Or What You Will Read online

  Italy’s “reunification” can be seen as one of the first colonial revolts. Italy had been colonized by other European countries, France and Austria and Spain. Michelangelo’s bastions were not enough to keep them out. And while some fragments of the Italian peninsula remained quirkily independent, so did some parts of India under British colonial rule. Garibaldi and Cavour and Mazzini were fighting for independence from external rule, just as the Greeks and other Balkan nations were fighting against the Turks at about the same time, and just as people in India, Africa, Ireland, and South America, would do then and later. And precisely because Italy was such a disparate set of states, it was easier to get everyone pointing in the same direction by appealing to the geographical abstraction. San Marino remains an independent pocket-handkerchief country entirely surrounded by Italy even now, which would mean nothing except for the way Marchese Serlupi, the ambassador from San Marino to Italy, sheltered many of the Jews of Firenze under the fig leaf of his diplomatic umbrella during the German occupation. But though different parts of Italy have different languages, different economies, and completely different histories, the country was fused together and hasn’t shown as much sign as you’d expect of wanting to devolve into semi-independent regions. And under Fascism, of course, it tried hard to be a colonial power itself in Libya and Abyssinia, and show itself just as powerful and unpleasant as all the other European countries. Free unified Italy tried to reach back to older things, revive parts of the history of parts of the country and universalise them. This worked strangely, as you would expect, patchily, with some unexpected successes and some things that failed without trace. But Firenze’s walls are gone, and only the gates remain.

  When shall we walk the walls? In the later Renaissance, when they are complete but defended? We’d be challenged, and we’d have to have a good explanation for what we were doing there. How about in the mid-nineteenth century, when they are overgrown and crumbling, with flowers growing out of every crack? Shall we walk them twenty years before they are pulled down to make way for that symbol of modernity and progress, a ring road? Come then to the late spring of 1847, when poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning find their happy ending in an escape to Firenze. Freed from the restrictions of the sickroom, and taken into healthful beauty, the poets blossomed in Italy’s warmth and sunlight. But it was in chilly London that Elizabeth wrote her memorable masterpieces, both the Sonnets from the Portuguese and the love letters, in which you can see two poets drawing closer to each other as they talk passionately about the vitality of art. Naturally, they came here. As the religious go to kneel where prayer has been valid, artists of all kinds come here, where art has. It’s not just art, but art as life, art as the wellspring, the community of art, the golden age where everyone is making things, full of a burning excitement to show them to each other. In many ways, the best time to see Renaissance art is now, when it’s on display, in air conditioning and excellent lighting, and open to anyone with the price of a ticket. But the best time to make it is when it’s all new, all in the process of discovery, when oils are just coming in, lost wax sculpture has just been rediscovered, and when somebody might invent perspective in between making the trial panel and making the whole door.

  Even in 1847, Firenze attracted artists of all kinds, poets among them. Firenze was ruled in this period, after Napoleon and before the Reunification and all that nonsense of destroying walls and building elaborate wedding-cake bombast on the Roman Forum, by Austria. It is the most politically peaceful, and certainly the least corrupt, that Firenze has ever been, or will ever be. The Austrians are barbarians, of course, who don’t understand the Florentines and paint the Palazzo Vecchio white. But because of the relative political calm, and because of the beauty of the sky and the hills and the river and the houses and palazzi, clustering within the walls, because of the immortal art, left to Firenze by the last of the Medici on condition that it never leaves the city, there is a community here now of English artists and writers and poets. People can live here much more cheaply than in England, and besides, it is warm and full of beauty. Elsewhere, the English are busily asserting themselves in oppressing the world, plundering India, abusing local people and snatching their land from Canada to Australia, making themselves disagreeable and exploitative under palm and pine. Here too, on no evidence, they regard themselves in every way as superior to the locals, even as they enjoy a life much better than they could have had at home. The food alone is incomparably better. (It is at this time that a sad English translator of Boccaccio has to explain ravioli in a footnote as “a kind of rissole.”) Here are fresh fruits and cheeses, dried and smoked meats, pasta of all kinds, wines, and olive oil, all in perfect condition, all delicious, and much better than they could have at home. Everything but the bread, that is. Florentine bread contains no salt, still, in memory of the siege of 1530.

  It’s interesting that there are, of course, many Austrians in Firenze in 1847, but they are all administrators and soldiers. There isn’t a colony of Austrian artists, or artists from elsewhere in the Austrian Empire. But the English are here, for whatever reasons, economic, social, artistic. And the Florentines of course are here, and still making art, and writing fiction and poetry, and history, for it is a little while yet before they all get caught up in the art project of making a new country. When it comes to that, poets can be fools as easily as anyone else.

