ADOPT A TOMB IN FLORENCE'S 'ENGLISH' CEMETERY

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Because the Swiss owners consider closing and abandoning the 'English' Cemetery in Florence if it cannot become economically viable, to save this library and archive of history written in marble in which we all share we have created a petition at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/471134975,
'That the Swiss-owned, so-called 'English' Cemetery in Florence be kept open, be restored and be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site' / 'Che il Cimitero 'degli Inglesi' a Firenze di proprietà Svizzera possa ancora essere visitabile, sia restaurato e sia dichiarato dall'UNESCO Patrimonio Mondiale dell'Umanità'



Dear Aureo Anello Member, Friend of the 'English' Cemetery in Florence, and Interested Others,

If you would like to adopt a tomb, to repair and research it, contact us. We should be particularly grateful if the tombs of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walter Savage Landor, Fanny and Theodore Trollope and Arthur Hugh Clough were so adopted.

Just yesterday as I was photographing all these tombs for a web essay on tombs to repair, I found that the two tombs at the top back of the cemetery have yellow forsythia profusely in bloom on their wrought iron arch, though it is still winter with ice forming in troughs. (Next, we need to train two roses on the arch over the child's tomb.)



COUNTESS CHARLOTTE SOPHIA GIGLIUCCI/ ENGLAND/ [Coat of Arms]/ CHARLOTTE SOPHIA, MOGLIE DEL CONTE GIOVANNI GIGLIUCCI/ NATA A LIVERPOOL IL 4 AGOSTO 1841/ MORTA A FIRENZE IL 12 FEBBRAIO 1920/ ET LAUDENT EAM IN PORT/ C30M
COUNTESS EDITH MARGARET GIGLIUCCI/ ENGLAND / [Coat of Arms]/ EDITH MARGARET/ MOGLIE DEL CONTE MARIO GIGLIUCCI/ NATA LIVERPOOL IL 26 AGOSTO 1847/ MORTA IN FIRENZE IL 16 NOVEMBRE 1909/ C29M
CONTE GIOVANNI GIGLIUCCI/ ITALIA/ [Coat of Arms]/ CONTE GIOVANNI GIGLIUCCI/ PATRIZIO FERMANO, NATO A FERMO IL 18 NOVEMBRE 1844/ MORTO A FIRENZE IL 6 DICEMBRE 1906/ VIRTUTE ET FIDE BENE QUI LATUI BENE VIXIT/ C30L
CONTE MARIO GIGLIUCCI/ ITALIA/ [Coat of Arms]/ CONTE MARIO GIGLIUCCI/ PATRIZIO FERMANO/ NATO A FERMO IL 19 NOVEMBRE 1847/ MORTO A FIRENZE IL 13 GENNAIO 1937/ RECTE ET SUAVITER/ C29M

These tombs are of an Italian count who married a young lady from Liverpool. Next to them are the tombs of the count's brother, also a count, and his wife, the sister of the lady from Liverpool! They are very lovely but in pietra serena which crumbles and which will need consolidation.

Our most famous tombs are in need of a restoration campaign by the expert Alberto Casciani. They are those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Lord Leighton (for which Aureo Anello has received 300 euro towards its needed 3000 euro and from a Moulton Barrett), Fanny and Theodosia Trollope, Walter Savage Landor and Arthur Hugh Clough.

We have republished on the web a story of 'Ensign Yelverton's Spoon' written by Michael Ayrton.

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We should like further interactive research carried out on the military regimental and naval figures buried here, and particularly on those who worked with Florence Nightingale and those who fought at Waterloo. We should also like research done on the armourial bearings on the tombs. And on the many Abolitionists against slavery who found burial here. For we are about freedom from tyranny, the right to be remembered. Death is a tyrant, but love overcomes death.

Holman Hunt sculpted his wife's tomb and placed on it the following Biblical quotation: 'Love is strong as death. Many waters cannot quench love neither can the floods drown it'. And he has her sarcophagus, like an arc, floating on waves of marble.
*§ +/ FANNY WAUGH HUNT/ ENGLAND/ (Wough)[Waugh]/ Holman Hunt]/ Fanny/ / Inghilterra/ Firenze/ 20 Dicembre/ 1866/ Anni 33/ 959/ Fanny Wough Hunt, l'Angleterre/ [Freeman, 227-230]/ NDNB entry for Holman Hunt/[Written in Medallions on Coffin with Pelican in its Piety, Lilies, at each End, Floating on Water, on the Waves of the Sea]

WHEN THOU/ PASSEST THRO/ THE WATERS/ I WILL BE WITH THEE/ AND THRO THE FLOODS/ THEY SHALL NOT/ OVERFLOW/ THEE [Isaiah 43.2]
IT IS/ I/ BE NOT AFRAID [Matthew 14.27]
LOVE/ IS STRONG AS/ DEATH/ MANY WATERS CANNOT/ QUENCH LOVE/ NEITHER CAN THE/ FLOODS DROWN/ IT [Song of Solomon 8.6-7]

//[on plaque at base] FANNY/ THE WIFE OF/ W. HOLMAN HUNT/ DIED IN FLORENCE DEC 20 1866/ IN THE FIRST YEAR OF HER MARRIAGE/ Holman Hunt, Sculptor/ E13I



Holman Hunt's wife in Florence modelling for John Keats' Isabella and the Pot of Basil during their honeymoon.



