs, her
hair braided (this is still the Florentine
custom), it being placed in a fine wooden
coffin, with a plate on it giving her name, then
cased in lead and sealed with the seal of
Florence, and last its burial with both Rev
Connolly and the American Episcopalian Rev Mills
officiating in white robes. (Rev Pierce Connolly
is buried in the Allori Cemetery, he was the
plaintiff in a suit that reached the House of
Lords to have his wife back after he became a
Roman Catholic priest and she founded the Order
of the Holy Child, a suit which he lost).
Variously present at the two funeral services
were Mrs Huntington, Mr and Mrs Lothrop, the
Alexanders (for their son's tomb, see AB28), Mr
and Mrs Perkins, Dr Gresanowsky, Mr and Mrs
Richard Saltonstall Greenough, Miss Horner, Mr
and Mrs Sullivan, and Mrs Erving and Miss
Briggs, the last two Louisa King (AB10)'s
sisters. Amy Lowell describes the beauty of the
Cemetery, its profusion of roses and the many
famous people buried there, including a child of
James Lowell (we have no record of this burial),
Mrs HORNER, MrsBROWNING (B8),
THEODORE PARKER (D108),
CLOUGH (F8),
many others. The General set sail from Boston
for England on hearing by telegramme of his
stepmother's illness, too late he telegrammed
instructions she be embalmed, which was not
possible. She was 65, he 47. The tombstone is
very beautiful in art nouveau style and sans
serif lettering.
AB6/
DOKTOR AUGUSTUS KIRCH/ GERMANIA
HIER
RUIT IN GOTT/ D. AUG. KIRCH
His descendants visited
the tomb of this German doctor and paid for
its cleaning.
We now return to the central
path to note the tombs on our right of
F8/ ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH/ AMERICA/ENGLAND
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH/ SOMETIME FELLOVV/ OF
ORIEL COLLEGE OXFORD/ DIED AT FLORENCE/
NOVEMBER 13 MDCCCLXI/ AGED 42/ THE LAST
FAREVVELL OF/ HIS SORROVVING VVIFE AND
SISTER
who dies in Florence of
complications from Malaria and also, it is
said, from Florence Nightingale, his relative
by marriage, overworking him.
and on our left visible from the path towards
the Duomo,
A109/
JEAN ELIZABETH
(WOOD) WILSON/ SCOTLAND
TO THE MEMORY OF
JEAN ELIZABETH WILSON/ WIFE OF
WILLIAM WILSON/ AND DAUGHTER OF
ALEXANDER/ LORD WOOD OF
EDINBURGH/ DIED MAY 1874
Jeffrey
Begeal notes that the James
Lorimer Graham (E12)
papers at Houghton Library
include the funeral notice to
take place 'Dr Wilson begs to
invite his friends to be
present at the Funeral of his
wife, Jeannette Wilson, which
will take place at the
Cemetery Porta Pinti on
Tuesday evening the 19 inst.
at half past four o'clock, May
18, 1874', and his own note of
sending a cross of white
flowers to cover the
coffin. Webbs have
further materials on the
baptisms of their six
children. This would be the Dr
Wilson who attends Elizabeth
Barrett Browning (B8)
and Cornelia Amory Goddard
Loring (AB5). The 1874
List of the Royal College of
Physicians of London lists Dr
William Wilson, of Florence,
Italy, as an M.D. of Gottingen
University on its page 24: 'William
Wilson, M.D. Gott., Florence,
Italy'.
A29/
WALTER
SAVAGE LANDOR/ ENGLAND
IN MEMORY OF/
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR/ BORN
30th OF JANUARY 1775/ DIED
17th OF SEPTEMBER 1864/ AND
THOU HIS FLORENCE TO THY
TRUST/ RECEIVE AND KEEP/ KEEP
SAFE HIS DEDICATED DUST/ HIS
SACRED SLEEP/ SO SHALL THY
LOVERS COME FROM FAR/ MIX WITH
THY NAME/ MORNING STAR WITH
EVENING STAR/ HIS FAULTLESS
FAME/ A.G. SWINBURNE/
In
Sector B,
Cliccare le piante per aggrandirle
B82/ SIR THOMAS SEVESTRE/ ENGLAND
SACRED TO THE MEMORY/ OF/ SIR
THOMAS SE . . .
BART/
WHO . . .
/ . . .
Knight of the Portuguese Order of the Tower and the
Sword for his
participation
as surgeon on
the H.M.S.
'Confiance' at
the capture
of
Cayenne. He
and Raffles
visit Napoleon
on St Helena.
Thomas
Adolphus
Trollope, What
I Remember,
II.146-147,
describes Sir
Thomas
Sevestre, as
an old India
Army surgeon
called on at
the Baths of
Lucca to
attend a dying
duellist.
B85/
THEODOSIA
(GARROW) TROLLOPE/ ENGLAND
Villino Trollope, Thomas,
Fanny,
The day 13
April 1865/
died in this
house/
Theodosia
Garrovv-Trollope/
Bice,
Theodosia
who
wrote in
English with
an Italian
spirit/ of the
struggle and
the triumph of
Liberty
THEODOSIAE
TROLLOPE/
T. ADOLFI TROLLOPE
CONIUGIS/ QUOD MORTALE
FUIT/ HIC IACET/ OBITUM
EIUS FLEVERUNT OMNES/
QUANTUM AUTEM FIERI
MERUIT/ VIR EUGUI
SCRIPTORES/ SCIT SOLUS/
JOSEFE GARROW ARMr
FILIA/ APUD TORQEY IN
AGRORUM DEVON ANGLORUM
NATA/ FLORENTIAE NOMEN
AGENS LUSTRUM/ AD PLURES
DIVINAE . . ./ MENSES
APRILES A.D. 1865
When
an invalid child
in Torquay, she
had known
Elizabeth Barrett,
likewise a young
invalid, both with
tuberculosis.
Meanwhile her
mother-in-law, FRANCES
TROLLOPE,
had also to deal
with rampant
tuberculosis in
her family,
burying many
members in
Belgium. Pastore
Luigi Santini on
Theodosia: 'She
arrived in
Florence in 1845
with her father [B108/ JOSEPH
GARROW,
who is buried near
her tomb],
an able violinist,
and her mother,
who became
friendly with
their neighbours,
the Trollopes, as
a result of a
visit by their
mutual friend
Charles Dickens.
She married Thomas
Adolphus Trollope
and moved to the
Piazza Barbano in
1848. She was a
talented writer
with a wonderful
mastery of Italian
and translated
works by Giusti
and G.B. Nicolini.
A fanatic
supporter of the
cause of Italian
independence, she
published a
history of the
Tuscan Revolution
in the Athenaeum'.
Thomas
Adolphus
Trollope, What I
Remember,
II.150-159, 166-168,
& Chapter XVIII,
describes her as
Florence's new
Corinne; pp. 171-173.
Theodosia (T.
Garrow on the title
page) made a
translation of
Giovanni Batista
Niccolini’s, Arnold
of Brescia, a
tragedy,
and this was published
in London in 1846, also
wrote History of
the Tuscan
Revolution. Elizabeth
Shinner (C71),
her
maid, is mentioned in
Harriet Fisher’s will,
made on 10 July
1846. She wrote:
‘To Eliz.th.
Shinner maid servant
the sum of 30£ my gold
watch and whatever
wearing apparel my
sister Theodosia
Garrow may not wish to
retain’. This
half-sister, C77/ HARRIET
THEODOSIA FISHER
(GARROW), is buried
with C71/
ELIZABETH
SHINNER,
their maid,
in Sector C. We
witness amongst many
of these tombs the
great affection and
respect their masters
and mistresses paid to
servants under their
roof: CHARLES
CROSBIE, A20toMARY
DUVALL, A80; the
friends of the
lateWILLIAM
READER,
A23toHENRY
AUSTIN,E34;
FRANCES
(MILTON)
TROLLOPE, B80, THEODOSIA
(GARROW) TROLLOPE,
B85,andHARRIET
THEODOSIA FISHER
(GARROW), C77,
toELIZABETH
SHINNER,
C71;ISABELLA
BOUILLON LANZONI,
D29,
toANNA
ROFFY,
C61;SIR
WILLIAM HENRY SEWELL, E58,
toJAMES
BANSFIELD,E59;
Prince
Demidoff to GEORGE
FREDERIC WAIHINGER,
E64;
Rosina
Buonarotti Simoni toMARY
ANNE SALISBURY,F2.
B42/ISABELLA
BLAGDEN (in
this sector B),
cares first for
motherless Pen
Browning, then for
Bice Trollope on the
deaths of their
mothers from
tuberculosis. NDNB
entries for Theodosia
Trollope, James
Archibald
Stuart-Wortley, whose
grandson married first
Theodosia's daughter,
Bice, then Millais'
daughter, Caroline. See
Garrow, Trollope,
Shinner, Fisher
entries and the
Villino Trollope
photograph below, on
which is placed this
plaque. Thomas
Adolphus Trollope
composes the Latin on
his mother's tomb, B80/FRANCES
(MILTON) TROLLOPE,
on his
wife's father's, B108/ JOSEPH
GARROW,and
on his wife's, B85/THEODOSIA
(GARROW) TROLLOPE.
