Rachmaninoff uses the sound of the oars of Charon's boat on the waters for his symphonic poem, the 'Isle of the Dead', Opus 29

Emio Lanini, 'Daniel in the Island of the Dead', https://www.florin.ms/DanielIsolaMorti.mp4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I: FLORENCE'S PROTESTANT CEMETERY
CHAPTER II: SECTOR A
CHAPTER III: SECTOR AB
CHAPTER IV: SECTOR B
CHAPTER V: SECTOR C
CHAPTER VI: SECTOR D
CHAPTER VII: SECTOR E
CHAPTER VIII: SECTOR F
CHAPTER IX: BURIALS NOW LACKING TOMBS
CHAPTER X: THE RESTORATION OF THE CEMETERY

FLORENCE'S PROTESTANT CEMETERY

         WhiteSilence  

To write a blues song
Is to regiment riots
And pluck gems from graves.
                                                                                                   Etheridge Knight

Leafing through the pages of the British Museum’s publication on the Egyptian Book of the Dead with its plates giving papyrus scrolls covered with script and with image, one learns of a lost religion but which is at the roots of Judaeo-Christianity, a religion where married couples who have been faithful to each other, who have been merciful to their slaves, who have not murdered or stolen or lied, shall be rewarded following death with a garden they shall tend, bringing forth grain for their sustenance, amidst the fragrance of the flowers they cultivate, a paradise based on work and on kindness. Cemeteries, paradoxically, are places crammed full of stories, of lives, and potentially of much beauty and healing. It is our desire to recreate of a once-abandoned, forever Swiss-owned, so-called 'English' Cemetery in Florence such a place of story and hope. Part of that task is this book, as a virtual visit, its 'WhiteSilence again being voiced, paradoxically, thunderously, synaesthetically, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in her poetry, culled from the archives sculpted in marble in many languages and several alphabets and quilled in manuscript by the Swiss in French on rag paper, now nearing two centuries ago.

Judaeo-Christianity for millennia carried out inhumation, the burial of the dead in the earth, the bodies to remain where they lay forever. Instead, the pagan Greek world cremated the dead, placing the ashes in urns. While the pagan Roman world placed the dead in sarcophagi, marble troughs that ‘eat flesh’', (sarx+phago), then put the bones in boxes, beyond the city walls. Christians then buried their dead in and around their churches, to be forever close to the Sacrament of the Resurrection. Jews and Romans had placed their tombs outside city walls for hygienic reasons; in Jerusalem only King David and the Prophetess Hulda were allowed burial within the city, all others being in tombs stretching out across the valley beyond the walls to be whitewashed at Passover because they were so polluting. In Prague the Jewish tombs are layered one upon the other within the cramped and involuted space of their graveyard. At Rome, tombs line the Appian Way beyond the ancient walls, the epitaphs upon them being often 'Siste, Viator', 'Pause, Traveller'. The French at St Cloud in 1804 enforced a similar secularization and sanitary distancing of once-Christian cemeteries as had Jews and Romans. Thus the famous Père Lachaise cemetery was born. Napoleon, a Freemason, proclaimed the St Cloud Edict throughout his Empire, requiring most of Catholic Europe to observe pagan laws, forbidding burials in cities, and requiring the Roman exhumation and storage of the bones into smaller spaces. Later, the Greek practice of cremation of the dead would also be permitted.



Florence’s Swiss-owned so-called ‘English’ Cemetery, situated on a hill that nestled against the medieval city wall, on land that may once have been an Etruscan tomb and which was bought from the Grand Duke in 1827, is exceptional in many ways. Its circa one thousand four hundred burials, marked now by only seven hundred tombs, are of Protestants, Anglicans, Orthodox, Masons, atheists, still births, suicides, paupers, serfs, slaves, servants, commoners, nobles, exiles, debtors, miscegenists, consumptives and much else, the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church having opened their cemetery to all those refused burial in consecrated Catholic ground or in the Cemetery for observant Jews, and who, before 1827, would have had to have had their cadavres transported by oxcart or horse-drawn hearse without refrigeration to Livorno for burial. The tombs, beneath the great cypress trees celebrated in the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin's 'Island of the Dead', for which Sergei Rachmaninoff composed his symphonic poem, are incised with Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Cyrillic and fraktura alphabets, and countless languages, including Rumantsch. The cemetery is international and ecumenical, a microcosm not only of Europe but of the whole world, a kind of League of Nations, and of its successor, the United Nations. The Cemetery was then closed in 1877, Giuseppe Poggi designing and executing the great viali to be like Paris’s boulevards and changing this square bounded by the walls of Arnolfo di Cambio and Michelangelo Buonarotti to an oval, when Florence became, briefly, the capital of Italy. The Swiss in their new cemetery at the Allori near Galluzzo comply with Napoleonic practices, exhuming their dead to be placed in the ‘ossario comune’ if further payments are not made.



