APP - ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING’S
FLORENCE
Casa Guidi (1), by George Mignaty, 1861
These
hypertexted numbers signify
places that can be found on map.
Casa Guidi
(1) is open on Monday, Wednesday and Friday from
3:00 until 6:00, except in winter. The English
Cemetery (16), is open
Monday morning, 9:00-12:00, Tuesday through Friday afternoons,
summer, 3:00-6:00 p.m., winter, 2:00-5:00 p.m.
AUDIO FILES OF
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING'S FLORENCE
♫
CASA GUIDI WINDOWS
♫
AURORA
LEIGH & POLITICAL POEMS
to accompany Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
Florence
♫
PREFACE
Elizabeth
Barrett Moulton Barrett, crippled by childhood tuberculosis and
already a successful poet, eloped at forty with Robert Browning,
her entourage including Lily Wilson, her maid, and the spaniel
Flush, coming, by way of Paris, Vaucluse and Pisa, September,
1846, reaching Florence in April 1847, then going to Vallombrosa
in July, on their returning finding Casa Guidi in
Via Maggio (1)
which became their home for the rest of their marriage,
immediately meeting Hiram Powers, the great American sculptor,
and soon after the French sculptress, Félicie de Fauveau.
Miss Mitford gives Flush to Elizabeth Barrett in Wimpole Street,
Marylbourn, London, drawings by Vanessa Bell, as endpapers to
her sister Virginia Woolf's book, Flush
Elizabeth Barrett
Browning at Casa Guidi (1)
in Florence with Flush, but which actually does not have a view
of the Duomo and its Giotto Bell Tower, only the wall of the San
Felice church.
Casa Guidi
is in the Oltrarno, the other side of the Arno river and best
reached by the Ponte Santa Trinità with its sculptures of
Spring, Summer, Autumn and shivering Winter, then up the Via
Maggio to the little square with its great column by Casa Guidi
the church of San Felice. On its other side is the the
huge and grim Pitti Palace, then Florence's political centre
as the residence first of the Grand Duke Leopold, then of King
Victor Emanuel. The plaque above the door on the left
proclaims that Elizabeth's poetry made a golden ring between
Italy and England. In Casa Guidi Windows I she
describe seeing the joyous procession up the Via Maggio from
the Ponte Santa Trinita to the Grand duke's palace, in Casa
Guidi Windows II she describes seeing the invading
Austrian army in their white uniforms with their cannons
coming up the street by Santa Felicita's church.
Elizabeth
became friends with Margaret Fuller, her presumed husband and
their child Angelo who, fleeing the disaster of Giuseppe
Mazzini's Roman Republic came to Florence in April 1850,
shortly before their deaths by drowning in the ship
'Elizabeth' off Fire Island, on 19 July of that year.
Elizabeth would turn her into the character of Aurora of her Aurora
Leigh. Another of their American friends was Harriet
Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin against
slavery in America, while others included the Hawthornes and
the young Kate Field, journalist for the Atlantic Monthly,
and Harriet Hosmer, sculptress, who sculpted their
'Clasped Hands' when they were staying in Rome.
Harriet Hosmer's Clasped Hands of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert
Browning
Their English friends included Walter Savage Landor, whom they would eventually care for in his senile dementia, Elizabeth speaking of him having 'the most beautiful sea-foam of a beard you ever saw, all in a curl and white bubblement of beauty'; Seymour Kirkup, who discovered Giotto's portrait of Dante in the Bargello Magdalen Chapel (7); John Ruskin, who wrote Mornings in Florence; Tennyson's brother, Frederick Tennyson; Robert Lytton, who became Viceroy of India; and - at a distance - the Trollopes. Elizabeth also kept George Eliot at a distance when that novelist came to Italy to research the period of Savonarola for Romola.
Elizabeth placed on the Casa Guidi marble mantelpiece the two engravings from Hengist Horne's New Spirit of the Age, which she helped edit in her Wimpole Street sickroom, of Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate, and Robert Browning, author of Paracelsus. She had jokingly proposed to both of them in her 1844 poem, Lady Geraldine's Courtship, before meeting either poet, when speaking of her heroine reading with her lover hero, of
aaa
And these images would be joined on the mantelpiece in Casa Guidi (1) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sketch of Tennyson reading 'Maud', about which event Elizabeth wrote in October 1855.