B102A/ GEORGIANA
CLEMENTINA
(TULK) SLOPER/
ENGLAND/
B102BC/ELOIS
ALICE ENRICA AUGUSTA COTTRELL/ ENGLAND/CHARLES LEWIS COTTRELL/ ITALY/ENGLAND/
TO THE MEMORY OF/
GEORGIANA CLEMENTINA/
WIFE OF THE REV JOHN
SLOPER OF WESTY/ WOODHAYHOUSEIN THE COUNTYOF BERKSHIRE/
DIED AT FLORENCE APRIL 2
1854/ IN THE 40 YEAR OF
HER AGE THIS
MONUMENT IS / ERECTED BY
HER ONLY SURVIVING
PARENT/ IN TOKEN OF MOST
AFFECTIONATE. . .
TRUSTING TO BE .
. ./ MERITS OF THAT
SAVIOUR IN . . .
/ PRESENCE SHE
NOW . . . EVER . .
. / - / THIS
MORTAL MUST PUT ON
IMMORTALITY/ ALSO SACRED TO
THE MEMORY OF THE TWO
INFANT/ CHILDREN OF
HENRY COUNT COTTRELL AND
SOPHIA AUGUSTA HIS WIFE/
ELOIS ALICE ENRICA
AUGUSTA DIED NOVEMBER 8
1849 AGED 16 MONTHS/ THE
YOUNGER CARLO LUDOVICO
DIED JUNE 18 1850 AGED
25 DAYS/ OF SUCH IS THE
KINGDOM OF HEAVEN/ 537
ALSO
SACRED
TO THE MEMORY OF
THE TWO INFANT/
CHILDREN OF
HENRY COUNT
COTTRELL AND
SOPHIA AUGUSTA
HIS WIFE/ ELOIS
ALICE ENRICA
AUGUSTA DIED
NOVEMBER 8 1849
AGED 16 MONTHS/
THE YOUNGER
CARLO LUDOVICO
DIED JUNE 18
1850 AGED 25
DAYS/ OF SUCH IS
THE KINGDOM OF
HEAVEN
JL Maquay, Diaries, note
Cottrells cared for the
dying tubercular Sloper,
Webbs, that she is
sister to Sophia Augusta
(Tulk) Cottrell,
daughter to Eleanor
Augusta Tulk. The two
Cottrell children (about
whom Elizabeth Barrett
Browning was so upset),
are named on her
tombstone and likely
buried with her. Count
Cottrell himself
baptized Carlo Ludovico
when he was dying but
Rev Moloney told him
this was invalid,
writing the entry only
in pencil.
Now
we go down the
path at right
angles towards
Florence's
domed
cathedral and
see the tomb
of ELIZABETH
BARRETT BROWNING's childhood friend from when they were both
convelescing
from
tuberculosis
in Torquay,
Devon, by the
sea, their
doctor
objecting to
their intense
writing
activities and
carrying their
inkwells out
of their
rooms, it
being thought
women's brains
were weaked by
intellectual
endeavours.
In
this
Sector B are
further
medical
doctors:
B35/
JOHN
NESBIT MAXWELL/
IRELAND
SACRED/
TO THE MEMORY OF/ JOHN
NESBIT MAXWELL ESQ M.D./
A.M. TRINITY COLLEGE
DUBLIN/ AND/ . . . IRELAND/HE WAS THE
YOUNGEST SON AND LAST
SURVIVING MEMBER OF THE/
FAMILY OF THE LATE
ROBERT MAXWELL/ HE DIED
AT FLORENCE ON THE 14TH
DAY OF FEBRUARY 1874/ IN
THE 67TH YEAR OF HIS
AGE/SUSANNA
(FULLERTON) MAXWELL/ IRELAND/
ALSO HIS WIFE SUSANNAH
FULLERTON MAXWELL/ WHO
DIED THE 19TH OCTOBER
1876/ AGED 68/ FEAR NOT
I WILL NEVER LEAVE THEE
NOR/ FORSAKE THEE/
HEBREWS
Marriage
notice: 'October
23, in St. Peter's
Church, Dublin, by
the Rev. Launcelot
Dowdall, Rector of
Rathfarnham, JOHN
NESBITT MAXWELL,
ESQ,., only
surviving son of the
late ROBERT MAXWELL,
ESQ., barrister at
law, formerly of
Summerhill, Dublin,
and Clonleigh,
county Donegal, to
SUSANNAH HAMILTON,
third surviving
daughter of the late
GEORGE ALEXANDER
FULLERTON, ESQ., of
Tolkington,
Gloucestershire, and
Ballintoy Castle,
count Antrim'. There
were no children to
succeed him?
B65/ EDWARD
PORTEUS/ ENGLAND
SACRED
TO THE MEMORY OF/
EDWARD PORTEUS ESQRE
DEPUTY INSPECTOR
GENERAL OF ARMY
HOSITALS IN H.B.
MAJESTY'S SERVICE/
NEPHEW TO THE LATE
RIGHT REVD RECTOR
BEILBY PORTEUS/ LATE
BISHOP OF LONDON
DEPARTED THIS
LIFE AT
FLORENCE/ ON THE 12
SEPT 1845 AGED 68
YEARS/ THIS MONUMENT
TO THE MEMORY OF AN
AFFECTIONATE HUSBAND
A GOOD FATHER AND AN
ABLE FRIEND/ IS
ERECTED BY HIS
DISCONSOLATE WIDOW
DOMENICA AND
SURVIVING ONLY SON
GEORGE/P.BAZZANTI.F
This
Waterloo
participant's
uncle Bishop of
London Beilby
Porteous, of
Scottish ancestry,
was from Virginia,
an Anglican divine
deeply opposed to
slavery: Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beilby_Porteus.
Edward Porteous
has married an
Italian wife and
has only one
surviving son. The
tomb was badly
vandalized but is
now well restored
and cleaned by
Daniel-Claudiu
Dumitrescu and
Nicolai Ovrei.
B94A/
ADELAIDE
DELISSER/ ENGLAND/
B94B/
DR ALEXANDER
DELISSER/ JAMAICA/ENGLAND/ B94C/ ELLIS WILLIAM
DELISSER/ ENGLAND
/ SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF/ ADELAIDE DELISSER/ WHO DIED
JULY 18 1845/
AGED 13 YEARS//SACRED
TO THE MEMORY
OF/ DR
DELISSER/ DIED
AT FLORENCE
MAY THE 4 1844
AGED 48
YEARS//SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF/ ELLIS WILLIAM DELISSER/ WHO
DIED JULY 14
1845 AGED 19
YEARS//
. .
. ZZANTI.F.
JLMaquay,
Diaries 8/5/1844
'letter from
P last night.
Delisser died
suddenly in his
carriage on
Saturday night' On
the Web we find 'Alexander
Delisser was a
surgeon in
London from
about 1820s to
about 1836.
Married Deborah
Crawford in
London in 1823.
[His widow, now
named Dora
Delisser, dies
12/5/1867 in
Marylebone of
bronchitis and
enlarged heart.]
They had 9
children all
baptised in
London between
1824 and 1835. .
. There is a
strong
connection to
Jamaica as he
seems to have
studied medicine
under a Dr
Morales there.
Dr Morales
married twice,
both to Delisser
women. There are
lots of
Delissers in
Jamaican
records, they
were mostly
Jewish families.
. . Alexander
had been
declared
bankrupt around
1825 just after
his marriage. He
seemed to be
complying with
court requests
so not sure if
that was a
reason for him
to take off to
Florence'.
Australian
descendants
pieced together
their story. The
mother had
already buried
their surgeon
father in
Florence where
he had died.
Later the very
promising
19-year-old son,
subject to
headaches, also
dies and there
is an inquest,
his 13-year-old
sister falling
from a window
[suiciding'] the
same day. The
mother sends the
bodies from
their home in
Marylebone (a
Jamaican haunt
in London, as
with the Barrett
Moulton
Barretts) to lie
with their
father's remains
and she also
leaves a space
for her own
grave which she
does not
subsequently
use. One
wonders, would ELIZABETH
BARRETT
BROWNING,
their neighbour,
have known their
story? Elizabeth
herself almost
died of grief
and tuberculosis
at her brother's
death by
drowning. Morning
Post: A
lone daughter
survives, Agnes
Isabella
Elizabeth,
formerly of
Woburn-place,
Russell Square
and late of
Florence,
marrying at St
Mary's
Cheltenham,
12/2/1850. Iris
Fromm, Master
Mason from
Bavaria,
repaired this
tomb,
Daniel-Claudiu
Dumitrescu also
restored and
cleaned it.
B129/ JOSEPH ANTHONY POUGET/ ENGLAND/ INDIA
THIS
STONE
IS ERECTED TO
THE SACRED
MEMORY OF/
JOSEPH ANTHONY
POUGET ESQ/
BORN ON .
. . OF JULY
. . . AT
KINGS ROAD
LONDON/ DIED
AT FLORENCE
. . . JULY
1833/ ERECTED
BY A GRIEVING
WIFE . .
. WHO KNEW
HIM . . .