This mis-named ‘English’ Cemetery, still owned by the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church which bought the land, and which is officially known by them as the Porta a’ Pinti Cemetery, is however English in several ways: it had been a beautiful garden, and is now again, as are English cemeteries; it defied the Code Napoleon, its burials being perpetually Judaeo-Christian, such as they have continued to be in the England that was never conquered by Napoleon; it is owned by the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church, a product of Calvin and Zwingli, and not secular; the English Church paid/loaned 5000 lire towards the purchase of the land and in consequence had the right to a tax paid from each English burial; the majority of the burials are of citizens of the British Isles and her Empire, and the English have the myth that where they lie is, as the poem by Rupert Brooke proclaims, 'forever England’. The Americans and Russians, conversely, often arranged to have their bodies expensively shipped back wrapped in lead by way of Livorno to their natal countries, the undertaker services being carried out by the Swiss. Legendarily, English cemeteries had two yew trees planted within their entrance for making the bows that defeated the French at Agincourt, yew being toxic to cattle but safe within the walls of graveyards from harming or being harmed. Traditionally, these two trees came to symbolize the pillars of the Jerusalem Temple named Joachim and Boaz (2 Chronicles 3.17). Florence’s ‘English’ Cemetery had two such yew trees planted at its entrance, though one has now been felled.

At the same time that the Grand Duke Leopold sold the hill outside the city wall to the Chiesa Evangelica Riformata Svizzera, he had also funded the Expedition to Nubia and Egypt by Ippolito Rosellini and Jean-François Champollion, giving Champollion, who had already cracked the code of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the chance to visit that land. The great painting of the duo hangs above the stairs of Florence’s Museo Archeologico Nazionale, a museum sharing with that of the Louvre half the loot of their Expedition. Rosellini's published book, Monumenti dell'Egitto e della Nubia (Florence, 1832-40, 10 vols), directly influenced the Egyptian style of many of the tombs in the ‘English’ Cemetery, resulting in obelisks and pyramids and also in sculpted motives of moths, bees, ourobouroi (serpents with their tails in their mouths symbolizing eternity), and winged globes or hourglasses, which derive from hieroglyphs. Pietro Bazzanti eclectically mixed these with Neo-Classical tombs showing husbands, wives and children in togas mourning beside cinerary urns, splendid sarcophagi, including two modeled on the Scipio tomb in the Vatican, and so forth.


 
The earlier tombs in the ‘English’ Cemetery are prophetic of the return to classical practices, pretending to be sarcophagi and cinerary urns placed on columns in the Roman and Greek manner, particularly those by Pietro Bazzanti (whose shop still exists in the Palazzo Corsini), while all their burials are really in the ground. At the same time, women's fashions were for high waists, Regency style, copying classical sculpture. Initially, the cemetery was designed as square by Carlo Reishammer (1806-1883). In 1859, the layout was changed to form box-edged paths to and from the column and its cross at the top centre (a monument in marble modelled on the column and cross with roses and lilies honouring St Zenobius beside Florence’s Baptistry, yet taller), again by Pietro Bazzanti (1825-1895), erected in honour of the Rosicrucian Frederick William II of Prussia’s visit to the Cemetery in that year. To effect the central path, students found when seeking the supposed Etruscan tomb under the Cemetery's hill, that they had wantonly covered over graves that still have bodies in them. Another box-edged path, now restored, was built to reach the tombs of WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR (A29) and of FRANCES TROLLOPE (B80) and her daughter-in-law THEODOSIA TROLLOPE (B85) and their friend, ISA BLAGDEN (B42). It has a view of the cupola of the Duomo. During this time fashion became Victorian, with crinoline skirts, and eclectic naturalist detail, such as we see with the statue of the mourning Mrs Walter Savage Landor on the tomb of their son, ARNOLD SAVAGE LANDOR (F128), rather than classical form. With this new landscaping the Cemetery came to reflect even more the hill of Calvary outside Jerusalem's city wall and its Temple.



