CHAPTER XXII
SUMMER OF 1847—FLORENCE, VILLA CAREGGI
On our arrival in Florence, we took up our abode on the north side of the Arno, in the same house with our friends the de Fauveaus, and many a delightful hour did I pass in Félicie’s studio, watching her beautiful work with deep interest, and sometimes reading aloud to her the works of our best authors, for she was as good an English scholar as I was, although she could not often be tempted to converse in our language. But we did not stay long under the same roof, for it had been arranged that our summer should be spent in Villeggiatura.
Lord Holland, who then possessed the beautiful villa of Careggi de Medici, in the immediate neighbourhood of Florence, kindly placed it at my mother’s disposition for the summer months of the year 1847, and when I look back upon the time we passed there, a dream of beauty, peace and happiness rises up before me, surrounded by the golden haze of memory and regret. The villa, which is in itself a palace, is situated in a charming garden, and the interior contains spacious and lofty apartments, and, at the time of which I am speaking, had just been embellished by frescoes from the master hand of our countryman George Watts, the illustrious Academician. One in particular, at the entrance of the villa, attracted especial notice. It represented the attack made by the servants of Lorenzo the Magnificent on the physician who attended their beloved master in his last hours, and whom they suspected of wilful neglect, or culpable designs on the life of the august prince. The moment chosen by the painter was that in which the retainers seized upon the medical attendant and ruthlessly cast him into the well, which then still existed in the court of the villa. The artist in question, a friend of Lord Holland, was a resident of Careggi when we arrived and most unwillingly drove him away. Assuredly there was room for us all, and many more, in that large and spacious house, but our painter had that love for solitude and that distaste for the society of strangers so frequently to be found in the artistic nature. He had betaken himself to a pavilion in the garden, and courteously but firmly withstood for a time all our advances at nearer companionship. I well remember writing what I considered a coaxing note, asking him to dine with us on Ash Wednesday, as I knew it was more to his taste to fast than to feast. Slowly and gradually we won our way towards his friendship, and, as I once afterwards told him laughingly, how proud I felt when by degrees he grew tame and would eat out of my hand. From that time we have been friends, and I watched with pride and pleasure his rising fame, and gazed with increasing admiration of years on his splendid creations. Our household was a curious medley. Our family consisted of my mother, my sister, my brother Charles and myself, with our three English servants—the faithful Henry and the two lady’s-maids. The domestics we found in the villa were as follows: the porter (an old soldier) and the gardener and his family, the babbo, the mama, the son and two daughters good, excellent people—the eldest girl Amalia a little hump-back, or gobbina, with a tender heart and loving eyes, her sister Violante—always selected on the occasion of any festa or procession to take the principal part therein, on account of her extreme beauty.
LIFE AT VILLA CAREGGI
The two mothers became great friends, notwithstanding their respective ignorance of each other’s language, but it was touching to see them sitting side by side in the garden, teaching each other Italian and English names for the different flowers, which the mama brought in handfuls and deposited on the lap of the “cara e buona miladi.”
The old gardener, with gentle manners and calm exterior, who rented the garden, but would never let us pay a soldo for the beautiful nosegays he showered on us, was a real Italian at heart. On one occasion, the gardener of a neighbouring villa, Salviati, had brought a large present of choice flowers to my mother, from our friend Mrs Vansittart. This circumstance so raised the ire of the rival functionary at Careggi, that it was with great difficulty that our English servant interposed to appease the babbo, for, as he told me afterwards, he saw the moment when knives were likely to be drawn. The porter, old Pietro, had been, as I said before, a soldier, and was a great character in his way. He would sometimes pace the terrace with me, and not only discuss, but quote long extracts from Dante. Like many other scholars and students of the divine poet, he found the greatest delight in the story of Francesca di Rimini, and he delivered it as his emphatic opinion that her punishment was immeasurably too severe for her fault. I think I should have to wait some time before an English hall-porter, or domestic servant of any class, would be likely to discuss with me the characteristics of one of Shakespeare’s heroines.
This reminds me of an incident related by my dear friend, Lady Marian Alford. She was coming out of the Cathedral at Siena, and talking of the lines in Dante which commemorate the sad fate of “La Pia.” She had got as far as “Siena mi fè,” when she paused and hesitated, being unable to remember the rest of the line, when a little street Arab, or gamin, came to her assistance and completed the sentence, “disfeci mi Maremma,” to the satisfaction of both. But we must not wander from Careggi and the golden summer we passed there.
The windows were scrupulously closed during the intense heat of the day, but between the hours of four and five they were flung wide open to admit the refreshing air, and then we would sit in the garden, or walk, or drive, interchanging visits, and offering or accepting invitations from the neighbouring villas, or sometimes from dwellers in the city.
From the loggia at Careggi, where we used to spend a great part of our evenings, watching the lights which starred the city, inhaling the perfumes of the orange flowers, and delighting in the erratic flights of those embodied stars, the fire-flies, we commanded the windows of the Villa Quarto, inhabited by our Swedish friend, the Comtesse Pipa and her nephew, Eric Baker, with whom we had invented a code of signals, and by displaying some scarlet or yellow drapery, understood at once if an invitation to dinner was refused or accepted.
“BALLET D’ACTION”