Robert,
meanwhile, furnished the vast room in which Elizabeth wrote (and
which she said was 'like a room in a novel') with antiques,
including its great gold-framed mirror, and paintings, many
pieces resulting from the suppression of monasteries, bought in
San Lorenzo Market (13)
where, one day, he found 'The Old Yellow Book' about a man's
murder of his wife.
The visit to
Vallombrosa was succeeded by stays in Bagni di Lucca where, one
morning in 1849, Elizabeth shyly gave Robert her sonnets she had
written of their love, now years ago, in her Wimpole Street
sickroom. And which he promptly published as Sonnets from
the Portuguese. It was here in Casa Guidi (1),
9 March 1849, that Pen Browning, their child, was born, about
whom Elizabeth would write in both Casa Guidi Windows II
and in Aurora Leigh. It was here that Elizabeth saw the
Grand Duke come back with the Austrian Army, 12 April 1848, to
oppress the Florentine people, forbidding their flag of red,
white and green, from Dante's Beatrice in Purgatorio.
Elizabeth defiantly furnished her salon with white and red
curtains against its green walls, those colours of the Italian
flag forbidden by the Grand Duke. She would write in the low
deckchair in the foreground of George Mignaty's painting,
stuffing the sheets between the cushions when visitors called.
It was here in the bedroom, 29 June 1861, that Elizabeth Barrett
Browning died, his father cutting off Pen's curls and also hers
and journeying back to England with the boy, after commissioning
George Mignaty to paint the room in which she had written so
many of her letters and her major poems.
Robert after her death went on to write the murder story of The Ring and the Book, from the 'Old Yellow Book' he had found in San Lorenzo Market, beginning it and ending it speaking of his wife. Their son Pen when he grew up preferred the Continent to England, became a painter and a sculptor, studying under Rodin, one bronze bust he made being of 'Pompilia', his model, his illegitimate Breton daughter, Ginevra, and thus Elizabeth's granddaughter. Robert and Elizabeth had shared a friendship with Isa Blagden, which Robert continued following his wife's death. Elizabeth had used the landscape from Isa's Bellosguardo terrace for the setting of Aurora's house in Florence - though its interior is that of via Maggio's Casa Guidi (1).
The View from Bellosguardo (17), reached by way of
the Oltrarno (beyond the Arno and beyond this map) Porta
Romana and turning right and climbing up the hill. This
painting by the Pre-Raphaelite John Brett of Bellosguardo
shows the medieval walls before Giuseppe Poggi tore them
down to make the viale, modeled on Parisian boulevards, at
the Risorgimento when Florence briefly became capital of
Italy. The Jewish Cemetery can be seen at the extreme left
outside the wall, just as the Protestant Cemetery (16) was just outside the
medieval wall but on the opposite side of Florence.
Though from a Jamaican family whose wealth came from slaves, Elizabeth hated slavery and oppression, using her poetry to write for the liberation of slaves, children, women, nations, Greece, and also Italy, in her day ground under by the Austrians, the Spanish, the French, the Pope. She witnessed the Austrian army passing beneath her Casa Guidi windows. She, as a woman, was barred from reading newspapers and novels at the Gabinetto Vieusseux, though her husband and Fedor Dosteivsky had that liberty. She joked that the periodicals are guarded there like Hesperian apples by the dragons of the place. She did not live to see the freedom of Rome with Italy. Her support of Italy's Risorgimento is acknowledged in the plaque on Casa Guidi which proclaims in Italian that she 'made of her verse a golden ring wedding Italy to England'. Leighton, who studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti (14), designed her tomb in the English Cemetery (16), 1861, with a broken slave shackle upon a garlanded harp.
One could have wished Robert Browning and Lord Leighton had seen fit to include pomegranates on Elizabeth's tomb in the Piazzale Donatello. Robert was to wed his poetry to Elizabeth's in The Ring and the Book through Castellani's lilied ring. Elizabeth had powerfully wed her poetry to Robert's through her embroidering of the High Priestly pomegranate into Lady Geraldine's Courtship, into her Letters to Robert Browning, and, later, in Aurora Leigh.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Tomb, 'English
Cemetery'
a
Frederic Lord Leighton, Self-Portraits, In
Youth, In Maturity, Uffizi Gallery (5)
Instead, Leighton's tomb has the thistle, rose and shamrock of the British Isles, the lily of Florence, the laurel of the poet's crown, and the three lyres of poetry, one with the broken slave shackle and roses, shown above, the two others with olive branches.