When Giuseppe Poggi (1811-1901) redesigned Florence he changed the square shape of the Cemetery to an oval, removing the medieval wall and gate of Porta a’ Pinti, first built by Arnolfo di Cambio, then reinforced by Michelangelo Buonarotti against Duke Alessandro de' Medici's return, leaving the picturesque cemetery as an island in the midst of traffic. The Arnolfian shields with the lily and the cross that had been on the Porta a’ Pinti Gate were placed instead on the Cemetery’s wall. In his letters to the Swiss he begs that they restore its romantic garden and plant roses. The Florentine Comune arranged for a gardener to live on the premises. Following the 1877 closure of the Cemetery the Italian MALFATTI family members (C35-37) elected to be cremated and had their marble tombs conspicuously placed where all who pass by may see them. Since 1877, only the burial of ashes or cleaned bones is permitted. Catholics are now allowed burials here, but neither Orthodox nor observant Jew permit such cremation. Giuseppe Poggi's symetrical and oval shape (not unlike the older libraries in London and Paris, the British Museum and Library under its Pannizzi dome, and the Bibliothèque National), is shaped and functions like the human brain with two hemispheres that communicate with each other at its entrance, its Gatehouse with its library, its archives, its webcrafting. Indeed we will find in this hypertexted book that the tombs themselves often have synaptic relations with other tombs, everything here being, as the Italians say, 'intrecciati', interwoven, interconnected, international, intergenerational. The London and Paris libraries would later, in the Twentieth Century, be rehoused in square glass boxes, the left hemisphere's usurping and negating the existence of the right hemisphere's inclusion and wholeness into architecture's modern brutalism. Florence's Swiss-owned so-called 'English' Cemetery is thus a monument to a more sane and complete, though now largely lost, world of culture. Neuroscience, and especially the prophetic words of Mary Somerville ('These formulae, emblematic of Omniscience, condense into a few symbols the immutable laws of the universe. This mighty instrument of human power itself originates in the primitive constitution of the human mind, and rests upon a few fundamental axioms, which have eternally existed in Him who implanted them in the breast of man when he created him after His own image'), concerning that science, best explain it.

Research tends to be linear, compartmentalized, statistical, detached emotionally, lobotomized, left-brained, garbed in white lab coats, carried out with glove-boxes. But Montaigne and the Victorians knew to combine poetry with prose, interspersing the one with the other, those George Eliot epigrams at the heads of chapters, a balancing of right and left brain understanding in depth and breadth. We use both methods in this book. We found of great value to us in restoring the garden the engraving published in Harper's Monthly in 1873 but actually produced, we can tell, before 1867, that has much to teach us about the longevity, about the non-altering, of this place. The tombs it showed then are almost all still here. We hyptertext the images to their catalogued entries.

Harper's, XLVII (1873) 509, Engraving of Florence's 'English' Cemetery



                                                                                                                   Temple Southwood Smith
Elton         Browne                  Fombelle    Berg  Moore  Smith               Jaffray                           Routh            Somerville                   
  BYelverton      CYelverton                     JKellett            Barrett Browning                 Beck           Hart                              Vieusseux
                             Sapte Tighe                                                                  Zimbowski     Golikova  
                   Hanna                                                                                                                                                                                           Trotman         Capei
Holt                                                          Kelson                             Levitsky

Buried in this cemetery is JACQUES AUGUSTIN GALIFFE (D47, but originally given in the Lost Chapter as we could not for years find his tomb), who, with Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi, both Swiss, both exiles, taught the importance of genealogical archival historical research, using these methods in Italian archives. We were finally able to locate Jacques Galiffe's tomb through the publication in 1907, over a hundred years ago, in Notes and Queries of the inscriptions copied by Lieutenant-Colonel G.S. Parry from the English tombs then extant, many now lost, which ruled out our identification of what we now know are the Galiffe tombs, but which we had earlier thought were those for the Pellews. This cemetery in which Galiffe's burial occurred is ideally suited for the research which he had pioneered. Also buried here, and I give the entry from the cited chapter on lost tombs, is the baby son of an English lawyer and historian, who used similar methods for historical study:

§534/ EDMOND ANTHONY CHESTER WATERS/ ENGLAND/ GL23777/1 N° 534 Burial 06/03 Rev Greene/ I: 1852-1859 'Registre des Sepultures avec detail des frais', Paoli 733/ Q 116: 576 Paoli/ Waters/ Edmondo Antonio Chester/ Roberto Edmondo/ Inghilterra/ Firenze/ 3 Marzo/ 1854/ Mesi 29/ 534.
Robert Edmond Chester Waters. Genealogical memoirs of the kindred families of Thomas Cranmer, 1877. Barrister of the Inner Temple, writing a genealogical study, he has had to bury his own eponymous child at 29 months old. This is what he pens in his book: 'Genealogy is so often confused with pedigree-making that people are apt to forget that it is a necessary element in history and biography, to which it is a help or a hindrance according as the laws of historical evidence are observed or violated. The pedigrees contained in these Memoirs have been examined link by link, and are now for the first time narrated in detail. The version hitherto received has seldom borne the test of critical research, but errors have been silently corrected, except where silence might imply that some authority had been overlooked. My own accuracy will be easily tested, for every statement is vouched by reference to authorities, and those genealogical proofs which cannot be consulted in any public library are quoted in full or in abstract. It must be borne in mind that conclusions are often drawn from cumulative evidence, and that there is a latent force in authorities which is imperceptible to those who have not consulted them all'. He has paid as much as for an adult burial of a rich, important person, for this small child, far more than Robert Browning paid for ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING(B8)'s burial. 