FOR HIS .
. . MANNER
OF LIFE
This former
physician in
the service of
the East India
Company in
Bombay is
perhaps joined
later by his
widow, Maria
Celestini, she
having married
a second time
to an
Italian.
MARIA (PERKINS POUGET)
CELESTINI/ ENGLAND/INDIA?/ Widow of the former physician in the East
India Company in Bombay, who placed his tombstone, now the
wife of Signor Francesco Celestini of Florence. Rev Robbins (E101)/
Puget
[Pouget]/ Maria/ / Inghilterra/ Firenze/ 6 Marzo/ 1847/ / 356/
We find on the central path in
Sector B our most famous tombs:
B7B/HORATIA AUGUSTA
ROBLEY BORGHESI/ ENGLAND
ORAZIA AUGUSTA ROBLEY/ NATA IN ALDERSHOT IL V
OTTOBRE MDCCCL/ CARISSIMA DI BONTA' E DI
BELLEZZA/ IN FIORE D'INGEGNO ADORNA DI
LETTERE/ NELLA MUSICA E NEL DISEGNO AMMIRATA/
DELIZIA DEGLI AMICI BENEDIZIONE DEI POVERI/
TOCCA APPENA AL XXIV ANNO/ DOPO SOLI XXI MESI
DI MATRIMONIO/ FU RAPITA/ AL COLONELLO FILIPPO
BORGHESI/ INCONSOLABILE/ QUI SICCOME BRAMASTI/
O MIA DOLCISSIMA SPOSA/ T'HO POSTO ACCANTO A
TUA MADRE/ E QUI VERRO SEMPRE A RICERCATI E
QUI ADDURRO LA FIGLIUOLINA NOSTRA AD ISPIRARSI
PREGANDO ALL'ETERNO/ IN LEI VEDERTI RIVIVERE/
1026 - 1244
See Robley:
http://www.robley.org.uk/graves.html.
B7A/ AUGUSTA
JANE (PENFOLD) ROBLEY's
daughter dies in Aquila in 1874 ten
years after her mother's death
following marrying into the Italian
Borghesi family and her husband buries
her here after only 21 months of
marriage (she has died following
childbirth of their surviving baby
daughter?) Filippo Borghesi had
volunteered to the University
Battalion, first of the Italian army
and then of the Republic, fighting for
the defense of Rome. When the French
restored Papal rule he emigrated, but
returned in July 1859, joining
Garibaldi in Sicily in 1860. In 1866
he held the command of the 26th
Regiment. He eventually became Major
General, retiring from the Army in
1881. Given his military importance it
would have been difficult for anyone
to prevent the erection of the large
plain marble cross which blocks the
view of the Leighton tomb for
Elizabeth Barrett Browning next to it.
Next
we
come to B8/
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING/ JAMAICA/ENGLAND half way up
the path, our most famous tomb.
E.B.B./ OB.1861//FRANCESCO GIOVANNOZZI FECE
I
have written elsewhere on Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
especially in the notes to our edition for Penguin of
Aurora Leigh and Other Poems, but also in the essay on
her death and burial, ebbdeath.html
of which the following excerpt is relevant to this virtual
e-book on our tombs.
In her last letter, which breaks off
unfinished, Robert halting it, we witness exhaustion
(Kenyon, II.448-450).
In 1860, posing with her son Penini, she could still
smile.
The terrible last photographs taken in Rome show her
with emaciated deathhead, despite the crinoline and curls. In
1861, the year of her death, we see a prematurely aged Corinne
in front of a painted backdrop of Rome's Colosseum (Arabella II.533). She was
only fifty-five, though pretending to the even younger
forty-five, and having packed into those years the writing of
an epic poem longer than Homer's Odyssey, marriage, and a son. In May of that
year, Hans Christian Andersen visited them, commenting on how
ill Elizabeth looked (Arabella II.536). Her last poem,
'North and South', was about him, for the children played with
Robert his Pied Piper of Hamelyn, processing through
the rooms, and listened to Andersen's Ugly Duckling.
But between these two dates, 1860-1861, is also the
publication of her poem, 'A Musical
Instrument'. Robert felt Elizabeth's poetic gift had
ended, saying to her brother George in a letter written from
Asolo, 22 October, 1889, 'the publication of "Aurora Leigh"
preceded by five years the death of its writer - who was never
likely to produce such another work', he being her literary
agent during their marriage and following her death. But one
of those last disparaged works was illustrated by Frederic
Leighton (who would design her tomb) for the Cornhill
Magazine and this poem, 'A Musical Instrument', is of
interest as a meta-poem, a statement about her poetic craft
and her marriage. It is also a poem in which Elizabeth takes
up a theme she has often used before, drawing on her classical
and Christian learning, on the 'Great God Pan'. Pan, we
recall, is that chimaera, part beast, part man,
related to centaurs, satyrs and fauns, EBB speaking of Flush
as 'Faunus', and echoing Milton on the death of the pagan Gods
in 'The
Morning of Christ's Nativity', both borrowing from
Plutarch's 'De oraculorum defectu', in her 'Great Pan is
Dead', and the Hawthornes noting that Robert is the Faun,
Donatello, of the Marble Faun. This is Frederic Lord
Leighton's fine illustration from the July 1860 Cornhill
Magazine:
And this is Elizabeth's poem, "A Musical Instrument"
that it illustrates:
What was he doing, the great god
Pan,
Down in the reeds
by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering
ban,
Splashing and paddling with
hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies
afloat
With the dragon-fly
on the river.
He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep
cool bed of the river:
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying
lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled
away,
Ere he brought it
out from the river.
High on the shore sat the great god Pan
While turbidly
flowed the river;
And hacked and hewed as a
great god can,
With his hard bleak steel at
the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of
the leaf indeed
To prove it fresh
from the river.
He cut it short, did the great god Pan,
(How tall it
stood in the river!)
Then drew the pith, like the
heart of man
Steadily from the outside
ring,
And notched the poor dry empty
thing
In holes, as he
sat by the river.
. . .
Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he
sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the
cost and pain, -
For the reed which grows
nevermore again
As a reed with
the reeds in the river.
The verse about cutting the reed evokes The
Runaway Slave at Pilgrim Point and the slashing at the
sugar cane by slaves with their machetes. Robert, at Bagni di
Lucca, would similarly swim in the river, at the time she had
shyly presented him her superlative love Sonnets -
which he immediately published, the best-selling Sonnets
from the Portuguese. ELIZABETHas a child
suffered agonies from tuberculosis of the spine for which the
Queen's doctor prescribed the opium laudanum. Her maid Lily
Wilson got her off it long enough for the successful pregnancy
with Pen, though she suffered multiple miscarriages at the
beginning of her marriage to Robert at the age of forty. In
the end, Lily Wilson dismissed from her service and Robert
administering the doses, she dies not of tuberculosis but from
the opiod, her two doctors, the Polish Gresssanowsky of the
indulging and enabling bedside manner, while Wilson was dead
set against the addiction, arguing about her treatment. Robert
blamed Wilson, but not Gressanowsky. We read in Kate Field's
letter of June 19, 1861, 'I cannot help perceiving
that DR. WILSON, who
was called in owing to the absence of GRESANOWSKY, and who is most forbidding
in physiognomy and is said by some to be a humbug, has
hastened Mrs. Browning's death by resorting to a violent
practice which her weak body was thoroughly incapable of
enduring. He began by frightening her, telling her what a
fearful state her entire system was in, - a fine way to
treat an imaginative person. Gresanowsky knew her
constitution, and it does seem most unfortunate that he
should have been absent. Since the medical murder of
Cavour, I have begun to distrust all doctors in Italy. . .
.'
Behind ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING's tomb, six years later,
will be that of
B9/FANNY WAUGH HUNT/ ENGLAND, sculpted
by her grieving Pre-Raphaelite artist husband.
WHEN
THOU PASSEST
THRO THE
WATERS I
WILL BE WITH THEE AND
THRO
THE FLOODS THEY
SHALL
NOT OVERFLOW THEE
IT IS I
BE NOT AFRAID
LOVE IS STRONG AS DEATH MANY WATERS CANNOT QUENCH LOVE NEITHER CAN THE FLOODS DROWN IT
// FANNY/ THE
WIFE OF/ W. HOLMAN HUNT/ DIED AT FLORENCE DEC 20 1866/ IN THE
FIRST YEAR OF HER MARRIAGE
A furher cholera epidemic forced the honeymooning
Holman Hunts to not proceed on to Jerusalem but instead to stay
in Florence. Thus, five years later than Elizabeth's burial
another grieving husband himself sculpted his wife's tomb up in
Fiesole to be beside that of Elizabeth. For FANNY
HOLMAN HUNT died in Florence. Their child who survived, CYRIL
BENONI
HUNT (Benoni, 'son of sorrow' being the name of the dying Rachel's
child in Genesis), was born at via Montebello, 22, baptised by
Rev Tottenham the day of his birth, who registered it two months
later, eight days after his mother's death. A silver
chalice and later a silver patten in their names eventually came
to St Mark's English Church
from the earlier Holy Trinity Church in Florence. Fanny has died
following childbirth, which happened to so many mothers buried
here, from the disbelief, even by RUDOLF
VIRCHOW in the statistically proved theories
carried out in practice of the use of washing hands following
autopsies in maternity clinics, that IGNAZ
SEMMELWEISS so carefully demonstrated. The
Hungarian doctor who taught medicine in Vienna and Budapest
was to die in an insane asylum of sepsis from being beaten by
attendants.