  But it is only 1847, May 15th of that year, early afternoon and the sun is shining. Here on the walls, looking out over the Tuscan countryside, at the folds of the hills and the distant monastery of San Miniato, with a sketchbook in the reticule that dangles from one hand and a furled parasol in the other, is a nineteen-year-old English girl called Tish. Her name is Laetitia Blackstone, but Tish is what she is called by her father, her stepmother, her brother and sister, her aunts and cousins and particular friends. The young man who is with her on the walls addresses her formally as Miss Blackstone, a title she inherited two years ago on the marriage of her elder sister, who is called Vinnie, and whose name is Lavinia, or formally, now, Mrs Baker, a name Tish finds sadly pedestrian. Their mother, who thought it charming to call her first two babies Lavinia and Laetitia, died fifteen years ago, shortly after giving birth to their brother Lawrence. Tish does not remember her mother, and feels bad about feeling no sense of loss. Unlike the heroines of fairy stories, she gets on well with her young stepmother, Rebecca. She is not a resident of the city, though her family have been welcomed by the expatriate community. They are visitors only, passing through, spending the summer in Italy taking in art and culture.

  Tish has a trimmed straw bonnet with a broad rose ribbon tying it down under her chin to make a funnel, so that she cannot see in any direction except straight forward unless she turns her head. She is wearing a walking dress made up of fuss in palest pink. Under it, even for this excursion along the walls, is a newfangled contraption of bone and wood and wire, a scaffolding that holds the skirt in place, a crinoline, replacing the much heavier layers of petticoats common a few years before. The skirt falls over it in three layers of flouncing, with ribbons and lace. She thinks this outfit is delightful and enjoys wearing it. She does not wonder what she could do if she were not tightly laced into a corset that does not let her breathe deeply, or if she did not have to carry the weight of crinoline and skirts that shape her into an hourglass. As a little girl she used to run with Vinnie and Larry, climb trees, catch and kick at balls, but she was glad to graduate to the prison of these adult clothes, which she thinks of as beautiful. Yet she is not a fool. She knows Latin and Hebrew, and is quite passionately fond of art and of Firenze.

  Young Adolfo Tornabuoni, known as Dolly, beside her, offering her his arm to help her over any slightest irregularity in the surface of the top of the wall, is wearing the uniform of men of his class and status anywhere in Europe at this time, which is to say a black jacket and trousers, a white shirt, and a tie. He has, however, substituted the matching headwear for a vermilion ha
t that would not have been out of place in the Renaissance, a chaperon of all things, one exactly like those Brunelleschi and Manetto wore, rolled and folded to cover his head and neck. He has also substituted the expected Victorian poker face with a merry grin. He has irrepressibly curling brown hair that constantly falls into his face. He is only four years older than his companion. And yes, his name is Adolfo, which means wolf, and which was a noble and popular name for centuries before it became contaminated by one evil bearer and so lost to everyone else forever. He is a scion of the ancient Florentine Tornabuoni family.

  They alternate between speaking English and Italian together. She has a young Englishwoman’s accomplished Italian (which has been less practical use in Italy than she imagined it would be), and he has the excellent English of Balliol College, Oxford, from which he has just graduated with honours, with a vocabulary helped out by a passionate love of Shakespeare. He lives in Firenze, in a palazzo that has belonged to his family since it was built six hundred years before. She lives at Blackstone House, near Manchester, in a house her grandfather, a goldsmith’s son turned soldier, built with money he made exploiting India. She is presently staying, with her family, in a comfortable hotel near the Bargello Museum, still, in 1847, in use as a prison. Tish is taller than Dolly is, she is taller than almost everyone, reaching nearly to six foot, a terrible affliction for a girl in 1847, and one that a bonnet, crimped black curls, a crinoline, and even a pair of dimples cannot atone for. She has almost resigned herself to the thought that she is so tall she will never marry, that she will have to content herself with being an aunt to Vinnie and Larry’s children, of which there are none so far.

  Dolly enjoys walking along the walls with a pretty English girl, showing her the city, perhaps contemplating a marriage alliance—wondering how much her dowry would be, as they have a great deal in common, even if she is English and taller than him. If the dowry were good, his family would approve the match, he thinks, which would redeem him in his father’s eyes for his scholarship and whimsy. He thinks it is a pity her older sister should not be available. Vinnie is shorter and prettier than Tish, less of a scholar but more of a tomboy—in Dolly’s hearing, Vinnie has deplored her crinoline and confessed that she would like to play cricket. Dolly is still very young. He knows he will have to do something to revive the family coffers before they are reduced to selling off their art, but he wants to be a scholar. Fortunate enough to be born in the world’s most beautiful city he longs to live in its golden age, or re-evoke it, as Petrarch did antiquity. “Your sister is married, I think?” he asks.

  “Yes.” Tish is used to attractive men asking her about Vinnie, and replies shortly.

  “Why doesn’t her husband accompany you?”

  “Mr Baker has to work, in London,” she says. This is the truth, but not all the truth. This whole trip has been planned by Rebecca, Tish and Vinnie’s stepmother, to help Vinnie recover from losing a baby. For this to work, it is essential to separate the two grieving parents, so that they can cease to reproach each other and have something else to talk about when they are reunited. It is a plan into which Rebecca has put much thought, and which she fully intends for everyone’s good.

  “What does he do?”