Others, among the 'Lost Tombs', are Lord Nelson's daughter's half-sister, Emma Carew, Catherine MacKinnon, who, from the Isle of Mull, became the Tsar of Russia's governess, and Louisa Catherine Adams Kuhn, the sister of Henry Adams and the subject of his 'Chaos' Chapter in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. We found that the archives preserving, on paper but not marble, the memory of our lost tombs yield most valuable information. For paper archives can last paradoxically even longer than do marble tombs, for which see our Lost Chapter.

The crescendoing opposition to slavery as a crime against humanity is a strong theme throughout Florence's 'English' Cemetery.. FRANCES TROLLOPE (B80) and RICHARD HILDRETH (D110), with their Jonathan Jefferson Whitelaw and The White Slave, had written the first and second slave novels, to be joined by a third, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which copied theirs and which would be translated into Romanian in 1854, freeing the Roma slaves in that country, souls bought and sold from the Middle Ages until 1855-56. For the 'English' Cemetery has the graves of slaves, serfs and servants along with their masters and mistresses and likewise ardent Abolitionists. Frederick Douglass, the American Black ex-slave, visited this Cemetery to honour in particular the tombs of ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (B8), RICHARD HILDRETH (D110) and THEODORE PARKER (D108), because they wrote and preached so eloquently against slavery. He quoted Theodore Parker on how the arc of time bends towards justice, quoted again by Barack Obama at Nelson Mandela's funeral.



The title of this book, 'Thunders of White Silence', is taken from ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING's impassioned sonnet against slavery, addressed, in the Greek mode, to the sculpture by the American HIRAM POWERS (B32) , the 'Greek Slave', whose model was Signora Mignaty, mother of ELENA MIGNATY (E130) and DEMETRIO MIGNATY (E131), while Giorgio Mignaty, the children's father, would portray Casa Guidi as it was at Elizabeth's death. The sculpture was exhibited at the very centre of the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. Art and life here inextricably intertwined.

WhiteSilence

The house of anguish. On the threshold stands
An alien Image with the shackled hands,
Called the Greek Slave: as if the sculptor meant her,
(That passionless perfection which he lent her,
Shadowed, not darkened, where the sill expands)
To, so, confront men’s crimes in different lands,
With man’s ideal sense. Pierce to the centre,
Art’s fiery finger! - and break up erelong
The serfdom of this world! Appeal, fair stone,
From God’s pure heights of beauty, against man’s wrong!
Catch up in thy divine face, not alone
East griefs but west, - and strike and shame the strong,
By thunders of white silence, overthrown!

   
Our first burial, in 1828, is of a child, the fifteen-year-old JEAN DAVID MARC GONIN (C10), son of the President of the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church which had bought the land; our last, in 1877, is of ELISE BOSSÉ (D111), the wife of an artist from Riga in Latvia. While SOLOMON COUNIS, D13, Vice President of the Swiss Evanglical Church which still owns this cemetery, painted the idealized imaginary portrait of Jean David Marc Gonin, defying death, as if 22, as so also did John Roddam Spencer Stanhope paint his daughter MARY SPENCER STANHOPE (B10) as if 17, and Trajan Wallis (A64) painted Mrs Julia Savage Landor and Michele Auteri Pomar (F128), sculpted her on WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR's son's, creating synapses not only of biological genealogies but also of artists and their portraits. Small wonder the municipality decided to have great artists' studios constructed all about the Piazzale Donatello in which our cemetery lies. The same synapses happen with books where we have ISA BLAGDEN (B42) writing Agnes Tremorne about Lord Lytton and he writing Lucile about her, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's Marble Faun combining the figures of ISA BLAGDEN (B42) and THEODOSIA GARROW TROLLOPE (B85) in his mixed-race Miriam, or ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (B8), as had Dante Alighieri before her, celebrating Florence in her verse, apocalyptically glimpsing the city from ISA BLAGDEN(B42)'s Bellosguardo, while Ferenc Pulszky has his son GYULA PULSZKY (A60) sculpted in heavenly flight above the Florence seen from their Montughi villa. Superimposed upon these biological genealogies and artistic representations is also the full spectrum of social, ecclesial and military divisions, here uniting in one spot as if focussed in a burning glass, supporters of Garibaldi, opponents of Napoleon, the Tsar of Russia, the Austrian Emperor, alongside Abolitionists opposing slavery, those concerned about the labour of children in mines and factories, exiled in Florence and now peaceably lying side by side with the status quo, Austrian military officers, Southern slave-owners, Romanian slave-owners, north England's mill-owners, her colliery owners, Ireland's landowners starving their tenantry, the clergy who baptized, married and buried them, the diplomats, and the military machinery of the British Empire, comfortably pensioned in retirement.