Beside these
two tombs is a third,
again from a
PreRaphaelite family,
the father come to
Florence because of
his asthma, the
daughter dying of
scarlet fever or
diphtheria. diseases
so common among the
children buried in
this cemetery, among
them the two Cottrell
babies, so many of
them being named,
whether boys or girls,
B10/ MARY SPENCER STANHOPE/ ENGLAND Grazia Santoni
IN MEMORY/ OF MARY/ SPENCER
STANHOPE/ BORN NOVR/ 9.1859. DIED/ FEBY 23.1867/ "THE LORD
IS/ MY SHEPHERD/ I SHALL NOT/ WANT. HE/ MAKETH ME/ TO LIE
DOWN/ IN GREEN PAS/TVRES. HE/ LEADETH ME/ BESIDE THE/ STILL
WATER"
John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (1829-1908),
another of the PreRaphaelite Brethren, came to live in Florence
because of his asthma, residing at Villa Nuti (Villino Strozzi)
at Bellosguardo with his wife and daughter, having visited the
city previously. Maquay's diary notes he fails to introduce
Frederic Leighton to him. The year following that in which the Spencer
Stanhopes had cared for the Hunts' now motherless child, Cyril
Benoni Hunt, they lost their own seven-year-old daughter, Mary
Spencer Stanhope, and the artist father likewise sculpted her
tomb. The same shape of her tomb recurs in his own tomb,
sculpted by himself, at the Allori, and in the plaques in the
churches commemorating him in Florence and in Yorkshire. He
helped build Holy Trinity, selling a Botticelli to pay for the
construction of its Gothic tower, and later frescoed the walls
and ceilings of St Mark's English
Church. He painted Mary, his daughter, as if she had lived
to be 17, not 7, as Psyche to his Charon, a work now owned by
Andrew Lloyd Webber. This is a pattern we also see with the
depictions in marble by Bazzanti as if 18, and by Solomon
Counis, as if 22 of JEAN DAVID MARC GONIN (C106) who had died at 15
years old. Nic Peeters and Judy Oberhausen gave a paper on this
family at our third City and Book international conference in
Florence, gimel.html and together we
visited Bellosguardo's Villa Nutti.Then we read Elizabeth
Barrett Browning's translation of Apuleius' 'Cupid and Psyche'
at the Cemetery's columned cross at the celebration for the
National Archeological Museum's Exhibition, 'Egyptian Motifs in
the English Cemetery', our Italian actress dressed as Stanhope's
Psyche, photograph above: http://piazzaledonatello.blogspot.it/2006_09_01_archive.html,
apuleius.html, egyptian.html, gimeld.html#peetersoberhausen,
Mediatheca 'Fioretta Mazzei holdings, TAU. Sector
C is at the top left-hand of the Cemetery.
Click
to enlarge
By the Cross to honour the King
of Prussia we find this obelisk honouring a
great doctor.
C3/
THOMAS SOUTHWOOD
SMITH/ ENGLAND
Harper's Monthly engraving
In Memory of
SOUTHWOOD SMITH, Physician/ who
through the promotion of
sanitary/ reform in the
principles of which he was/ the
first to discover and through
other/ philanthropic and
literary labours was/
distinguished as a benefactor of
Mankind/ Born at Martock,
Somersetshire, England/ Dec 21,
1788, Died at Florence/ Dec 10,
1861// + THEN SHALL THE
RIGHTEOUS SHINE FORTH AS THE SUN
IN THE KINGDOM/ OF THEIR FATHER/
MATTHEW XII v.43// [Below
Joel T. Hart's sculpted portrait
medallion] / Ages shall honor,
in their hearts enshrined, thee,
SOUTHWOOD SMITH, Physician of
Mankind/ Bringer of Air, Light,
Health into the home/ Of the
rich Poor of happier years to
come/ Leigh Hunt/
Pastore Luigi
Santini tells us that 'he was
a well-known
medical doctor who promoted public
health reforms and good works
supported by the Anglo-Florentine
community. His tombstone, sculpted
by John Hart, inscribed with
verses by Leigh Hunt (the terse
poet of early English
Romanticism), is near that of
Theodore Parker, many of whose
philosophic ideas he shared'. He was a Unitarian
minister and Edinburgh-trained
physician, head of the London
Fever Hospital, deeply concerned
about poor housing and its
connection with disease,
especially for children working in
mines and factories. He was
colleague to Jeremy Bentham,
enbalming him at his request, and
escorted Lord Normanby and Charles
Dickens through London's slums,
teaching them about poor housing
conditions and their connection to
ill health. Associated with
Leonard Horner, who was to have
been buried in the 'English'
Cemetery beside his wife, A15/
ANNE
SUSANNA (LLOYD) HORNER,
in Sector A, he had B80/FRANCES
(MILTON) TROLLOPE write Michael
Armstrong Factory Boy, and B8/ELIZABETH
BARRETT BROWNING write Cry of
the Children, both of whom
are buried in Sector B. He was
Octavia Hill's grandfather and
guardian, raising her.
She
continued his work,
introducing housing reform
in slums. When
we
have a Roma with tuberculosis we hold
alphabet school here beneath the Column
and Cross out in the open, rather than
in the Library. We find that Roma in
Romania are forced by their poverty to
live sometimes 12 to one room or 28 to
two rooms, with no windows and with
tuberculosis in the family, especially
amongst the children, which is now
becoming resistant to drugs. To install
windows would be cheaper and better than
to pay later for hospitals and
medicines.
The University of London's 'auto-icon'
of Jeremy Bentham, embalmed at his
request by Thomas Southwood Smith,
Bentham being the University's founder.
Sadly our next is to a tomb for a surgeon who suicided.
C99/
JAMES CRAIGIE, M.D./ SCOTLAND
JAMES
CRAIGIE
SURGEON/ BRIT. R.N./ BORN AT GLASGOW 1754/ DIED AT
FLORENCE 1833/ THIS
SMALL TRIBUTE TO HIS MEMORY/ MARKING THE PLACE OF HIS
INTERMENT/ IS ERECTED BY HIS BROTHER-IN-LAW STEWART MURRAY
BOT.GARD.
JLMaquay, Diaries
29/1/1833 'a Mr Craigie, English, shot himself last
evening.' His brother-in-law, who buries this Scottish,
not English, surgeon, laid out Glasgow's Botanical
Garden, the 'Bot.Gard' of the inscription. One wonder
whether Stewart Murray has married his sister or is his
wife's brother, more likely the former. It is an
imposing tomb, not a small one by any means. A later
James Craigie Murray will graduate from Glasgow
University.
C74/ 177/IVAN IVANOVICH IVANOV/ RUSSIA/
A young doctor (26 years old) at the
Imperial Russian court.
Our next Sector, D, to the right at the top of the Cemetery,
has this bereaved family:
Click
to enlarge
D24M/ D12A/1195/ ELISABETH (HARMAND) COUNIS/ SVIZZERA/
She is the wife of D13/
VICE PRESIDENTE
SALOMON GUILLAUME COUNIS. Their
daughter, D12B/ LOUISE LE COMTE COUNIS, is
also buried with them.
D24M/ D12B/ 379/
LOUISE LE COMTE COUNIS/ SVIZZERA/ F MATTEI Buried with them is their daughter, who is listed in
the Archives as having no profession. In actual fact,
Elisa/Louise was a gifted painter like her father, her
orphaned daughter Lisine being raised by her grandparents: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani
30 (1984); Wikipedia: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisa_Counis#Biografia.
D24M/ D13/ 657/ VICE PRESIDENTE SOLOMON GUILLAUME
COUNIS/ SVIZZERA/
A painter, he was also Vice-President
of the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church in Florence. His
widow was D12A/ ELISABETH (HARMAND)
COUNIS (d. 1873), his daughter, D12B/ LOUISE LE COMTE COUNIS (died
1847)
who are buried beside him. He paints the portrait of C106/
JEAN DAVID MARC
GONIN, the Cemetery's
first burial, who likely died of tuberculosis, as if he
were not just 15, but 22.
Self-potrait
Portrait, Jean David Marc Gonin
D72/ SIR JAMES ANNESLEY/ IRELAND
TO THE MEMORY/ OF/ SIR
JAMES ANNESLEY KT/ OF THE MEDICAL ESTABLISHMENT . . .
He publishes Researches into the
Causes, Nature and Treatment of the More Prevalent
Diseases of India, and of Warm Climates Generally,
1841 (609 pp), with a fine engraved portrait. The Notes
and Queries transcription records what was intact
100 years ago but of which most is now missing from the
remaining slab fragment. This
tomb needs to be repaired in the same manner that Daniel-Claudiu Dumitrescu
and Nicholae Ovrei under Alberto Casciani did with that
for B65/ EDWARD PORTEUS, building up the centre with bricks, then placing
the marble slab sides, and last the top. The piece that is
inscribed with FORT ST GEORGE,
LATE PRESIDENT OF THE MEDICAL BOARD AT MADRAS/ WHO DIED AT
FLORENCE/ THE 15 DECEMBER 1847 is now in the collection of inscribed marble slabs.