Fanny Holman Hunt, painted by her husband, Holman Hunt, during her pregnancy in Florence. He would marry her sister in order for their child, Cyril Benoni, to be raised. St Mark's English Church in Florence has a chalice and paten given in their memory.





While sculpting his dead wife's tomb in Fiesole, Holman Hunt painted this portrait of a Tuscan girl plaiting straw. In it one can see San Domenico below Fiesole, where Fra Angelico was Prior and where the European University now is housed.



His wife's tomb finished, Holman Hunt went to the Holy Land, painting there by the Dead Sea, 'The Scapegoat'. Holman Hunt's versions of the 'Light of the World' are in St Paul's Cathedral and at Keble College, Oxford.



Indeed so many of our tombs have marble be what it is not, sculpted as delicate lilies, poppies, just as Time's scythe is about to cut them, wooden crosses, including the bark, coiled rope, daffodils, myrtle. Beside which were once planted these flowers and shrubs and which we can plant here again.

Julia Bolton Holloway, Professor Emerita
Director, Biblioteca e Bottega Fioretta Mazzei
'English Cemetery', Piazzale Donatello, 38
50132 Florence, Italy juliana@tin.it
http://www.umilta.net http://www.florin.ms
http://piazzaledonatello.blogspot.com

If you wish to deposit directly into the Emergency Appeal Fund you can do so at the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, Ag. 30, Viale Petrarca, Firenze, for the Chiesa Evangelica Riformata Svizzera-Restauro Beni account 849 00 066666, ABI 6160, CAB 2839, Coordinate bancarie B 06160 02839 000066666C00, IBAN IT85B0616002839000066666C00, Swift CRFI IT 3F

Or to Aureo Anello: by cheque made out to 'Aureo Anello' and posted to 'English' Cemetery, Piazzale Donatello 38, 50132 Florence, Italy; or through Pay Pal:

LORD LEIGHTON, HIRAM POWERS, THE BROWNINGS, ETC.

____
Because the Swiss owners consider closing and abandoning the 'English' Cemetery in Florence if it cannot become economically viable, to save this library and archive of history written in marble in which we all share we have created a petition at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/471134975,
'That the Swiss-owned, so-called 'English' Cemetery in Florence be kept open, be restored and be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site' / 'Che il Cimitero 'degli Inglesi' a Firenze di proprietà Svizzera possa ancora essere visitabile, sia restaurato e sia dichiarato dall'UNESCO Patrimonio Mondiale dell'Umanità'
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Dear Aureo Anello Member, Friend of the 'English' Cemetery in Florence, and Interested Others,


Lord Leighton's Florentine Lily,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Tomb

Good news and bad news. The bad news is that the Swiss owners still want to close and abandon the so-called 'English' Cemetery. We have not succeeded in raising the 3000 euro for the restoration work of the tomb for Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Frederic Lord Leighton, apart from 300 euro from a Moulton-Barrett descendant. A great world monument, EBB's tomb, within a great world monument, the 'English' Cemetery in Florence, are both still at risk.



Beside EBB's tomb is that sculpted by Holman Hunt in Fiesole for his wife Fanny who had died in Florence following childbirth.



Here we see where acid has entered the marble turning it into plaster of paris so it is crumbling away. This process can be reversed if we can raise the funds speedily enough for this work.



Lord Leighton has on the third harp at the back of the tomb a broken slave shackle expressive of EBB's passionate hatred of slavery (she was herself the child of a Jamaican slave owner). Many persons buried in this cemetery similarly worked against slavery, including Theodore Parker and Richard Hildreth, their tombs visited by Frederick Douglass, while buried near EBB and Hiram Powers, beneath an Orthodox cross in marble with her story in Cyrillic, is the tomb of Nadezhda, a black Nubian slave who came to Florence at 14 in Champollion and Rosselini's 1828 Expedition.

Lord Leighton studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, one of his teachers being Hiram Powers, an American sculptor buried in this 'English' Cemetery. Leighton won fame first from a huge canvas he painted at 24 of the Procession of Cimabue's Madonna from Borgo Allegri to Santa Maria Novella, which Elizabeth Barrett Browning had already described in poetry in her Casa Guidi Windows, the painting being purchased by Queen Victoria. Leighton was to be President of England's Royal Academy of Art. His sister, Mrs Alexandra Orr Sutherland, became Browning's biographer and the editor of his letters. We are in the process of acquiring copies of Leighton's drawings for this tomb for the Cemetery's library and archive, as well as having acquired significant holdings concerning the writers and artists, poets and sculptors, buried here, through the great generosity of Aureo Anello members.



