CLASPED HANDS AND GOLDEN RINGS
SAVING FLORENCE'S 'ENGLISH'
CEMETERY
Florence's 'English' Cemetery does not make money for its Swiss owners, who recently decided to close and abandon it.
The Aureo Anello Associazione Mediatheca 'Fioretta Mazzei' e Amici del Cimitero 'degli Inglesi' began restoration and landscaping, first by scraping away the rust and then painting the great wrought iron gates, and paying for handrails on the entrance steps, while repairing the holes to the building, next purchasing box, lavender and rosemary shrubs, and propagating these, along with Florence's wild irises and our one myrtle left, to create hedges that can protect tombs and people from each other as these have now become very dangerous, then doing minor repairs to tombs and cleaning lichen from them, now scraping rust from their ornamental iron work and applying two coats of anti-rust and two coats of paint to these. Prohibiting the use of weed-killer for the first time in my eight years here means that instead of our former greyness and deadness the wild strawberries have returned and the Cemetery is filled with flowers, roses, poppies, irises, daffodils, lilies.We are not allowed legally to sell objects, not being commercial, but may receive donations. In exchange we have created a CD, called 'Florence in Sepia' which gives an entire nineteenth-century collection of photographs of Florence in sepia, that we exhibited in the Palazzo Strozzi and which are now available for viewing in the original in our Gatehouse, as well as the catalogue of the tombs, Victorian guidebooks of Florence and much else.
FIRENZE/ FLORENCE
IN SEPIA
We have re-created, thanks to Amalia Ciardi Dupré Harriet Hosmer's 'Clasped Hands' of Elizabeth and Robert Browning.
We have also edited and printed, in William Morris type, and hand-bound in our own marbled paper, a limited and numbered edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets and Ballad.
Either separately or together these would make excellent wedding gifts. Suggested donations for the 'Clasped Hands':
in terra cotta, 250;
in plaster, 100; in Della Robbia glazed terra cotta, 250
for the books, 50;
for the CDs, 10; in dollars, euros, pounds. Please include an amount to cover postage.
Our CDs now include mp3
recorings of readings and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's and Dante
Alighieri's poetry.
Make cheques written out to 'Aureo Anello' and post to
Biblioteca e Bottega Fioretta
Mazzei
'English' Cemetery
Piazzale Donatello, 38
50132 FIRENZE
ITALIA
Or use PayPal:
Photographs and marbled paper by Jasmine Eppler, June/July 2005, and by her grandmother.
FLORIN WEBSITE © JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY, AUREO ANELLO ASSOCIATION, 1997-2010: FLORENCE'S 'ENGLISH' CEMETERY || BIBLIOTECA E BOTTEGA 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 || NON-PROFIT GUIDE TO COMMERCE IN FLORENCE || AUREO ANELLO, CATALOGUE