The Brownings had been accompanied on their honeymoon by Anna Jameson, a fine art historian, and John Ruskin was sketching in Pisa when they arrived there. Anna Jameson's father painted miniatures on ivory of the paintings in Windsor Castle and his red-haired daughter knew these paintings well and others and wrote about them in books. Among them would have been Johann Zoffany's painting of the Uffizi's Tribune (5) which we shall see below. The Brownings numbered among their friends the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
a
Robert
Browning by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
and Holman
Hunt's wife Fanny would come to be buried beside Elizabeth in
the English
Cemetery in a tomb Hunt sculpted. The Brownings were an
important link between Italy and England's Pre-Raphaelites, also
her Anglican Oxford Movement which sought likewise to return to
the Catholicism of medieval England. The Brownings were English in Italy.
While Dante Gabriel Rossetti's father
was exiled from Italy, teaching Dante in London. His son
imagined the Florence he never saw in his early and most
self-referential painting of 'Dante painting Angels', a
scene he took from Dante Alighieri's Vita Nuova, and
which gives the Arno and its bridges (4).
Dante
Gabriel Rossetti,
Dante Painting Angels, Ashmolean Museum
A similar self-referential painting was executed by the similarly very young, but academic painter, Frederic Leighton, who had studied at Florence's Accademia di Belle Arti (14).
Elizabeth had written the note to Casa Guidi Windows, I. 334 [1848], about Cimabue's Madonna, 'A king stood bare before its sovran grace: Charles of Anjou, whom, in his passage through Florence Cimabue allowed to see this picture while yet in his "Bottega". The populace followed the royal visitor, and, in the universal delight and admiration, the quarter of the city in which the artist lived was called "Borgo Allegri". The picture was carried in triumph to the church, and deposited there. E.B.B.' In Elizabeth Barrett Browning's day the Cimabue painting was still in Santa Maria Novella (11). Thus she tells the story that will become the painting. Then she wrote joyously in a 13 May 1855 letter about Queen Victoria purchasing the not yet twenty-five-year-old Frederic Leighton's 'Carrying Cimabue's Madonna through the Borgo Allegri' (8). (If one looks with care to the top of the scene on the right, one can see San Miniato. (3)) In July-August of that year Robert Browning introduced Frederic Leighton to John Ruskin.
Elizabeth
filled her letters and poems with Florence, giving as it were, a
guidebook to Florentine art. One finds her in the letters
speaking of the 'golden Arno', at sunset, a 'silver arrow'
cleaving the palaces (4),
of strolling with Robert on moonlit evenings to the Loggia to
look at the 'Perseus' (6).
Recently, Florentine churches have been scrubbed clean. In Elizabeth's day they were lit with candles which darkened the walls but made the gold leaf gleam. Our selection of images are partly taken from an English water colourist, Colonel C. Goff, because these evoke what Elizabeth herself saw. Then I had no sooner started drafting together this book than in walked a tall young Yorkshire artist, James Rotherham, with portfolio, - including a drawing of Cellini's 'Perseus' in the Loggia dei Lanzi (6). I had met him at Mass morning after morning at the Santissima Annunziata (15) in Florence. Together we plotted how best to illustrate Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry about Florence and his art. His second contribution - the Santissima Annunziata's 'Madonna of the Seven Sorrows'. All this editorializing transpired in the English Cemetery in Piazzale Donatello (17), where Elizabeth Barrett Browning is buried and beside which is Michele Gordigiani's studio.
Elizabeth besides filled her letters with Italian politics, European politics, filtered through her passionate love of liberty, functioning to her large circle of friends as a journalist, much as had also Jessie White Mario and Margaret Fuller and Kate Field. Though she lamented being forbidden to enter, as a woman, the Gabinetto Vieusseux (sacred to men such as Robert Browning, John Ruskin and Fedor Dostoevsky), and thus was denied access to newspapers, censored during that period by the Grand Duke. Her letters and her poetry witness the birth, the freeing, of a nation, whose capital for a brief while came to be her Florence.