Many of the
children born to mothers who then died of childbed fever, survived, but not in this
case.
D52/ MARIA
MERCADANTI/
SVIZZERA
QUI RIPOSANO IN PACELE CENERI
DI MARIA MERCANDATI/ NATA TUN/ NATIVA DI REMIS
IN SVIZZERA/ IN ETA DI ANNI 23 DOTATA DI VIRTU/
OLTRE OGNI CREDERE/ CHE DOPO PENOSA/ E BREVE
MALATTIA/ PARTI DAI VIVENTI/ IL 29 GENNAIO 1832/
LASCIANDO DI SE MEMORIA/ IN FIGLIO DI GIORNI 15/
L'INCONSOLABILE CONSORTE/ BALDASSARE MERCADANTI/
ALLE SPOGLIE MORTALI/ QUEST'URNA POSE// PIANGE
IL BAMBINO LA MADRE/ ESPRIMAMENTE COSI/ PERDEI
QUEN BEN CHE SOLO/ SORGEVA I GIORNI MIEI/ PERDEI
MIA CARA MADRE/ L'ANIMA DEL MIO CUOR
She
has come from Thun in the Canton of Berne. She
has died following childbirth fifteen days
earlier, her baby, Gaudenzio following her the
next year. The Russian tomb (VARVARA ARSEN'EVNA
KUDRJAVCEVA NATA NELIDOVA, D80)
below theirs will have a poem inscribed on it by
the husband mourning his dead wife, speaking of
himself as 'orphaned' rather than 'widowed',
from the sight of this weeping child. The
restoration and cleaning of this badly
vandalized and broken open tomb was a major
undertaking by Daniel-Claudiu Dumitrescu.
D80/ 609/VARVARA ARSEN'EVNA
KUDRJAVCEVA NATA NELIDOVA/ RUSSIA/
The
widowed
Professor Kudrjacev laments the death of his
wife, speaking of himself as 'orphaned' in
reference to the sculpture on the tomb of
the dead Mercadanti mother and her orphaned
son MARIA MERCADANTI, D52, GAUDENZIO MERCADANTI, D50.
A scholar, he studied Dante.
D86/THOMAS P. JACKSON, M.D./ AMERICA
TO
THE MEMORY/ OF/ THOMAS P. JACKSON, M.D., OF BOSTON, UNITED
STATES, WHO DIED IN FLORENCE/ JUNE 25TH 1854, AGED 44
Beyond the information on his tomb we have little
information about him. It seems it was intended to have him
shipped to America, yet later we find a record of his burial
in Florence.
D87/ MAJOR ALEXANDER TOMKINS/ENGLAND
SACRED TO THE MEMORY
OF/ MAJOR ALEXANDER TOMKINS 77 HIGH/ YOUNGEST SON OF THE
LATE BORGOYNE TOMKINS/ PHYSICIAN AT THE TOWER OF LONDON/
DEPARTED THIS LIFE ON THE 2ND OF NOVEMBER 1852 AGED 52
YEARS/ 494
Major Alexander Tomkins was in the
77th Infantry. A descendant writes: 'Burgoyne Tomkins (c.
1761-1836), was a physician, not a mere surgeon as his
father had been. He took an MD at St Andrews and was a
Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and held the sinecure
post of Physician to the Tower of London garrison for over
50 years (Burgoyne's sons were officers in the Army and
the Royal Navy, one dying at Waterloo, while two of his
daughters married Army officers)'.
D136/ DR JOHN WILLIAMS/ ENGLAND
IOANNI WILLIAMS
LONDINENSI/ SANCTIS MORIBUS HUMANIS
LITTERIS/ NATURA ET PHILOSOPHIA
PRAETARO/ CUI AD MEDICAM ET
CHIRUGIAM/ MILIT BRITANNIC . . ./RELICTO
MEDICA / DOCTOR XXXV ANNOS PERITUM . .
. /. . . AL AD AMORE/ MORBIS RAPITOS/
HONESTA MISSIONI DONATVS FLORENTIAE/ VBI LENIRE COARCTATIONIS
MAGNORUM CORDIS VASORUM/ INCREMENTVM PASSVS/
DIEM OBIIT EXTREMVM/ XV FEBRVARI ANNO
MDCCCXXXX1 AET SVAE LVIII/ RESVRRECTIONEM
A.D.J. CHRISTO PROMISSAM EXPECTANS/ CONIVGI
DILECTISSIMO PAVLA VXOR CVM LACRYMIS
He is one of our Waterloo
participants. Has he instructed before his
death that his tombstone carry this lengthy
Latin inscription? His wife Paula carries out
his desire in tears.
Now on our right hand we come to Sector E.
Click to enlarge
E1/
LOUISA CATHERINE (ADAMS) KUHN/ UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Her husband was
from Philadelphia, her father, Charles Francis Adams, U.S.
Minister to Great Britain during the Civil War. In Florence
the couple lived in the palace in the Piazza Santa Maria
Maggiore, now the Banca Popolare di Milano. Notes and
Queries placed her tomb a hundred years ago as visible
in Sector E.
EI E' LOUISA
She is Henry
Adams' sister. Her death from tetanus in Bagni di Lucca is
described in the 'Chaos' chapter of his autobiography The
Education of Henry Adams:
He
had been some weeks in London when he received a telegram from
his brother-in-law at the Bagni di Lucca telling him that his
sister had been thrown from a cab and injured, and that he had
better come on. He started that night, and reached the Bagni
di Lucca on the second day. Tetanus had already set in.
The last lesson,—the sum and term of education,—began
then. He had passed through thirty years of rather varied
experience without having once felt the shell of custom
broken. He had never seen nature,—only her surface,—the
sugar-coating that she shows to youth. Flung suddenly in his
face, with the harsh brutality of chance, the terror of the
blow stayed by him thenceforth for life, until repetition made
it more than the will could struggle with; more than he could
call on himself to bear. He found his sister, a woman of
forty, as gay and brilliant in the terrors of lock-jaw as she
had been in the careless fun of 1859, lying in bed in
consequence of a miserable cab-accident that had bruised her
foot. Hour by hour the muscles grew rigid, while the mind
remained bright, until after ten days of fiendish torture she
died in convulsion.
One had heard and read a great deal about death, and
even seen a little of it, and knew by heart the thousand
commonplaces of religion and poetry which seemed to deaden
one’s senses and veil the horror. Society being immortal,
could put on immortality at will. Adams being mortal, felt
only the mortality. Death took features altogether new to him,
in these rich and sensuous surroundings. Nature enjoyed it,
played with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the
torture, and smothered her victim with caresses. Never had one
seen her so winning. The hot Italian summer brooded outside,
over the market-place and the picturesque peasants, and, in
the singular color of the Tuscan atmosphere, the hills and
vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting with mid-summer
blood. The sick-room itself glowed with the Italian joy of
life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the
soft shadows; even the dying woman shared the sense of the
Italian summer, the soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage,
the sensual fulness of Nature and man. She faced death, as
women mostly do, bravely and even gaily, racked slowly to
unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence, as a soldier
sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these hills
and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the
same air of sensual pleasure.
Impressions like these are not reasoned or catalogued in
the mind; they are felt as part of violent emotion; and the
mind that feels them is a different one from that which
reasons; it is thought of a different power and a different
person. The first serious consciousness of Nature’s
gesture,—her attitude towards life,—took form then as a
phantasm, a nightmare, an insanity of force. For the first
time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human
mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of
shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing,
wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created
and labored from eternity to perfect. Society became
fantastic, a vision of pantomime with a mechanical motion; and
its so-called thought merged in the mere sense of life, and
pleasure in the sense. The usual anodynes of social medicine
became evident artifice. Stoicism was perhaps the best;
religion was the most human; but the idea that any personal
deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman,
by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in
perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a
moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.
God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but He could
not be a Person.
With nerves strained for the first time beyond their
power of tension, he slowly travelled northwards with his
friends, and stopped for a few days at Ouchy to recover his
balance in a new world; for the fantastic mystery of
coincidences had made the world, which he thought real, mimic
and reproduce the distorted nightmare of his personal horror.
He did not yet know it, and he was twenty years in finding it
out; but he had need of all the beauty of the Lake below and
of the Alps above, to restore the finite to its place. For the
first time in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him
what it was,—a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces,—and
he needed days of repose to see it clothe itself again with
the illusions of his senses, the white purity of its snows,
the splendor of its light, and the infinity of its heavenly
peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful beyond
itself, and the Alps put on charms real as terrors; but man
became chaotic, and before the illusions of Nature were wholly
restored, the illusions of Europe suddenly vanished, leaving a
new world to learn.
On July 4, all Europe had been in peace; on July 14,
Europe was in full chaos of war. One felt helpless and
ignorant, but one might have been king or kaiser without
feeling stronger to deal with the chaos. Mr. Gladstone was as
much astounded as Adams; the Emperor Napoleon was nearly as
stupefied as either, and Bismarck: himself hardly knew how he
did it. As education, the outbreak of the war was wholly lost
on a man dealing with death hand-to-hand, who could not throw
it aside to look at it across the Rhine. Only when he got up
to Paris, he began to feel the approach of catastrophe.
Providence set up no affiches to announce the tragedy. Under
one’s eyes France cut herself adrift, and floated off, on an
unknown stream, towards a less known ocean. Standing on the
curb of the Boulevard, one could see as much as though one
stood by the side of the Emperor or in command of an army
corps. The effect was lurid. The public seemed to look on the
war, as it had looked on the wars of Louis XIV and Francis I,
as a branch of decorative art. The French, like true artists,
always regarded war as one of the fine arts. Louis XIV
practiced it; Napoleon I perfected it; and Napoleon III had
till then pursued it in the same spirit with singular success.
In Paris, in July, 1870, the war was brought out like an opera
of Meyerbeer. One felt one’s self a supernumerary hired to
fill the scene. Every evening at the theatre the comedy was
interrupted by order, and one stood up by order, to join in
singing the Marseillaise to order.
When Henry Adams'
wife, Clover Adams, committed suicide from drinking photographic
developing fluid, Henry had her magnificent tomb sculpted by
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, now conserved in the Smithsonian Museum,
alongside of sculptures by Hiram Powers, Edmonia Lewis and
William Wetmore Story:
SELINA / DI/
GIUSEPPE CHECCUCCI/ NACQUE A LONDRA/ NEL MARZO 1822//
14 APRILE 1850/ SELINA GARINEI/ VOLAVA AL CIELO /
[PER?] SEGUIRE FIGLIOLETTO/ LASCIANDO INCONSOLABILE/
ELVIRA E SALVADORE/ FIGLIA E CONSORTE// SELINA
CHECCUCCI/ NEL 7 DICEMBRE 1844/ NELLA CAPELLA DI
SPAGNA/ ST MARY LE BONE/ IMPALMAVA IL SUO DILETTO/
SALVADORE GARINEI/ INGEGNERE FIORENTINO
Checcucci descendants: She obtained a
license to marry Savaldore Garinei, an Engineer of
Florence, in London, 3 December 1844, the license
referring to both as parishioners of Marylebone where
the marriage would be solemnized, the parents being
Joseph Checchucci and E86/LYDIA (WILDMAN) CHECCUCCI, who had married at St George Hanover
Square, Westminster, London, 13 April 1809. Garinei
descendant has photograph of the child, Elvira
Garinei, who survived her mother's death, likely from
puerperal fever.
E22/CHARLES BANKHEAD, M.D./ ENGLAND
SACRED/ TO THE MEMORY
OF/ CHARLES BANKHEAD M.D./ WHO DIED AT FLORENCE 25 NOV
1859/ AGED 91/ THIS TABLET WAS ERECTED BY HIS SON/ CH.
BANKHEAD ESQRE
George IV's Physician Extraordinary, he
was the physician in attendance at Castlereagh's
suicide. The son who buries his father in Florence has
an entry in the NDNB.
E44/ CHARLOTTE MARIA (KEPPEL
BERRINGTON) BOWES-LYON, COUNTESS OF STRATHMORE
AND KINGHORN, BARONNESS GLAMIS/ ENGLAND/SCOTLAND/
SACRED TO THE MEMORY/ OF/ CHARLOTTE MARIA
COUNTESS OF STRATHMORE AND KINGHORN/ BORN DEC 29
1826 DIED AT VILLA NORMANBY NOV 3 1854/ THIS
MONUMENT WAS ERECTED BY HER AFFLICTED AND
BEREAVED HUSBAND/ THf LORD SHALL KEEP THEE FROM
ALL EVIL/ YEA IT IS EVEN HE THAT SHALL KEEP THY
SOUL/ PSALM CXXI/V.7
Burke's Peerage notes
Charlotte-Maria, daughter of George-William
Keppel, 6th Viscount Barrington, married Thomas
George Bowes Lyon, 12th Earl of Strathmore and
Kinghorn and Baron Glamis, 30 April 1850, dying, 3
November 1854, without issue, the Earl being
succeeded by his brother Claude, the 13th Earl.She was niece of Lord
Normanby, and nursed by them while dying of
tuberculosis. Almost ancestress of Queen Elizabeth
II, through the Queen Mother, born to the Earl and
Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorn, the ninth
child, of ten, of the ancient Scots family, who
own Glamis Castle.Two columns of the tomb
can be seen in photograph of Felicie Fauveau's
sculpture for tomb of Charles Lyon Herbert (E48) in Lord
Lindsay's collection. E48/ SIRCHARLES LYON HERBERT,
M.D./
ENGLAND
*
*
JHS/AMICI/H. F.
A doctor, he was
created a Knight, 1836. JLMaquay,
Diaries 28/12/1855 'attended Sir
C. Herberts funeral at 8 this
morning'. His tomb was sculpted by
Felicie de Fauvau, a French
Royalist sculptress living in
exile in Florence. B42/ ISABELLA
BLAGDEN publishes a fine
essay on Felicie
de
Fauveau. Its pietra
serena caused it to
fragment. We found one piece with
the chalice and could only
identify it from the photograph in
Lord Lindsay's scrapbook, now in
the possession of his heir, Lord
Crawford, in Scotland.
E29/ WILLIAM SOMERVILLE/ SCOTLAND
Harper's Monthly
engraving
Somerset House, Royal Society
Mary
Somerville
Ada
Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter
Lawrence MacDonald, Vassar, bust Francesco
Jerace, Naples, tomb WILLIAM SOMERVILLE/
ELDEST SON OF THE HISTORIAN OF QUEEN ANNE/ BORN AT MINTO
ROXBURGHSHIRE/ 22 APRIL 1771/ DIED AT FLORENCE 25 JUNE
1860/ GOD WILL REDEEM MY LIFE FROM/ THE POWER OF THE GRAVE
49 PSALM
His father's
death is noted in Bell's Weekly Messenger
(No.1770, Sunday, February 28, 1830): 'We regret to
learn that the Rev. Dr. Somerville, so eminently
distinguished as the historian of Queen Anne, and for
other valuable works, died at Jedburgh Manse, at a very
advanced age, on Sunday last. The Rev. Doctor was the
father of a Scottish church. He had assisted in the
communion services in the church of his own parish on
the Sabbath preceding, and apparently with no decrease
of energy or zeal; but he was taken ill on the evening
of that day, and continued to linger, peacefully waiting
for his rest, till his departure, as we have said, on
the Sabbath of the week following, much about the hour,
of the evening when he was first taken ill.--At
Jedburgh, on the 16th inst. after a few days illness,
the Rev. Dr. SOMERVILLE, in the 90th year of his age,
and the 63d in which he had discharged the active duties
of a Minister.--Edinburgh paper'. British Library:
Title: The History of Great Britain during the reign
of Queen Anne, with a dissertation concerning the
danger of the Protestant Succession, and an appendix
containing original papers. Author: SOMERVILLE.
Thomas. D.D. Publication details: pp. xxvii. 674.
A. Strahan, etc.: London, 1798. 4o. Author of many other
books including against slavery. His son, William
Somerville, a surgeon in the army, eventually doctor at
Chelsea Hospital, who is buried here is the husband of
the Scottish mathematician and astronomer Mary
Somerville who predicted the existence of Neptune and
Pluto. Mary Somerville encouraged Ada Byron, Countess
Lovelace (Lord Byron's daughter), in her pursuit of
mathematics, Ada Byron and Charles Babbage creating the
modern computer. Mary Somerville's bust is honoured in
the Royal Society of which her husband and her son were
made members. She is buried in Naples' Cimitero degli
Inglesi, beneath her life-size figure sculpted by the
young Calabrian sculptor, Francesco Gerace, who also did
the medallion of her friend, A15/ ANNE SUSANNA (LLOYD) HORNER.
Somerville College, Oxford, is named after her.
This
is the first entry in the Guildhall Register under header
'Duchy of Tuscany'. There would be space for the tomb of
Mary Somerville and her daughters opposite that of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In Naples it lacks the plaque
and no one knows who she is. A project for IBM?
E54/ JOHN LOGAN CAMPBELL/ SCOTLAND/NEW ZEALAND/
This baby's Scottish
father, a medical doctor, settled first in Australia,
then in New Zealand, and was knighted: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Logan_Campbell
We have carefully restored the badly damaged tomb.
John
Logan
Campbell
Mayor of Auckland
John
Logan Campbell
E33/ PETER FRANCIS LUARD M.D./ ENGLAND
SACRED
TO
THE MEMORY OF PETER FRANCIS LUARD M.D./ SECOND SON OF . . .
JOHN LUARD ESQ/ OF BLYBOROUGH LINCOLNSHIRE// WHO DEPARTED
THIS LIFE ON THE 5 DECEMBER 1857/ IN THE 72 YEAR OF HIS AGE.
TO ME TO DIE IS GAIN/. . . PHIL. . .