Hiram Powers' Greek Slave, which was the centrepiece on a turning pedestal at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition, whose head is modeled on the Greek wife of the painter Giorgio Mignaty who painted Casa Guidi at Browning's request as it was when EBB died.



While the studio, where Michele Gordigiani's descendants still live, and where he painted the portraits of the Brownings now in the National Portrait Gallery, is across the street from the tombs of the two Mignaty children.



In Italian we speak of such things being 'intrecciate', 'woven together', 'knit together'. This is so much the case with this 'English' Cemetery in Florence where Americans and English came together in a burst of creativity at the time of Italy's Risorgimento. Nathaniel Hawthorne's Miriam in The Marble Faun is a composite of Isa Blagden and Theodosia Garrow Trollope, EBB's friends, both buried here near her, both exotically part East Indian, part Jewish. Though Mrs Walter Savage Landor had herself sculpted in despair on her son Arnold's tomb, her back turned from her husband's burial place, so much of the Cemetery celebrates Hope: in Nadezhda's name, which is 'Speranza' in Italian; in the sculptures of women with anchors, for the pun on 'ancora speme'; in this dream the nineteenth century had of the freeing of nations, Greece, Italy; of slaves, in the British Empire, in America; of the liberation of women and children from bondage, from working in mines and mills. Do we obey Dante's infernal gate's message, 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here', 'Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate', or turn this around into Dante's paradisal joy of a new Florence, peopled, as is this Cemetery, with angels with our Cemetery's view of the dome of of Santa Maria del Fiore?



Sir Franco Zeffirelli had telephoned the Mayor of Florence in August asking that the 'English' Cemetery be saved. And the city of Florence immediately responded, saying this treasure must be saved. Florentines, who used to shun us, now speak of this place as an abandoned 'jewel', 'un gioiello', and for the first time are coming in flocks to visit us, complaining rightly about its neglect and disrepair, delighting in its beauty. Foreigners from all over the world have always steadily visited us since we have been keeping it open to the public.

However, we very much need to raise 3000 euro to save Lord Leighton's tomb for Elizabeth Barrett Browning as its Carrara marble is crumbling into gesso, this being Alberto Casciani's estimate for the work. It is a Florentine and world treasure and should only be restored by the expert most recommended by Florence's Opificio delle Pietre Dure. We shall also ask that he restore the tombstones of Walter Savage Landor, Arthur Hugh Clough, Fanny and Theodosia Trollope. He can begin work in the Spring if we raise the funds.

Initially we had hoped to have a charitable foundation set up in England for the purpose of raising these funds and we delayed outright requests so that they could be made by it. Instead, we have now formed a committee here in Florence for the 'English' Cemetery Emergency Appeal, with Signor Gerardo Kraft, President of the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church which owns the so-called 'English' Cemetery and who is the former Swiss Consul, Clive Britton, who is the Anglo-Florentine concert pianist and Artistic Director of Asolo's Norbert Brainin Foundation, and myself, President of the Aureo Anello Associazione Biblioteca e Bottega Fioretta Mazzei e Amici del Cimitero degli Inglesi. We invite an American participant on this Emergency Appeal Committee as many of our damaged tombs still needing repair because their fallen slabs are too heavy to lift without a crane are of American burials.

Our petition both here in the Cemetery and on the web, that the Cemetery be kept open, be restored and be a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is coming close to 2000 signatures from persons all over the world.

We thank all of you who have contributed to Aureo Anello, enabling the Victorian curving hand rails to our steps where before there were none, and the paint with which we restored the formerly rusting wrought iron gates of the Cemetery. We also invite you to consider arranging for the ashes of family members to be buried here as there are 500 places designated for these and this decision will enable the Swiss-owned 'English' Cemetery to become self-sustaining as a living museum for generations. It is our dream to landscape this oval island with its hill as it had been in the nineteenth century, with roses trained on the children's tombs' wrought iron arches, with wild strawberries, myrtle, lavender, irises and oleanders, beneath its tall cypresses.

Yours sincerely,

Julia Bolton Holloway, Professor Emerita
Director, Biblioteca e Bottega Fioretta Mazzei
'English Cemetery', Piazzale Donatello, 38
50132 Florence, Italy juliana@tin.it
http://www.umilta.net http://www.florin.ms
http://piazzaledonatello.blogspot.com

If you wish to deposit directly into the Emergency Appeal Fund you can do so at the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, Ag. 30, Viale Petrarca, Firenze, for the Chiesa Evangelica Riformata Svizzera-Restauro Beni account 849 00 066666, ABI 6160, CAB 2839, Coordinate bancarie B 06160 02839 000066666C00, IBAN IT85B0616002839000066666C00, Swift CRFI IT 3F

Or to Aureo Anello: by cheque made out to 'Aureo Anello' and posted to 'English' Cemetery, Piazzale Donatello 38, 50132 Florence, Italy; or through Pay Pal: