Anglo-Florentins et le British Institute

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“The double line of dark cypress, and the intricate underbrush of rosemary, lavender and Chinese roses, the shimmering meadow of spring daffodils and wild orchids, and here and there the busy buzz of the bees, compose an unforgettable picture. »… (Janet Ross, Old Florence)
In Florence, wonderful writings of its sumptuous past are guarded, treasures that show the everyday life in the city. If the Gabinetto Vieusseux is maybe the most famous temple of memoirs for the foreign communities that followed one another during the past centuries, the British Institute is the treasure chest of memories for the Anglo-Florentines.
This term was used for those English aristocrats, intellectuals and art enthusiasts who chose the “Cradle of the Renaissance” as their personal residence. Everything in the world was moving, everything was projected towards a big epochal change; the Victorian era, with its strict customs and traditions, was finding a new freedom in Florence, where the young English ladies could keep their language, traditions, customs and education, enrich their knowledge, but with a breath of lightness and vitality towards a new future.
In the Waterfield Collection (collecting writings of XIX and XX century) there are pages describing the everyday life in Florence, pages of inestimable historical memory, tales of a Tuscan countryside yet to be discovered, and tales and dialogs between Anglo-Florentines, whose names are to be found in history and art books even today.
The Waterfield Collection is a private donation given to the British Institute of Florence by the Beevor family in 2001, last descendants of the Ross family. The aunt of Lina Waterfield was Janet Ross, English journalist and writer, correspondent for The Times during the years Florence was the capital of Italy, and wife of a London banker very active in his business with the new rising Kingdom of Italy.
Janet was described as a woman with a cheerful personality, very curious and sensitive, open to the change of an evolving society, an amazing guest of numerous salons in a very eclectic and fervid Florence, a woman capable of understanding every developing change in the society.
Her magnificent mansion was at Poggio Gherardo, near Settignano, a villa with a view over Florence and an enchanting garden that she described with emphasis in many letters addressed to her friends in the United Kingdom.
The writer was friends with Mary and Bernard Berenson, a world-renowned art historian and his wife (they lived in Florence), patrons and collectors of great works. Janet published a book about her mother’s life, Lucie Duff-Gordon, an open-minded woman interested in knowledge and culture, so much that she decided to spend the last six years of her life in Egypt.
The collection was first given to the Institute Library by Nigel Beevor in 2001, on behalf of his family (Nigel Beevor is the son of Carinthia (Kinta) Beevor, daughter of Lina Waterfield). In that occasion the Library received bibliographic material, letters, essays, pictures, innovative manuscripts, a published book and a painting. Kinta Beevor and Gordon Waterfield gathered the material and published it in England. In October 2002, other material and manuscripts, pictures and publications were given, enlarging the collection.
Janet, besides being a popular writer in the Anglo-American community of Florence, became even more famous as correspondent for The Times during the years Florence was the new capital of the Kingdom of Italy, about which American and English readers wanted to know everything. It was the dawning of the affirmation of women in the literary and journalistic field, the affirmation of the revolutionary movement of the Suffragettes that opened the way for women’s rights. Only through the chronicles we can understand the everyday life now disappeared, and the account of her life and her friendships can be found in her book The Fourth Generation (London 1912).
Lina Waterfield was one of the founders of the British Institute in 1917, and she maintained a strong emotional bond with it the whole of her life. Together with her husband, the painter Aubrey Waterfield (d. 1944), she restored and lived in the Fortezza della Brunella at Aulla in the Lunigiana, and managed a school at Poggio Gherardo in the 1930s, only leaving Italy in 1940. Lina Waterfield was Italian correspondent for the newspaper The Observer from 1921 until 1939, and foreign correspondent for Kelmsley Press from 1946 to 1950.
Her husband was the author of The Manchester Guardian published in the 1920s. The majority of the letters are from Janet Ross and Lina Waterfield to various correspondents all around the world; in the collection we find letters from Janet Ross to Austin Henry Layard (1817-1894, archaeologist and diplomat), to Bernard Berenson (1865-1959, art critic and connoisseur), to Mary Berenson (Mary Pearsall Smith, then Costelloe, then Berenson, writer, 1864-1945), to Madge Symonds Vaughan, to Lina Waterfield and other academics, less famous but great Italy lovers.
The Anglo-Florentine community was a society of educated people, who studied and collected works of art, wrote about the monuments and the unique landscapes of Florence, travel correspondences, tales about the Tuscan countryside and descriptions of their residences located over the best hills around Florence. We owe a lot to the Anglo-Florentine community, that enriched and transmitted a great open-mindedness since the dawning of Lady Orford, who was one of the firsts that decided to live in Florence, and acquired the Villa Medici in Fiesole in 1772 (which became Villa Spence in the 1800s, but remained in Anglo-Saxon hands even the years after). Then George Nassau who lived at Villa Palmieri and Lord Holland, British ambassador to the Tuscan Court, who rented the Villa of Careggi in 1845. The image of the British community in Florence is closely bound up with art, literature and poetry, but no less with the history of foreign, banking and financial policy in the new Kingdom of Italy.

Italian version by Elena Tempestini

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