In the pages that follow Elizabeth uses the Italian forms of terza rima for Casa Guidi Windows, and the sonnet, for 'Hiram Powers' Greek Slave', and the Sonnets from the Portuguese, English blank verse for Aurora Leigh, the ballad form for 'An August Voice', as well as 'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point', and the classical Pindaric Ode for her eulogy on Camille Cavour, recalling that Corinna won the garland for that form in ancient Greece. This book is anthology and guide, an anthology of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse, a historical guide for us now to her beloved city of Florence, the 'golden ring between Italy and England'.
Lord Leighton's Florentine Lily
on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Tomb
HER POETRY ABOUT FLORENCE I
[Hypertexted numbers signify places that can
be found on map. Call up both
files and cycle between them. Casa Guidi (1) is open on Monday,
Wednesday and Friday from 3:00 until 6:00, except in winter. The
English
Cemetery (16), is open
Monday morning, 9:00-12:00, Tuesday through Friday afternoons,
summer, 3:00-6:00 p.m., winter, 2:00-5:00 p.m.]
AUDIO FILE OF
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING'S FLORENCE, ♫
CASA GUIDI WINDOWS, to
accompany Elizabeth
Barrett Browning's Florence and Map of Florence.
CASA GUIDI WINDOWS I [1848]
I
I heard last night a little
child go singing
‘Neath Casa Guidi
windows (1), by the church,
‘O bella libertà, O
bella!’ stringing
The same words still on
notes he went in search
So high for, you concluded the upspringing
Of such a nimble bird to
sky from perch
Must leave the whole bush in a tremble green;
And that the heart of
Italy must beat,
While such a voice had leave to rise serene
‘Twixt church and palace
of a Florence street!
A little child, too, who not long had been
By mother’s finger
steadied on his feet;
And still O bella libertà he sang.
Pen Browning, Elizabeth's son,
born in Florence, 9 March 1849
It was he who arranged for the above plaque to be placed on
Casa guidi
. . .
I can but muse in hope upon this shore
Of golden Arno as it shoots away
Straight through the heart of Florence, ‘neath
the four
Bent
bridges (4), seeming to strain off like bows,
And tremble, while the
arrowy undertide
Shoots on and cleaves the marble as
it goes,
And strikes up palace-walls on either side,
And froths the cornice out in
glittering rows,
. . .
How beautiful! The mountains from without
In silence listen for the word said
next,
(What word will men say?) here
where Giotto planted
His campanile (10), like an unperplexed
Question to Heaven, concerning the
things granted
To a great people.
Colonel Goff, Water Colour, Prior to 1905
What word says God? The sculptor’s Night and Day
And Dawn and Twilight, wait in
marble scorn,
. . .
Michelangelo, Aurora, Medici Tombs, San Lorenzo
In Florence and the great world outside his
Florence,
That’s Michel Angelo! His
statues wait
In the small chapel of the dim St
Lawrence! (12)
Day’s eyes are breaking bold
and passionate
Over his shoulder, and will flash
aborrence
On darkness, and with level
looks meet fate,
When once loose from that marble film
of theirs:
The Night has wild dreams in her sleep, the Dawn
Is haggard as the sleepless: Twilight
wears
A sort of horror: as the veil withdrawn
‘Twixt the artist’s soul and works
had left them heirs
Of the deep thoughts which would not quail nor
fawn,
Of angers and contempts, of hope and
love;
For not without a meaning did he place
The princely Urbino on the seat above
With everlasting shadow on his face;
While the slow dawns and twilights
disapprove
The aches of his long-exhausted race,
Which never more shall clog the feet
of men.
X
Or enter, in your Florence
wanderings,
The church of St. Maria
Novella (11).
You pass
The left stair, where, at plague-time. Machiavel
Saw one with set fair face as
in a glass,
Dressed out against the fear of death and hell,
Rustling her silks in pauses of the
mass,
To keep the thought off how her husband fell,
When she left home, stark dead across
her feet, -
The stair leads up to what Orgagna gave
Of Dante's daemons; but you, passing
it,
Ascend the right stair from the farther nave,
To muse in a small chapel scarcely
lit
By Cimabue's Virgin.
Colonel Goff, Water Colour, Santa Maria
Novella Madonna and Child, Cimabue, actually the Rucellai
Madonna
Bright and brave,
That picture was accounted, mark of
old:
A king stood bare before its
sovran grace,
A reverent people shouted to behold
The picture, not the king, and even the place
Containing such a miracle grew bold,
Named the
Glad Borgo (8) from that beauteous
face . . . .