One of the most remarkable burials in this so-called ‘English’ Cemetery is that of NADEZHDA DE SANTIS (B58), buried near the tombs of both HIRAM POWERS (B32) and ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (B8). She had come at fourteen, a black slave from Nubia, her freedom being purchased by Rosellini's uncle, and was baptized in a Russian Orthodox family, dying here in her thirties. Her story is told in Cyrillic letters in Russian on her white marble Orthodox cross, the only Orthodox cross the strict rules of the Evangelical Reformed Swiss ever permitted, though the Cemetery contains many Russian, Romanian and Greek tombs. Her name of 'Nadezhda' given to her in Christian baptism means ‘Hope’. Her name as slave had been 'Kalima'. Also buried here is HENRIETTA MARIA HAY (F53), the daughter of the Greek slave, Kalitsa Psarakis, whose freedom was purchased in the Alexandria market by the Scots Egyptologist, Robert Hay, and whom he married on Malta in 1828, their daughter coming to live, until her death in 1875, in Casa Guidi. These stories of Kalima and Kalitsa parallel that of Pushkin’s ancestor, ‘Tsar Peter’s Negro’, about whom he wrote a magnificent short story, unfinished except by its narrator’s existence. Both Pushkin, who wrote an epitaph for his friend buried in Livorno, saying ‘he lies beneath the myrtle of sweet Italy’, and Robert Browning's father obsessively drew the physiognomies of their African slave ancestors. We recall that Duke Alessandro de' Medici was similarly the son of a slave woman. 



Thus in this ‘English’ Cemetery servants can lie alongside their masters and mistresses (and often the records show that the servants were awarded first-class funerals, their owners, second-class ones), death being no respecter of gender, class, nation, race, nor, in the nineteenth century before modern medicine, of age. We witness amongst many of these tombs the great affection and respect their masters and mistresses paid to servants under their roof: CHARLES CROSBIE, A20 to MARY DUVALL, A80; the friends of the late WILLIAM READER, A23 to HENRY AUSTIN, E34; FRANCES (MILTON) TROLLOPE, B80, THEODOSIA (GARROW) TROLLOPE, B85, and HARRIET THEODOSIA FISHER (GARROW), C77, to ELIZABETH SHINNER, C71; ISABELLA BOUILLON LANZONI, D29, to ANNA ROFFY, C61; SIR WILLIAM HENRY SEWELL, E58, to JAMES BANSFIELD, E59; Prince Demidoff to GEORGE FREDERIC WAIHINGER, E64; Rosina Buonarotti Simoni to MARY ANNE SALISBURY, F2. Many children are buried here, felled by diphtheria, many women who died following childbirth, asepsis still not being understood nor vaccines or antibiotics being available. Outstanding doctors are buried here, among them THOMAS SOUTHWOOD SMITH (C3), advocator of fresh air and sunlight in the homes of the poor to prevent disease, JAMES ANNESLEY (D73), who published a very large book on the diseases encountered in India and other tropical climates, Sir DAVID DUMBRECK (A48), head of the hospitals in the Crimea in which Florence Nightingale worked, and BARTOLOMEO ODICINI (A47), the doctor in Uruguay, whose patients were Anita Garibaldi and her starving children, and, after Aspramonte, Garibaldi himself. Many tombs in the Cemetery are those of military and civil officials who served in India and elsewhere in the Empire. Fourteen participants against Napoleon in the Peninsula and at Waterloo lie here, likewise relatives of naval officers and others associated with Nelson, Popham and Collingwood at Trafalgar. And then another web, not accounted for in the three estates of the Middle Ages, of ploughman, knight, monk, of labourer, landowner, clergyman, is that of commerce and enterprise, English ship builders, bridge builders, mill owners, mine proprietors, railroad builders and their employees, their daughters, Swiss bankers, architects, cafe owners, bakers, pastry makers, and slaves, serfs and servants, from Africa, from the Caribbean, from the steppes of Russia, and from England, lying side by side with each other, the slave and the servants often having fine tombs and first class funerals in a Magnificat world, that struggled for Gospel justice. Thus this Cemetery becomes an anthropological laboratory for the study of economic development through immigration and through international banking; likewise it is a textbook  for the story of medicine, many friends of Henri Dunant of the Swiss Red Cross and Florence Nightingale of the hospitals in the Crimea also lying here. It is an archive in marble for the history of Italy, of England, of Europe, of the world.

