CLASPED HANDS AND GOLDEN RINGS
SAVING FLORENCE'S 'ENGLISH'
CEMETERY
Florence's 'English' Cemetery did not make money for its Swiss owners, who several times decided to close and abandon it.
The Aureo Anello Associazione, Mediatheca 'Fioretta Mazzei' e 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 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 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
or for the
sculptures of Elizabeth and Robert's 'Clasped
Hands' or tondos with
their portraits (Amalia Ciardi Duprč's sculpture can also be
found at http://www.florin.ms/amaliadupre.html), or some or all of these.
We have also re-created, thanks again to Amalia Ciardi Dupré, Harriet Hosmer's 'Clasped Hands' of Elizabeth and Robert Browning.
We have as well 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 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.
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To donate to the restoration by Roma of Florence's
formerly abandoned English Cemetery and to its Library
click on our Aureo Anello Associazione's
PayPal button: THANKYOU! |