. . .
Perseus, Loggia, Benvenuto Cellini, drawn by James
Rotherham (6)
No the
people sought no wings
From Perseus in the Loggia,
nor implored
An inspiration in the place beside,
From that
dim bust of Brutus (7), jagged and grand,
Where Buonarotti
passionately tried
Out of the clenched marble to demand
The head of Rome’s sublimest homicide,
Then dropt the quivering mallet from
his hand,
Despairing he could find no model stuff
Of Brutus, in all Florence . . .
Michelangelo,
Bust of Brutus, Bargello Museum (7)
XXVIII
. . .
England claims, by trump of poetry,
Verona, Venice, the Ravenna-shore
And dearer holds her Milton’s Fiesole
Than Langland’s Malvern with the
stars in flower
. . .
XXIX
And Vallombrosa (18), we two went to see
Last June, beloved companion, - where
sublime
The mountains live in holy families,
And the slow pinewoods ever climb and
climb
Half way up their breasts, just stagger as they
seize
Some grey crag - drop back with it
many a time,
And straggle blindly down the precipice!
The Vallombrosan brooks were strewn
as thick
That June-day, knee-deep, with dead beechen
leaves,
As Milton saw them ere his heart grew sick,
And his eyes blind. . . .
O waterfalls
And forests! Sound and
silence! Mountains bare,
That leap up peak by peak, and catch
the palls
Of purple and silver mist to rend and share
With one another, at electric calls
Of life in the sunbeams, - til we cannot dare
Fix your shapes, learn your number!
We must think
Your beauty and your glory helped to fill
The cup of Milton’s soul so to the
brink,
That he no more was thirsty when God’s will
Had shattered to his sense the last
chain-link
By which he had drawn from Nature’s visible
The fresh well-water. Satisfied by
this,
He sang of Adam’s paradise and smiled,
Remembering Vallombrosa. Therefore is
The place divine to English man and child –
We all love Italy.
XXX
. . .
. . .
CASA GUIDI WINDOWS II [1851]
XXV
The sun strikes, through the
windows, up the floor (1)
Stand out in it, my own young Florentine,
Not two years old, and let me see
thee more!
It grows along thy amber curls, to shine
Brighter than elsewhere. Now, look
straight before,
And fix thy brave blue English eyes on mine,
And from thy soul, which fronts the
future so,
With unabashed and unabated gaze,
Teach me to hope for, what the Angels
know
When they smile clear as thou dost.
Pen Browning
XXX
‘Here’s sculpture! Ah, we live too! Why not
throw
Our life into our marbles? Art
has place
For other artists after Angelo.’ (7,12,14)
HIRAM POWERS’ GREEK SLAVE [1850]
Elizabeth saw this statue in Hiram Powers' studio in Florence, prior to its presence in the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition, and wrote this powerful sonnet to it against Slavery.
They say Ideal Beauty cannot enter
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!
Longworth Powers' Photograph of Hiram Powers. EBB
spoke of Powers' expressive black eyes.
He is buried near Elizabeth Barrett Browning
in Florence's English
Cemetery (16)
♫ ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING'S FLORENCE
HER POETRY ABOUT FLORENCE
II
a
AURORA LEIGH I [1856]
The Piazza of the Santissima Annunziata
A train of priestly banners, cross and psalm, -
The white-veiled rose-crowned
maidens holding up
Tall tapers, weighty for such wrists, aslant
To the blue luminous tremor of the air,
And letting drop the white wax as they went
To eat the bishop’s wafer in the church;
Colonel Goff, First Communion, Fiesole
. . . There’s a verse he set
In Santa Croce (8) to her memory,
‘Weep for an infant too young
to weep much
when death removed this mother’ - stops the
mirth
To-day 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.
Colonel Goff, Santa Croce (8)
The child Aurora gazes on the painting of her dead mother:
Madonna of the Seven Sorrows, Santissima Annunziata, Water Colour, James Rotherham (15)
or,
Lamia
in
her first
Moonlighted pallor, ere she shrunk and blinked,
And,
shuddering, wriggled down to the unclean;
Or, my
own mother, leaving her last smile
In her
last kiss, upon the baby-mouth
My
father pushed down on the bed for that, -
Or my
dead mother, without smile or kiss,
Buried at Florence
(8,16).
