As Cooks came, they went
J. G. Links
FLORENCE: A TRAVELLERS' COMPANION SELECTED AND INTRODUCED by Harold Acton and Edward Chaney
Constable, £12.95 The pavement is thickly strewn with sepul- chral slabs and tablets. . . . Few, however, of the names have much interest beyond the walls of Florence.
Murray's Hand-book for Northern Italy, 1846 (on S. Croce) . . As, however, you are at present within the walls of Florence, you may perhaps condescend to take some interest. . . . Here is a simple but most useful test of your capacity for understanding Florentine sculpture or painting. . . And if you will kneel down and look long. . . you will — or may — know, from this example alone, what noble decora- tive sculpture is. . . Try to understand the difference: it is a point of quite cardinal importance to all your future study.. .
John Ruskin, Mornings in Florence, 1875 . . . There was no one even to tell her [Lucy Honeychurch] which, of all the sepulchral slabs that paved the nave and transepts, was the one that was really beautiful, the one that had been most praised by Mr Ruskin.. .
E. M. Forster, A Room with a View, 1908 And he [Aaron Sisson] felt. . . the sense of having arrived — of having reached a perfect centre of the human world: this he had. D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod, 1922
Venice was for gliding about in gondo- las, even Ruskin confessed, but Florence had a heritage of Renaissance art which had to be taken more seriously. How had this come about? Venice, after all, had been living in almost uninterrupted peace at home, growing ever richer, whilst the Florentines seem always to have been at each others' throats. Sir Harold Acton's introduction to this diverting and informa- tive book reads like a tale of unremitting violence. Guelph against Ghibelline, and Gonfalieri against both, for reasons that remain obscure to all but the most assi- duous reader; followers of pope against those of emperor, with regular forays against neighbouring princes; arson, pil- lage, slavery and mutilation (the hospital, we learn later, received a florin for each sentence of amputation or other bodily punishment, three for a death sentence).
Yet, out of it all, came a cascade of writers, architects and painters with new ideas. Dante, Giotto, Petrarch and Boc- caccio were all living in Florence in the early 1300s; Brunelleschi, Donatello, Alberti and Piero della Francesca in the early 1400s (in Venice, the gothic Doge's Palace was not finished until 1425, by which time the Republic's fortunes were on the verge of decline). Leonardo, Miche- langelo and Raphael were all working in Florence in the early 1500s. Many of the lesser gifted approached the giants in talent.
By 1620 the fruits of these marvellous years of creativity had been handed over to the tourists: four Englishmen had already been to Florence and published their guide-books. For many of the millions who followed them their visit was an introduc- tion to art, for a few an experience of spiritual exaltation; others remembered nothing but their feet. Ruskin was happy there on his many visits until, in 1874, he found an omnibus station, with its smells of variously mixed horse manure, at the foot of Giotto's Tower, the loveliest of those raised on earth: from then on, the city was a place of torment.
Sir Harold allows himself only 25 pages to tell this extraordinary story and it is then, presumably, that Edward Chaney takes over. He is an architectural historian, for seven years resident in Italy (a new- comer compared to Sir Harold), and an old hand in the world of travel literature. He has selected some 200 extracts, dating from 1300 to 1966 and grouped according to the building described, from writers who tell of what they had seen themselves or knew of from their contemporaries. Thus we read of Brunelleschi trying to persuade the authorities that he could put a cupola on the Duomo without internal support and, 400 years later, of the building of the new fagade. It is hard to imagine a better way to begin to understand how Florence came to be what it is, or what it seemed like to the early tourists and the residents who finally took over.
Many of the entries have been translated by Mr Chaney himself into idiomatic, easily-read English. (To return to an old cavil, why must scholarship, allowing this to Boccaccio, for example, insist that William Thomas, writing 200 years later, continue to employ his archaic and tire- some spelling and punctuation?) The selec- tion is judicious and much helped by the existence of early and unfamiliar chronic- lers such as Giovanni Villani and Luca Landucci, as well, of course, as Vasari and the impossible Cellini. Murray and Augus- tus Hare need no longer be carried by the visitor except for their picture of the Florence of their own day.
But these 19th-century guide-books were catering for a different kind of tourist altogether. As Sir Harold points out, it was the Englishness of their Florence that most strikes us when we read the 'Useful In- formation' at the beginning of these guides, a Ole toute anglaise, as the Gon- court brothers found it in 1855. The Brownings were by no means the only literary figures who chose to make it their home (the book includes a most moving account by Browning of his wife's death 'where the beginning was is the end'). Already in 1825, Leigh Hunt found 200 English families resident there — the absence of beggars and an industrious population were as great an attraction as the splendid galleries. Sir Harold is old enough to remember their successors him- self and has told us of the 'good talk' that could be relied on in the Berenson and Sitwell houses, as well as the Actons' (how good was the listening, one wonders?). The talk among the young executives of Chiantishire may be as good, but it is different. They have not really filled the gap left by those driven out of Florence and its surroundings by the success of Thomas Cook.
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