BRITISH STUDENTS IN FLORENCE
SIR,—May I approach your readers with an account of what the British Institute in Florence is doing, under great difficulties, to present an account of our language, literature, history and institutions to the Italian student world ? This Institute has been in existence since 1917, when a small group of men who believed in such things, including John Buchan, Sir Henry Newbolt and C. F. G. Masterman, persuaded the Foreign Office to spend a little money on what is now called cultural propaganda. The Institute took root and flourished among Italian students from the age of seventeen upwards, but the British public was slow to take up the idea. We were a pioneer body in those days, but never did I undertake such an uphill task as that of trying to get endowments for this Institute when the Government of the day, having sent our Ambassador to Florence to promise permanence and a subsidy for their new child, went back on the promise three years later and left the Institute in the air as soon as the Geddes axe got to work. After much toil the committee in London raised about £35,000 as an endowment, and this was sufficient, when
converted into lire, to maintain a small but active centre of English studies, whose diploma soon acquired a high moral value in Italy. Salaries were, however, low, and only when the British Council arose in 1935 did our task become lighter. From that year till Mussolini's declaration of war in 1940 the Institute prospered exceedingly, and its students made a large contribution by their fees towards the basic expenses. It is housed in the splendid old Palazzo Antinori, where it uses the whole palace except the ground floor and the attics. So catastrophic, however, has the effect of the devaluation of the lira become since 1940 that it is hard to make both ends meet since the reopening, and we could not do it at all without some British support. At this moment, moreover, the British Council has suffered a fresh squeeze by the Treasury, and enterprises like the British Institute in Florence are the obvious victims. Our subsidy from public funds has just been halved, while at the same moment rents are being decontrolled in Italy and the cost of living continues to rise.
In the meantime, we have, this summer, been developing a scheme which we started on a small scale last year—that of sending out a limited number of British students to spend a fortnight in Florence during September as guests of the Institute. They pay their own expenses, except that this year we have been able to give, on a tutor's recom- mendation, twenty-two travel grants not exceeding £15 to those who could not otherwise have made the journey. The Ministry of Education co-operated with us by recognising the scheme as an " organised course of study abroad" and by giving grants of their own to about forty addi- tional students. This enabled us to send out a total number of 94 British students to make their first acquaintance with Italy. The Institute pro- vided a fine library, a reading room, a first-rate lecturer and an efficient staff to help them, and the letters received since their return show how intensely the enterprise was appreciated. But how can it ever be repeated unless the Institute regains its old stability ? It needs a fresh endowment of £10,000, or else all this will continue to be at the mercy of every wind of economy that blows across the field on which we have worked for
thirty years.—I an], Sir, yours, &c., JANET TFtEVELYAN,
Hon. Treasurer, British Institute of Florence. The Master's Lodge, Trinity College, Cambridge.
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