VI
Marian and Aurora gaze on the sleeping child, who is both Elizabeth's Penini and Margaret Fuller's Angelo:
B.png)
Sandro
Botticelli, Madonna della Melagrana, Detail of Child with
Pomegranate
VII
I found a house, at Florence,
on the hill
Of Bellosguardo (17).
‘Tis a tower that keeps
A post of double observation o’er
The valley of Arno (holding as a hand
The outspread city (4))
straight toward Fiesole
And Mount Morello and the setting sun, -
The Vallombrosan mountains to the right,
Which sunrise fills as full as crystal cups
Wine-filled, and red to the brim because it’s
red.
No sun could die, not yet be born, unseen
By dwellers at my villa: morn and eve
Were magnified before us in the pure
Illimitable space and pause of sky,
Intense as angels’ garments blanched with God,
Less blue than radiant. From the outer wall
Of the garden, dropped the mystic floating grey
Of olive-trees, (with interruptions green
From maize and vine) until ‘twas caught and torn
On that abrupt black line of cypresses
Which signed the way to Florence. Beautiful
The city lay along the ample vale,
Cathedral, tower and palace, piazza and street;
The river trailing like a silver cord
Through all, and curling loosely, both before
And after, over the whole stretch of land
Sown whitely up and down its opposite slopes
With farms and villas.
Engraving of Bellosguardo
The noon was hot; the air scorched like the sun,
And was shut out. The closed persiani threw
Their long-scored shadows on my villa-floor,
And interlined the golden atmosphere
Straight, still, - across the pictures on the
wall,
The statuette on the console, (of young Love
And Psyche made one marble by a kiss) (5)
The low couch were I leaned, the table near,
The vase of lilies, Marian pulled last night
. . .
aaa
Canova, Cupid and Psyche,
Louvre
Amore and Psyche, Uffizi (5)
. . .
Here Elizabeth describes Casa Guidi rather than Bellosguardo, and, with the statue imagined as on the console, she remembers her translation of Apuleius, Metamorphoses IV. Giorgio Mignaty's painting of Casa Guidi for Robert Browning at EBB's death. (1)
She has appropriated the statue of Cupid and Psyche from the Uffizi, seen here to the left in Johann Zoffany, 'The Tribune of the Uffizi', 1772-78. (5)
And only once, at the Santissima (15),
I
almost chanced upon a man I knew.
He
saw
me
certainly.
I
slipped so quick behind the porphyry plinth,
And
left him dubious if 'twas really I.
Engraving of Miracle of Blind Girl Recovering
her Sight at Santissima Annunziata
VIII
Gradually
The purple and transparent
shadows slow
Had filled up the whole valley to the brim,
And flooded all the city, which you saw
As some drowned city in some enchanted sea . . .
The duomo bell (9,10)
Strikes ten, as if it struck ten fathoms down,
So
deep; and fifty churches answer it
The same, with fifty various instances.
Some gaslights tremble along squares and
streets;
The Pitti’s
palace-front is drawn in fire (2);
And, past the quays,
Maria Novella’s Place (11),
In which the mystic obelisks
stand up
Triangular, pyramidal, each
based
On a single trine of brazen tortoises,
To guard that fair church, Buonarotti’s Bride,
That stares out from her large blind dial-eyes,
Her quadrant and armillary dials, black
With rhythms of many suns and moons
. . .
Colonel Goff, Santa Maria Novella
IX
Elizabeth ends Aurora Leigh imagining the then twelve-gated Florence as the heavenly Jerusalem, from the Book of Revelation, while Aurora and Romney (who is now blind), gaze down upon it from Bellosguardo (17)
. . . .Upon the thought of perfect noon. - 'Jasper first,' I said,
AN AUGUST VOICE
You'll take back your Grand-duke?
I made the treaty upon it.
Just venture a quiet rebuke;
Dall'Ongaro write him a sonnet;
Ricasoli gently explain
Some need of the constitution:
He'll swear to it over again,
Providing an "easy solution."
You'll call back the Grand-duke.
. . . .
He is not pure altogether.
For instance, the oath which he took
(In the Forty-eight rough weather)
He'd "nail your flag to his mast,"
Then softly scuttled the boat you
Hoped to escape in at last
. . . .
You'll take back your Grand-duke?
There are some things to object to,
He cheated, betrayed, and
forsook,
Then called in the foe to protect
you.
He taxed you for wines and for meats
Throughout that eight years' pastime
Of Austria's drum in your streets -
Of course you remember the last time
You called back your Grand-duke?
. . . .
His love of kin you discern
By his hate of your flag and me -
So decidedly apt to turn
All colours at the sight of the
Three.
You'll call back the Grand-duke.
You'll take back your Grand-duke?
'Twas weak that he fled from the Pitti
(2);
But consider how little he
shook
At thought of bombarding your city!
. . . .
You'll call back the Grand-duke.
From LAST POEMS [1862]
KING VICTOR EMANUEL ENTERING FLORENCE, APRIL, 1860
King of us all, we cried to thee, cried to thee,
Trampled to earth by the
beasts impure,
Dragged by the chariots
which shame as they roll:
The dust of our torment far
and wide to thee
Went up, dark'ning thy royal soul.
Be witness,
Cavour,
That the King was sad for the people in thrall,
This King of
us all!
a
Camille, Count Cavour, by
Michele Gordigiani who also painted the portraits
of Robert and Elizabeth in his studio by the English
Cemetery (16)
. . . .
This is our beautiful
Italy's birthday;
High-thoughted souls,
whether many or fewer,
Bring her the gift, and
wish her the good,
While Heaven presents on this
sunny earth-day
The noble King to the
land renewed:
Be witness, Cavour!
Roar, cannon-mouths! Proclaim, install
The
King
of
us all!
Grave he rides through the Florence gateway,
Clenching his face
into calm, to immure
His struggling heart
till it half disappears;
If he relaxed for a moment,
straightway
He would break out
into passionate tears -
(Be witness, Cavour!)
While rings the cry without interval,
"Live,
King
of
us all!"
. . . .
Flowers, flowers, from the flowery city!
Such innocent thanks for a
deed so pure,
As, melting away for joy
into flowers,
The nation invites him to enter his
Pitti (2)
And evermore reign in
this Florence of ours.
Be witness, Cavour!
He'll stand where the reptiles were used to
crawl,
This King of us all.
. . . .
[Hpertexted numbers signify places that can be found on map. Casa Guidi (1) is open on Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 3:00 until 6:00, except in winter. The English Cemetery (16), is open Monday morning, 9:00-12:00, Tuesday through Friday afternoons, summer, 3:00-6:00 p.m., winter, 2:00-5:00 p.m.]
Elizabeth Barrett Browning twice describes the
silver arrow of the Arno River (4)
shooting through the city of Florence. In Casa Guidi
Windows I.52-59
I can but muse in hope upon
this shore
Of
golden
Arno
as it shoots away
Straight through the heart of Florence, 'neath the four
Bent
bridges
(4), seeming to strain
off like bows,
And
tremble, while the arrowy undertide
Shoots
on
and
cleaves the marble as it goes,
And
strikes up palace-walls on either side,
And
froths
the
cornice out in glittering rows,
With
doors and windows quaintly multiplied,
And
terrace-sweeps,
and
gazers upon all,
By
whom if flower or kerchief were thrown out
From
any
lattice
there, the same would fall
Into
the river underneath no doubt,
It
runs
so
close and fast, 'twixt wall and wall.
How
beautiful.
And in Aurora Leigh VII.534-537:
Beautiful
The city lay along the ample
vale,
Cathedral, tower and
palace, piazza and street,
The river trailing like a
silver cord
Through all (4), and curling loosely,
both before
And after, over the whole
stretch of land
Sown whitely up and down
its opposite slopes
With farms and
villas.
Robert Browning, The Ring and
the Book
Virginia Woolf, Flush:
A Biography
Flush:
Una biografia. in italiano
Before the Risorgimento, Florence's walls and city gates, built first by Arnolfo di Cambio, then by Michelangelo, had enclosed her. This map shows Florence as it was in the earlier nineteenth century, from Augustus Hare's Florence:
Protestant Cemetery
Before 1877
IN STOCK
Oh Bella Libertà! Le Poesie di Elizabeth Barrett Browning. A cura di Rita Severi e Julia Bolton Holloway. Firenze: Le Lettere, 2022. 290 pp.
For other Florence guides/Per altre guide di Firenze: https://www.florin.ms/GoldenRingGuides.html
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THANKYOU!