The Grand Duke Leopold II of Tuscany (1797-1870), shared the Enlightenment concepts that Napoleon also had and at first wanted to open Tuscany to these new ideas. The Catholic Church, prior to Vatican II, prohibited the Bible in the vernacular to the laity. The Protestant churches, instead, were Evangelical. The tombs within the sanctuary of the ‘English’ Cemetery, illegally flaunt Biblical verses in many scripts and multitudes of languages and alphabets. Later, the Grand Duke panicked from the people’s espousal of democratic ideals, and returned to Florence with the white-clad Austrian army, enforcing rigorous censorship of the press and religious uniformity, about which Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in Casa Guidi Windows. As a result, English and Italian Protestants came to be imprisoned and/or exiled for propagating translations of the Bible in Italian, like ROSA MADIAI (F129) and her husband, Francesco, and the brother, Pietro, of GIULIA GUICCIARDINI (F34). The Italian flag of red, white and green was likewise forbidden. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote against this oppression in her twice-told tale of Casa Guidi Windows I, II, the literal windows of which she also defiantly decorated with white and red curtains on green walls and about which colours she was speaking, Robert tells us, as she lay dying in 1861.

It is especially English literature, English poetry, that is celebrated here, the three great poets, ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (B8), WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR (A29), ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH (F8), the novelists, FRANCES TROLLOPE (B80) and RICHARD HILDRETH (D110), all using their pens against slavery and for the Risorgimento, and, as well, the relatives and friends of English writers, of George Byron (E27/ DEMETRIO CORGIALEGNO/Δεμητριος Κοργιολενιος), of Jane Austen (A45/ CHARLOTTE EMILIA PLUMPTRE; D27/ THOMAS HILL SPENCER), of William Wordsworth (F74/ MARIAN WORDSWORTH; E11/ THOMAS HAMILTON; B8/ ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING), of Sir Walter Scott (A95/ ISABELLA SCOTT). In Jane Austen's genteel pages one witnesses the jockeying for inheritance in landholdings, for commissions in the military, for livings in the Church of England, and for marriages into both wealth and status through these others. In the more riotous ones of Frances Trollope and Elizabeth Barrett Browning we find slaves, factory hands, debtors, gypsies, mixed-race persons, a fuller spectrum of reality struggling for survival and autonomy. All their characters are matched in reality with our tombs and their so meticulously recorded burials in the Swiss-French hand-written archives.
 
It is said that Florence 'is the sunny place for shady people'. In a few cases to escape the lunacy of a family member. Or imprisonment for bankruptcy. Many who came here did not fit into English society in their homeland. THEODOSIA GARROW TROLLOPE (B85) and ISA BLAGDEN (B42) were exotically part East Indian, part Jewish (and used for Hawthorne's Miriam), while ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (B8) and Robert Browning were from West Indian families, she from Jamaica's Cinnamon Hill plantation, he from St Kitts, both part Black and slave and he part Jewish. FRANCES TROLLOPE's husband and Robert Browning's father had to live abroad to escape the legal consequences of their foolishness, as debtors and as breachers of promises. Thus it is a cosmopolitan necropolis of great variety and interest. We have placed the information and the images, culled from registers, receipts, encyclopaedias, obituaries in the newspapers, essays, scientific studies, we include descriptions, measurements and photographs of all the tombs, and also list those we no longer have, now to be found on the Web at http://www.florin.ms/WhiteSilence.html. Because we put all our tombs on the web the descendants then find us, also the international scholars, following which we are able to put them in touch with each other, even to rejoining branches of far-flung families who had lost contact, in one case descendants in Sweden and Italy, in another in France and in Australia, the world, reflected in the cemetery, becoming a global village, a hypertext, and a social network. We remember the great importance the ancestors have for cultural memory, particularly among the Aborigine in Australia. We recorded a Maori from New Zealand reciting his genealogy, an Amerindian from Brazil reading a Sonnet from the Portuguese in Portuguese, and a Welshman and a Russian discoursing together on Dylan Thomas whom the Russian had translated into Cyrillic. A lovely shy mother and her two daughters, direct descendants of Elizabeth's sister, came from the Outback in Australia.  M ost recently the grandson of the great Chinese poet, Xu Zhimo. For all these reasons we hypertext throughout this book, giving the cross references to tombs and to poems, palimpsesting our keystrokes to this oval physical space next to this building in which I enter them. Our library we have formed as partner to this cemetery, the Mediatheca 'Fioretta Mazzei', includes a section on nomadic and indigenous peoples subject to discrimination and consequent poverty by the dominant group in power: Jews, Native Americans, Aborigine, Blacks, women, and, in relation to the Cemetery, particularly the Roma from Romania, present in Florence, and who are our skilled gardeners, carpenters, stonemasons and blacksmiths, though most are still illiterate from their centuries of enslavement. Together, outsiders with insiders, we collaborate to preserve a cultural monument, to record history, in a space dense with meaning.

In Italian, 'intrecciati', meaning braided, plaited, interwoven, knotted together, is especially a feature of this cemetery, where one finds a tomb erected by a painter, TRAJAN WALLIS (A64), who also portrays the wife and two children of a poet, WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR (A29). that wife, Julia Savage Landor (F128), repeated again grieving her child Arnold's death, no longer on canvas but in life-size marble by Michele Auteri Pomar, while the grave of her famous husband (whom she hated and drove away from their home) has crumbled away from cheapness and neglect and been replaced in 1945 with a newer stone. Or where ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (B8) and HIRAM POWERS (B32) both come to lie here, she having written the sonnet to his 'Greek Slave'. We find that participants (or their relatives), at the Peninsula and Waterloo battles, at Trafalgar, in the Crimea, and Cephalonia, find their final resting place here. We find ISA BLAGDEN (B42) caring for the orphaned children of THEODOSIA TROLLOPE (B85) and ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (B8),  the parents of MARY SPENCER STANHOPE (B10) doing the same for Cyril Benoni Hunt, following the death of his mother, FANNY HOLMAN HUNT (B9) and his father Holman Hunt sculpting the tomb for her. We find links between Algernon Charles Swinburne, Matthew Arnold and Leigh Hunt, writing epitaphs for WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR (A29), JAMES LORIMER GRAHAM (E12), ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH (F8) and Dr THOMAS SOUTHWOOD SMITH (C3). We find that already FRANCES TROLLOPE (B85) and HIRAM POWERS (B32) had worked on sculpting Dante's Commedia in Cincinatti, Ohio, before coming to lie close to each other in Florence. FRANCES TROLLOPE (B85), THOMAS SOUTHWOOD SMITH (C3) and ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (B8) were already within the pages of Hengist Horne's New Spirit of the Age before their clustering here.

For the cemetery crams together all our dividing categories: the masters and servants of the social classes, honouring the servants; men and women and children, particularly showing tenderness and love for the latter two by gender and age; the professions, military, naval, medical, legal, religious; and nations, in a marvelous cosmopolitanism. Yet this is work in progress and further study needs to be made of the military regiments, which range from generals and admirals to a Croatian deserter, likewise of the armorial bearings often sculpted on the tombs. The largest proportion of tombs are those of the British, all classified as 'English,' 'anglais,' in the original directories and which we have specified as to whether English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, Jamaican, Barbadoes, New Zealand or Australian, followed by the Swiss burials, then the German, then the American, the Italian, next the Russian, while including those of many other countries, France, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Greece, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Belgium, India, Jamaica, Romania, Finland, Estonia, Egypt, Nubia, and Croazia, this last of the Austrian army deserter pauper. It should be noted that in Italy women keep their maiden names and do not assume that of their husband. Thus the Swiss burial records in French and Italian give the maiden, not the married, name of each deceased married woman. They also give the maiden name of the mother of the persons they bury, this permitting female genealogies to be studied. For the British burials I am greatly indebted to the joint research carried out by Anthony and Diana Webb, for the Swiss burials to Maurizio Bossi of the Gabinetto Vieusseux, for the Rumantsch Swiss burials to Peter Michael-Caflisch, for the American burials, to Jeffrey Begeal and Carolyn Carpenter, and for the Russian burials to Michael Talalay and Gino Chelazzi, also to countless other scholars and descendants who have generously given information and support. Our translator, Assunta D'Aloi, has been my 'Adam scriveyn'. The books of the greatest use have been Hengist Horne, New Spirit of the Age, Thomas Adolphus Trollope, What I Remember, the many publications of Lilian Whiting (who used the materials of Kate Field, the young American friend of the aged English Walter Savage Landor), and Giuliana Artom Treves, The Golden Ring: The Anglo-Florentines, 1847-1862. These are now shelved in the Mediatheca 'Fioretta Mazzei' in the 'English' Cemetery.