  Tish does not like Daniel Baker, who she thinks bullies Vinnie. She does not share her stepmother’s hope that a separation will effect a reconciliation. She has seen Vinnie become young again since they left England, though she is still not quite well. She had been meant to accompany them on this excursion, but felt faint and had to stop to rest. She is sitting perched on a tummock in a shady spot beneath the walls, fanning herself, resting until they return to her. She insisted the other two go on. Tish glances back, but the curve of the walls means that Vinnie is out of sight already, which means she must be left to her expected destiny. We can spare a pang for Vinnie, who deserves more from life than the opportunities her sex and station have allowed her. But her life is still incomparably better than that of so many women in this world in 1847. We cannot rescue them all even in fiction, or even give them our attention, and the pang we spare them must be vast, especially those who are neither white, nor rich, nor educated.

  “He is a banker, which is the most boring thing in the world,” Tish says, answering Dolly’s question about Vinnie’s husband’s profession.

  “Oh no, I cannot allow you to believe that. My family were bankers, you know.”

  Tish laughs, showing her dimples, and putting her hand to her mouth, her reticule dangling from her wrist on its little chain. “Oh, but bankers were more fun back then. I wouldn’t mind being banker to Lorenzo de’ Medici and paying Ghirlandaio to fresco my chapel. I adore your family chapel in Santa Maria Novella. But in our times the romance is sadly absent from banking, Mr Tornabuoni.”

  “Oh do call me Dolly,” he says, impulsively, and though it is not something people do, he looks both so Italian and so boyish in his ridiculous hat, that she nods consent, and at that moment I slip into him, filling him up in one quicksilver gulp, and he catches fire, moves from a placeholder much less interesting than the too-tall young lady by his side to become a person with his own thoughts, his own agenda, my grin and quirk of the brow. Don’t ask how I perform this trick of consciousness. I’ve been doing it for so long now that it seems quite natural. I do not slip on Dolly like shrugging on a suit of clothes, I become part of him like a soul entering a body. I enter into him, and he becomes part of me.

  “Then I must be Tish,” she says, offering her big capable hand. Tish gives her a real smile now, for as he catches fire so does she, and the walls, with the plants growing between the cracks in the grey stone, and the landscape outside the walls, and Firenze inside, the Duomo, and the Palazzo Vecchio, the old palace in its temporary coat of Austrian whitewash, and the dark curve of the Arno, with the Ponte Vecchio, the old bridge with its shops, and the clear curve of Ponte Santa Trinitá, the bridge Michelangelo helped design. “How funny that we both have nonsensical nicknames.”

  “What’s nonsensical about Dolly?” he asks, shaking her hand, and for a moment she thinks she has committed a faux pas, and then he laughs slyly, and she sees that he is teasing her.

  “Why, nothing in the world, except a young man being called after a little girl’s toy,” she says, taking back her hand. “I expect that is the mature kind of joke men care for at Oxford.”

  There are no women at Oxford, not yet. She would have liked the chance to study there. But she is enjoying her trip to Italy too. She has a great capacity for finding joy where she is, which will serve her well.

  Dolly pushes his curls back out of his face and grins at Tish. “Yes, it is an Oxford joke to call me Dolly. But I like it better than Adolfo. True, I am not a toy, but I am not a wolf either, and I am more obviously not a toy, so it suits me better.” There is something of the toy about him, Tish thinks, in his loose jointed walk and his silly hat, and the way she is comfortable with him. It’s a pity he couldn’t really be an eligible husband for her, not even if he could bring himself to ignore her height. She loves Firenze. But—Dolly is smiling up at her. “Whereas your name—Laetitia is a beautiful name.”

  “It is the way you pronounce it,” Tish says. “It has a nice meaning. Happiness. But I’ve always been called Tish. What does that make me? A sneeze?”

  He laughs. “It is a very English thing to take a beautiful name and turn it into a sneeze.” They walk on, sedately, side by side, each comfortable now in the other’s company.

  “Some people say that is where Petrarch’s father lived,” Dolly says, breaking the silence to indicate a farmhouse in the distance.

  Tish stops and turns her head to look, through the funnel of her bonnet. She had been twisting her closed rose-coloured parasol in the dust, leaving little circles and trails behind her. Now she turns from the house and turns her blue eyes down to his smiling dark ones. “Tell me why Petrarch is important. The only thing I ever knew about Petrarch is his love for Laura.”

  “That�
��s not how we say it, we say Laura,” he says, in Italian, correcting her pronunciation. “And she is—” He switches back to English. “She is green laurel, lauro; the gentle breeze, l’aura; the golden curls, l’aureo; the dawn, l’aurora. Petrarch saw her everywhere and her name runs through all his poems like a current rippling through the sea.” He gestures at a laurel tree out in the fields that surround the city that are so like a pastoral landscape in a Renaissance painting that it is impossible to see them any other way. Nymphs and shepherds should recline under those trees, or they should be the backdrop for the holy family passing briefly through Tuscany on their way from Bethlehem to Egypt.

  “Daphne,” Tish says. She has read Ovid, with a sensual delight in his use of language.

  “Yes, Daphne, the laurel,” Dolly says, with intensity. “You see that. Good. But she wasn’t what was important, Laura, not really. He loved her, yes, but much more important he loved Cicero.”