FLORIN
WEBSITE
©
JULIA
BOLTON HOLLOWAY, AUREO ANELLO
ASSOCIATION,
1997-2010: FLORENCE'S 'ENGLISH'
CEMETERY
|| MEDIATHECA
'FIORETTA MAZZEI'
|| ELIZABETH
BARRETT BROWNING || WALTER SAVAGE
LANDOR || FLORENCE
IN SEPIA || BRUNETTO
LATINO, DANTE
ALIGHIERI AND GEOFFREY
CHAUCER
|| E-BOOKS
|| ANGLO-ITALIAN
STUDIES
|| CITY AND
BOOK
I,II,
III,
IV, V || NON-PROFIT
GUIDE TO COMMERCE IN FLORENCE
|| AUREO
ANELLO, CATALOGUE || SITE MAP
|| WEBLOG || UMILTA WEBSITE ||
ROMANIANROMA WEBSITE
UNESCO, MEMORY OF THE WORLD
NOMINATION APPLICATION
'FROM GRAVES TO CRADLES'
FLORENCE'S 'ENGLISH' CEMETERY, ITS
ARCHIVE, ITS MEDIATHECA,
ITS RESEARCH, ITS RESTORATION
A piazza
in Florence, a cemetery on a hill with its tall cypresses, perhaps once
an Etruscan tomb, now strangely set in the midst of swirling modern
traffic, through whose gates visitors step into a different past. An
archive, a library, in situ,
with the documents and also with the books by and about the persons
buried here: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walter Savage Landor, Frances
Trollope, Southwood Smith, Arthur Hugh Clough, Jean Pierre Vieusseux,
Hiram Powers, Theodore Parker, Richard Hildreth, the sister of Henry
Adams, the wife of Holman Hunt, the daughter of Arnold Bőcklin,
the
son
of
Ferenc Pulszky, the
governess
of
the
Tsar
of
Russia, the son of William IV of England,
twelve participants of the Peninsula and Waterloo battles against
Napoleon, many friends of Florence Nightingale, whose tombs the
ex-slave Frederick
Douglass visited. A place filled with memory, for Florence, for Italy,
for Europe, for the world. A place dense with meaning, a burning glass
of history, for Civil Rights, for the Aboliton of Slavery, for the
rights of nations (among them Greece, Italy, Poland, Hungary), to be
freed from foreign oppression, for the rights of women, for the rights
of children, for health and welfare, a place for poets and sculptors, a
place for writers and artists. In its oval are multiple languages, a
United Nations in a city square, peaceably altogether, the archives in
French and Italian, the tombstones they document in Hebrew, Greek,
Roman, Cyrillic and fraktura
alphabets and in most European languages, including Rumantsch. A
cemetery celebrated in Arnold Bőcklin's 'Island of the Dead' and in
Sergei Rachmaninoff's music to the same. Nobles and commoners lying
with slaves, serfs and servants, all walks of life, the Swiss owners
burying pauper travellers for free. In the nineteenth century a
beautiful garden, now being restored in the twenty-first, after years
of abandonment and neglect, from research in
Victorian diaries and guidebooks and from old photographs and
paintings. A place whose intent was, is and will continue to be the
'Memory of the World'.
The Swiss-owned so-called 'English' Cemetery as it was from 1827 to the
late 1860's. At the Risorgimento Giuseppe Poggi re-designed Florence,
briefly Italy's capital, with Parisian boulevards, tearing down the
medieval walls built by Arnolfo di Cambio and Michelangelo Buonarotti
to do so. The 'English' Cemetery had nestled against the outside of the
medieval wall by the Porta a' Pinti Gate. It still has the two stemma
of the lily and the cross Arnolfo sculpted.
The Cemetery with its Gatehouse, housing the library and
archive, as they are now. The tomb of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is the
large sarcophagus on six colums to be seen in the centre on this side
of the central path. The large building behind the Cemetery is the
studio of Michele Gordigiani, who painted the two portraits of
Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning which are now in London's
National Portrait Gallery. Francesca Gordigiani, his descendant, still
lives in his studio. We recommend you call up Google Earth and ask it
for 'Piazzale Donatello, Florence', to see a further aerial view of the
Cemetery and Gatehouse..
To call up each section of this file click on the following:
I. The Swiss Archives
Receipt for burial of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
II. The Swiss-owned so-called
'English' Cemetery
III. Florence in Sepia
IV. Florence's
Flood, 1966
V. The Mediatheca 'Fioretta
Mazzei'
VI. The Florin Website
VII. 'The City and the Book'
International
Conferences in Florence
VIII. The Romanian Roma Restorers
IX. Julia Bolton Holloway, Custodian,
Vita
FLORIN
WEBSITE
©
JULIA
BOLTON HOLLOWAY, AUREO ANELLO
ASSOCIATION,
1997-2010: FLORENCE'S 'ENGLISH'
CEMETERY
|| MEDIATHECA
'FIORETTA MAZZEI'
|| ELIZABETH
BARRETT BROWNING || WALTER SAVAGE
LANDOR || FLORENCE
IN SEPIA || BRUNETTO
LATINO, DANTE
ALIGHIERI AND GEOFFREY
CHAUCER
|| E-BOOKS
|| ANGLO-ITALIAN
STUDIES
|| CITY AND
BOOK
I,II,
III,
IV, V || NON-PROFIT
GUIDE TO COMMERCE IN FLORENCE
|| AUREO
ANELLO, CATALOGUE || SITE MAP
|| WEBLOG || UMILTA WEBSITE ||
RING
OF
GOLD WEBSITE