From Roll of the Royal College of
Physicians 1878: 'Peter
Francis Luard, M.D. , was the second son of Peter John
Luard, of Blyborough Hall, Lincolnshire, Esq., by his
wife Louisa, daughter of Charles Daldiac, Esq., of
Hungeford Park, and was born 16th September 1786. He
received his medical education at Edinburgh, where he
graduated doctor of medicine 24th June, 1808 (D.M.I.
de Ebriosrum malis). He was admitted a
Licentiate of the College of Physicians 1st April,
1822, and settled at Warwick, where he was much and
deservedly respected'.
From a Huguenot family settled in England, he
retired to Florence for his health. Maquay and the
Luards were great friends. JLMaquay, diaries
26/12/1857 'Doctor Luard died last night after
eating his dinner comfortably with his daughter and
thus surviving his wife (E45/MARY MAGDALEN (MORGAN) LUARD)
exactly one month.'
E125/ SARAH McCALMONT/ ENGLAND
JESUS WEPT// BENEATH IS DEPOSITED ALL
THAT WAS MORTAL OF/ SARAH/ THE BELOVED WIFE OF
T. RD THOMAS MCCALMONT/ OF WIMBOURNE MINSTER
DORSET/ DIED AT FLORENCE/ IN CHILDBIRTH/ AUGUST
24TH 1836/ AGED 28 YEARS/ BUT I WOULD NOT HAVE
YOU TO BE IGNORANT, BRETHREN, / CONCERNING THEM
WHICH ARE ASLEEP THAT YE SORROW / NOT EVEN AS
OTHERS/ WHICH HAVE NO HOPE FOR/ IF WE BELIEVE
THAT JESUS DIED AND ROSE AGAIN EVEN SO/ THEM
ALSO WHICH SLEEP IN JESUS WILL GOD BRING/ WITH
HIM 1 THESS IV.13[-14]/ AND THEY SHALL BE
MINE, SAITH THE LORD OF HOSTS/ IN THE DAY WHEN I
MAKE UP MY JEWELS. MAL 3.17 / BLESSED BE GOD
EVEN THE FATHER OF OUR LORD JESUS/ CHRIST THE
FATHER OF MERCIES AND THE GOD OF ALL COMFORT WHO
COMFORT/ETH US IN ALL OUR TRIBU/LATION THAT WE
MAY BE ABLE TO COMFORT THEM/ WHICH ARE IN ANY
TROUBLE BY THE COMFORT WHERE/WITH WE OURSELVES
ARE COMFORTED OF GOD. 2 COR 1.3[-4]//. .
.// IT IS THE LORD LET HIM/ DO THAT WHICH
SEEMETH HIM/ GOOD II SAM 10.12/ THE LORD GAVE
AND THE/ LORD HATH TAKEN AWAY/ BLESSED BE THE
NAME OF/ THE LORD JOB 1.21// P.BAZZANTI.F.
A Blundell ancestor founded the Blue
Coat School. She is Sarah Blundell and in her
portrait still possessed by the family she looks as
if she steps out of the pages of a Jane Austen
novel. She has married Rev Thomas McCalmont of
Tarrant Crawford 17 June 1833. They were living at
the Villa Medici in Fiesole when she died in
childbirth, 24 August 1836, which is where later
Holman Hunt will sculpt the tomb for his wife, B9/ FANNY WAUGH HUNT,
who likewise died following childbirth (they didn't
know to wash their hands), and which the young Iris
Origo visited. Sarah McCalmont's clerical husband
brings their orphan babe home to England where he is
baptised 'Hugh Barklie Blundell McCalmont' in
Liverpool by his relative, Rev William Blundell,
whom De Quincy used to hear preach: http://dequinceyineverton.blogspot.it/2011/02/reverend-william-blundell.html.
In Sector F
Click to enlarge
we find
F51/ THOMAS WILLIAMS TROTMAN, M.D./
BARBADOES
Harper's
Monthly engraving
BENEATH/ LIE THE MORTAL REMAINS OF/ THOMAS WILLIAMS
TROTMAN M.D./ OF THE ISLAND OF BARBADOS WEST INDIES/ WHO
DIED AT FLORENCE/ ON THE 21st OF JULY 1862/ AGED 52
YEARS/ HE WAS MUCH AND DESERVEDLY REGRETTED/ AND HIS
WIDOW AND SOME OF HIS FRIENDS/ HAVE UNITED TO ERECT THIS
MONUMENT/ AS A TESTIMONY OF THEIR SORROW FOR HIS LOSS/
AND THEIR REGARD FOR HIS MEMORY/ THE LORD GAVE AND THE
LORD HATH TAKEN AWAY/ BLESSED BE THE NAME OF THE LORD
Genealogy of Barbadoes Families:
'Thomas Williams Trotman, born 31 July 1809, baptised
1 Jan 1812 at Christ Church. Assistant to Dr J.W.W.
Carrington of St Thomas. Sailed to Liverpool, 1837.
Later practised medicine in Florence. Died of typhus
in Italy, July 1852. Married Elizabeth Wilhelmina
Bellingham, daughter of Samuel Ffennel Esq of
County Tipperaray, and his wife Frances Grenville
Bindon. Her will of June 1876, then living at N° 7
Vittorio Emanuele, Florence. Died 2 March 1891. No
issue'. The Ffennells of Tipperaray were likewise a
medical family. Elsewhere on Web, 'Thomas Trotman.
M.D. introduced hares to Barbadoes in 1842'. At this
period it was not understood that typhus was caused by
lice in clothing. Maquay Diaries: 14/12/1853 'up at
6.30 to attend Mrs Tolley's funeral which was very
badly managed by the Crossmans (B99/ REVD GEORGE
BRICKDALE CROSSMAN) who had taken all on
themselves, no pall bearers and no attendants but
Gregory Trotman and myself. Old [Seymour Kirkup?] also
came but had not been informed or invited. Rain
continued all day'. Is Gregory a brother of Thomas who
has no children. We could mention at this point Sarah
Parker Remond, the Black American friend of Douglass,
Mazzini and Garibaldi, who studied and practised
medicine in Florence and who is buried in Rome's
Protestant Cemetery. It was possible in the nineteenth
century for families from what were then the Colonies
to come to Europe and establish themselves with
respect.
F67/ EMMA
(GAMGEE) CAPEI/ ENGLAND Harper's Monthly
engraving
DISTINTA
CHE FU IN SUA MODESTA LUCE/ PER VENUSTA DI FORME/ E PIU/ PER
INGENUITA D'ANIMO/ TEMPERATO AD ELEVATI PRINCIPII/ QUI
RIPOSA NEI SONNO ESTREMO/ EMMA DI GIUSEPPE E MARIANNA GAMGE/
CHE AFFRANTA DA LABORIOSO GEMINO PARTO/ NEL DI 15 LUGLIO
1868/ IN ETA DI ANNI 29 MESI 3 GIORNI 13/ LASCIO DISE/ NEI
QUATTRO SUOI FIGLI NEL CONSORTE DOTT. LORENZO CAPEI/ E IN
QUANTI LA CONOBBERO/ MEMORIA NON PERITURA/
The Italian husband, Lorenzo Capei, a medical
doctor, and his four remaining children, mourn the death
following childbirth with twins of his wife, the daughter of
a veterinarian from Essex who had lived in Naples and
Livorno. Her brother, Joseph Samson Gamgee, was an
outstanding English medical doctor. Following education on
the Continent he too became interested in veterinary surgery
and wrote several papers, the first when he was 16. He then
began medical studies at University College Hospital in
London. For a period he shared lodgings with Joseph Lister
(1827-1912) – later Baron Lister of Lyme Regis – the founder
of antiseptic surgery. While he studied medicine, he became
a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in
1854, subsequently a Fellow of the College of Surgeons in
Edinburgh. He worked at the Royal Free Hospital. Being
multi-lingual, Gamgee travelled widely throughout Europe for
further studies in Paris, Brussels, Vienna, Florence and
Pavia. In Paris he became a friend of Louis Pasteur
(1822-1895) and worked at the University of Paris. Gamgee
worked for a period as a surgeon at University College
Hospital, and then tended the wounded from the Crimean War
(1853-1856) at the Anglo-Italian Hospital in Malta. (See
also A48/SIR DAVID DUMBRECK.) Most of Gamgee's professional life was spent in
Birmingham. He came there in 1857 and was elected to the
medical staff of The Queen’s Hospital, founded in 1841. Here
he performed a successful amputation of a man's leg at the
hip joint. He was noted for washing his hands before as well
as after performing surgery. Gamgee was interested in all
hospital matters and is remembered for his great efforts to
improve hospital conditions, and occasioned the building of
a new hospital wing. Gamgee had a great knowledge of
literature and was a busy and elegant writer as well as an
outstanding speaker and hard-working surgeon. Emma's babies,
at least, survive her. As had also the babies of
Fanny Holman Hunt and Sara McCalmont.