Our seven-fold entries first present the tombs' 1) coordinates, 2) the identification letter and number for the tomb in that sector in space, 3) the Swiss acquisition number in time, the name and inscription, then 4) a paragraph in larger type presenting the gleanings from the Web and the Webbs, the indefatigable couple who have so carefully researched English baptisms, marriages and burials in Tuscany, and from descendants and other scholars who have found us on the Web and through us their ancestal tombs, filling out the above entries into a narration, giving flesh and blood again to skeletons and dust, giving the story that can be told of each tomb and of each burial, of each person, whether slave or noble, woman or man, child or adult 5) followed by the schedatura for the Italian Ministry of Culture and Tourism (Ministro dei Beni e delle Attività culturali e del Turismo, or MIBAC, which used to be called the 'Belle Arti'), presenting its sculptor, its description, its measurements, in Italian, and the tomb's inscription, 6) next giving the documentation in the Swiss archives in chronological order, the entry and receipts in French, the final 1877 cataloguing in Italian, between these the Guildhall Library entries by the Anglican chaplains conducting the English-speaking burials, the newspaper obituaries, and the Maquay and Horner diary entries, 7) then, a hundred years ago, Lieut. Col. G.S. Parry of Eastbourne, publishing in Notes and Queries 10 (1908), his 'Inscriptions at Florence' giving a listing of the then English tombs in the cemetery, in some cases, giving us the location of now lost or previously non-identified tombs.

With the modern and left brain  dominant  denial of death cemeteries have become loathsome places of bitter reality. Strangely our burials are conducted with overwhelming grief by those whose families are atheist, who openly manifest an unfathomable despair. While those of faith have their belief and their memories which console and calm them. Cemeteries are archives in marble of a people's - or, as in our case, of many peoples' - history. These cemeteries of exiles are like a pearl necklace around the globe, connecting with cemeteries in Rome, in Lisbon, in Livorno, in Bagni di Lucca, in Naples, in India, in so many places. And pearls we recall are like poets' tales, Isak Dinesen claiming they are 'loveliness born out of disease'. Italian cemeteries were secularized under Napoleon. Florence's Trespiano is a terrifying place, racks upon racks of small boxes of human remains, a place of ugliness far out of the city, widows travelling to it with flowers in tears on the buses, feeling so utterly lost. But English cemeteries nestled about their country churches are beautiful, where children play and mothers come with babies, ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (B8) recalling this even in Italy,

                                                  WhiteSilence

                                                         There's a verse he set
                                                  In Santa Croce to her memory,
                                                  'Weep for an infant too young to weep much
                                                  When Death removed this mother,' stops the mirth
                                                  Today on women's faces when they walk
                                                  With rosy children hanging on their gowns,
                                                  Under the cloister to escape the sun
                                                  That scorches in the piazza,                    Aurora Leigh I.101-8 1857

She remembered how once tombs also surrounded churches in this Catholic land, such as the tombs, now mostly cleared away, in Santa Croce's cloister, or those which once lay about the Duomo square, as George Eiot describes in Romola. To so combine death with life, rather than its denial, is healing. Here, in Florence's Swiss-owned so-called 'English' Cemetery, filled with bones of so many nationalities, who have countless stories to tell of outspokenness in the face of slavery and oppression, and who are sometimes celebrated with sculptures of great beauty, we have been enabled by the Roma, themselves for centuries slaves, to restore the former garden to a loveliness, to conserve the wrought and cast iron, to clean the marble, to create again an island of peaceableness.

In the chapters that follow we shall find, particularly among the women, the passionate espousal for the freeing of slaves from their bondage, of children from crippling work in mines and factories, of nations from oppression, each cause in a sense mirroring women’s own sense of their powerlessness. Among the treble voices those of ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (B8), FRANCES TROLLOPE (B80) and MARY SOMERVILLE (E29), among the bass, those of THEODORE PARKER (D108), RICHARD HILDRETH (D110) and THOMAS SOUTHWOOD SMITH (C3). Buried here are many who fought against Napoleon on the Peninsula, at Waterloo, at Trafalgar, many who were friends of Florence Nightingale and at the Crimea, those who fought with Lord Byron and with Giuseppe Garibaldi. Amidst so many dead of terrible diseases (we read of tuberculosis, cholera, typhus, typhoid, malaria, syphilis, diphtheria, felling both adults and infants), we have SOUTHWOOD SMITH(C3)’s clear appeal, voiced in verse in Leigh Hunt’s epitaph for ‘fresh air and sunlight in the homes of the richer poor of happier years to come’. He had FRANCES TROLLOPE (B80) write Michael Armstrong: Factory Boy and ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (B8), ‘The Cry of the Children’, which was translated into Russian by Michael Dostoevsky, Feodor’s brother, to spread his teaching. His granddaughter, Octavia Hill, whom he raised, would continue his insights with her slum clearance work. We benefit from their labours.

These chapters shall be as a Canterbury Tales, as a Spoonriver Anthology, of the documentary and archival telling of many tales.

          WhiteSilence

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