F27/ PHILIPPINA (SIMONS)
CIAMPI/ ENGLAND
FILIPPINA
SIMONS
INGLESE/ CON MOLTO INGEGNO E ISTRUZIONE/ EBBE OTTIMO
CUORE/ MERITO' LA STIMA E L'AFFETTO/ DI QUANTI LA
CONOBBERO/ CESSO' DI VIVERE IL 15 AGOSTO 1870/ DOPO
LUNGA E TERRIBILE MALATTIA/ IL CAV: D. ORESTE CIAMPI/
ALLA DILETTA MOGLIE/ Q.M.P.
Her husband, Cavaliere Don Oreste Ciampi,
a lawyer, who seems not to have learned English, was
also an exhibiting artist. Did he have Joel Hart sculpt
her likeness? Did she die of cancer? He bought parts of
the Villa Puccini in Pistoia where she likely lived:
'Villa Puccini - La villa, nota con il nome di villone,
fu fatta costruire da Tommaso Puccini nella prima meta'
del secolo XVIII, con i guadagni che ricavo' dalla sua
professione di medico, e fu modificata nel corso del
tempo fino ad assumere l'attuale aspetto neoclassico.
Nell'Ottocento, Niccolo' Puccini, uno dei promotori
della Societa' dei Parentali ai Grandi Italiani, mise a
disposizione di Filippo Pacini un microscopio con il
quale il grande scienziato pistoiese condusse, proprio
nella villa, le prime ricerche anatomiche e istologiche.
L'ampio giardino, realizzato tra il 1821 e il 1844 per
volere di Niccolo' Puccini, fu arredato con vari
edifici, alcuni dei quali dedicati alla scienza: un
Pantheon agli Uomini Illustri, un "Tempio di Pitagora",
un monumento alla scienza, uno all'industria, un
emiciclo dedicato a Galileo Galilei e una colonna
sovrastata dalla statua di Carlo Linneo, alla cui
memoria fu dedicato il parco. Per la sistemazione della
struttura idraulica dei due laghi e dei ruscelli
incarico' l'architetto pistoiese Giovanni Gambini, che
in quel periodo lavorava anche a villa Celle. Emanuele
Repetti definiva il giardino come un luogo «incantato
che difficilmente si potrebbe descrivere come merita».
Attualmente esso non si presenta piu' nelle sue forme
originarie ed alcuni suoi monumenti sono scomparsi.
Sostanzialmente invariato e' rimasto, invece, il
Castello Gotico (o Fortezza), uno degli edifici
monumentali che arricchiva il giardino e che divento',
dal 1836 dimora abituale di Niccolo' Puccini. Come
testimoniano accurate descrizioni ottocentesche redatte
in occasione della vendita all'asta delle proprieta', la
torretta centrale possedeva, oltre ad un parafulmine
alla sommita' del tetto, curiosi marchingegni che
secondo un'aneddotica assai diffusa avrebbero permesso a
Niccolo' Puccini di non allontanarsi dalla sua camera da
letto per ricevere gli ospiti: «Nella parete interna di
questa camera trovansi diverse maniglie d'ottone che
servano con adattato meccanismo ad aprire e chiudere la
finestra, aprire e chiudere il cancello di cinta esterno
ed ad altri usi oggi fuori servizio». Una divisione
della proprieta' fu originata prima dalla costruzione
della strada per Porretta, la nuova via Leopolda (1847),
e poi dalla costruzione della strada ferrata Porrettana
(1864). L'area che comprende la Fortezza, il tempio
gotico, il pantheon e alcuni monumenti, quali quello a
Galileo, furono acquistati nel 1867 dall'avvocato
fiorentino Oreste Ciampi'. This is one among several tombs with a portrait
medallion: A64/GEORGE AUGUSTUS WALLIS by
Aristodemos Costoli, A15/ ANNE SUSANNA (LLOYD) HORNER by
Francesco Jerace; AB7/ INA BOSS
SAULTER, by Ettore Ximenes;B4/ ELENA
NIKITICNA DIK, NATA AKZYNOVAby Fyodor
Fyodorovitsch Kamensky; C3/ THOMAS SOUTHWOOD SMITH by
Joel T. Hart; D108/ THEODORE PARKER by
William Wetmore Story; D127/JAMES ROBERTS, by
Joel T. Hart?; E12/ JAMES LORIMER GRAHAM, JR by
Launt Thompson; E9/WALTER KENNEDY LAWRIE by
Pietro Bazzanti,F27/PHILIPPINA
(SIMONS) CIAMPI,
Joel T. Hart(?).
Also two family members of Walter
Savage Landor at the feet of the sculpture of Mrs
Walter Savage kneeling on their son's tomb,
F128/
ARNOLD
SAVAGE LANDOR/ ENGLAND/SWITZERLAND
Trajan Wallis
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ARNOLD SAVAGE
LANDOR ESQ./ BORN 5TH OF MARCH 1818/ DIED 2nd OF APRIL
1871// M. AUTERI POMAR 1873// M. AUTERI POMAR 1873
The figure on the
tomb is Mrs Walter Savage Landor, Julia ThuilIier
Savage Landor, mourning the death of her son Arnold
Savage Landor whom she did not permit her husband to
see while he was growing up. At the end she threw her
husband out of the Villa Gherardesca in San Domenico,
Fiesole, that he had given them, leaving him homeless
in the streets of Florence until the Brownings took
care of him, lodging him with their former maid, Lily
Wilson, in Via della Chiesa. Not a happy marriage.
Walter had been much in love with an earl's daughter,
Rose Aymler, writing exquisite quatrains to her. She
died of fever in India and is buried there with his
verse on her tomb. Then he met Julia Thuillier, the
pretty daughter of a bankrupt Swiss banker, at a dance
in Bath and married her. Their son Arnold is described
by a family member as being paralyzed with mad eyes,
sounding very much like a syphilis patient. In less
unhappy days she had her portrait with her children
Arnold and Julia painted by Trajan Wallis, the son of
A64/GEORGE AUGUSTUS WALLIS, who is buried in
Sector A. She spends a fortune on the son's tomb,
nothing for her husband's. Walter Savage Landor's is
at A29, this one
for their son as far from him as she can get, with her
back turned to it.
one family member a
medical doctor, another, the grandson, whose death
certificate when brought here from Porte Sante lists
his illness as anthrax.
Behind them is the tomb of the little Russian child
who seems to have accidentally died of poisoning.
F122/ PRINCESS VERA LEONIDOVNA UROSOVA/ RUSSIA
This four-year-old Russian princess buried beneath the
now-felled great cedar of Lebanon comes from a family
who were great friends with the Tolstoy family, Prince
Leonid Dmitrievic Urosov being Vice-Governor of Tula.
Princess Selene-Maria A. Obelensky explains that Vera is
only distantly connected to her grandmother, Princess
Orussov.
Aristotle's
physician Alcmeon said that Man dies because he cannot join the end to
the beginning. At the beginning of Sector F we have this
tomb with its
splendid Egyptian hieroglyph of the ourbouros, the
serpent devouring its tail, the end joined to the
beginning, from Champollion and Rosselini's book on
their expedition to Egypt and Nubia,
F1/ SAXON COCKER/ ENGLAND
Urna su
colonna. Marmista ignoto. Sec. XIX, post
1/1831. Ambito toscano. Urna scolpita con
orobouros su colonna quadrata in marmo bianco.
Pulito, Daniel-Claudiu Dumitrescu, 2012. [M:
Urn: A: 66; L: 43; M. A: 16; L: 56.5; P: 56.5.]/
Iscrizione sepolcrale inglese incisa in lettere
capitali e numeri arabi: SAXON COCKER/ DIED 25th
JANUARY 1831/ AGED 24 YEARS/ N°. 24/See
1828-1844/
Registro
alfabetico
delle tumulazione nel Cimitero di Pinti:
Cocker/ Saxon/ / Inghilterra/ Firenze/ 25 Gennaio/
1831/ Anni 25/ 42/ Belle
Arti scheda,
1993-1997/Museo
Archeologico,
2006-2007: http://www.
florin.ms/egyptian.html. Chiesa
Evangelica Riformata Svizzera, 1827-present.
and which is also used on the first tomb in Sector A
to Robina Wilson, which copies the Renaissance tomb in
San Miniato to the Cardinal of Portugal.
We use the
pieces of hand-painted pottery we find in the Cemetery
as paper weights in our exhibits of rare books, here Arthur Hugh
Clough's poetry with a piece of pottery painted with
the crutch that indicates it belonged to a cup used by
the Oblates of Santa Maria Nuova Hospital to feed
their patients there, a hospital with oblates for its
nursing staff founded seven hundred years ago in
Florence by Monna Tessa and Beatrice's father, Folco
Portinari.
Booklet and app
created, 27
May 2018, Aurello Anello Books
To donate to the restoration by Roma of Florence's formerly abandoned English Cemetery and to its Library click on our Aureo Anello Associazione's PayPal button: THANKYOU!
Click to enlarge 
Cliccare le piante per aggrandirle
Grazia Santoni
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to enlarge
Harper's Monthly engraving
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to enlarge
Click to enlarge
Harper's Monthly
engraving
Click to enlarge
Harper's
Monthly engraving
Harper's Monthly
engraving
Cocker
tomb
with Holt tomb behind it, Marianne
Erika Raab, 2012
Booklet and app
created, 27
May 2018, Aurello Anello Books
