FLORIN
WEBSITE
©
JULIA
BOLTON HOLLOWAY, AUREO ANELLO
ASSOCIATION,
1997-2010: FLORENCE'S 'ENGLISH'
CEMETERY
|| BIBLIOTECA E
BOTTEGA FIORETTA MAZZEI
|| ELIZABETH
BARRETT BROWNING || 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 || SITE MAP
HOW
TO CATALOGUE A CEMETERY: A CASE STUDY OF
FLORENCE'S
SWISS-OWNED, SO-CALLED 'ENGLISH', CEMETERY
Seven years ago I became
Custodian of the Porta a' Pinti Cemetery, the Swiss-owned so-called
'English' Cemetery, in Florence. The Swiss had bought the land for it
outside the Porta a' Pinti Gate from the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1827.
You can find it in Google Earth at Piazzale Donatello, Florence, Italy.
It had been subject to neglect for more than a century following its
1877 closure caused by Giuseppe Poggi's destruction of the medieval
city wall.
When I first came on the job I was asked to catalogue the tombs. All I
then had was an alphabetical Register of burials drawn up in 1877.
There was no map to the tombs. So I
located them and transcribed their inscriptions. Of the more than
1,400 burials between 1827-1877 there are now less than a thousand
extant tombs. After a year I was joined by
an Italian
woman scholar, and together we translate into our mother tongues this
material,
including those of the Proceedings of a City and Book international
conference we organized with the Gabinetto Vieusseux on the Cemetery in
2004,
publishing these on the Web at http://www.florin.ms/gimel.html.
Beginning with the alphabetical register I drew up a list on the Web,
repeating its useful taxonomy. This is the format written on the
flyleaf, the
subsequent pages being cut down to render this visible and the columns
entered accordingly, in Italian, by hand:
Cognome/ Nome/ Paternità / Patria/ Data
della Morte/ Età/
Tomba
Because these are in Italian, English-speaking scholars searching
the whereabouts of Hugh James Rose, the clergyman who initiated the
Oxford Movement, could not find him. I did. He is listed as 'Ugo
Giacomo Rose' and he is buried in a fine marble 'Scipio' tomb. So I
took to giving the correct national form of the name in RED CAPITALS
at the beginning of each entry, followed immediately by the nation of
provenance in BLUE
CAPITALS, and augmented the information in the Register.
Russian scholars assisted us with our Russian burials, consulting
records in St Petersburg and at the Orthodox Church in Florence. An
English scholar consulted the London Guildhall Library and Foreign
Office records of English persons buried here. While the Swiss
originally listed Poles as Russians, I separate them. I do the same
with the English, giving whether they are Scots, Irish, Welsh, or
Australian. The independent Swiss and Americans did not have a church
that did double duty as a Civil Service organ of their governments so
we lack double record keeping for their burials.
To these I have added the following further information, creating a key:
Key to Codes Used in Alphabetical Register:
V=damaged by vandalism to be
repaired;
^=needing to be photographed; * =register and tomb checked against each
other; ° =living descendants, relatives, researchers; §
=further
documentation in cemetery archives;/
BOLD
CAPS,
IN RED=FIRST NAME, (MAIDEN NAME), SURNAME/
IN
BLUE=COUNTRY/COUNTRIES/;/normal
type=1877 alphabetical register entry ending with tomb number, written
in Italian/ 1844-1871/; additional information from 'Eglise
Evangelique-Reformé
de Florence Régistre des Morts', 2 vols, written in
French/;
/ /=additional information, including codes GL=London
Guildhall
Library, PRO=Public Record Office, FO=Foreign Office, kindly supplied
by
Anthony Webb researching the English in Tuscany; Maquay Diaries=John
Leland
Maquay, Jr, Diaries, information kindly supplied by Alyson Price,
Archivist,
Harold Acton Library, Florence; Talalay=Michail Talalay, 'Tombe dei
Russi
nel Cimitero detto "degli Inglesi"', con l'assistenza di Gino Chelazzi,
RC
in Talalay=Registro del Cimitero, St Petersburg
MKF in Talalay=Metrickesie
Knigi Florencii, Libri parrochiali di Firenze, Chiesa Ortodossa; DND,
NDNB,
Dictionary
of National Biography, New Dictionary of National
Biography;
Freeman=James A. Freeman, 'The Protestant Cemetery in Florence and
Anglo-American
Attitudes toward Italy,
Marker 10 (1993), 219-243; Henderson=Philip
Henderson, Lucca, has further information concerning family backgrounds/
[
]=description of tomb]; BOLD (CAPS EXCEPT WHERE INSCRIPTION USES
lowercase)=INSCRIPTION
ON TOMB/; A1A, etc.
coordinates
indicating tomb position in cemetery/ tomb sculptor, signature of
sculptor
on tomb
During the next few years more registers came to light. (It had
been said they had been lost in the 1966 Flood when I had inquired
concerning them.) These earlier and contemporaneous registers were
being written out in French, and meticulously gave the mother's maiden
name, the canton of birth, and the occupation of the one being buried.
So we enter all three forms of the names, in English, in Italian, in
French, to aid in retrieval. We remind Anglo-Saxon users that in Italy
wives are known by their maiden, not married names.
Last of all, we received the Belle Arti records telling us which
sculptor created which tomb. The sculptors of our tombs, two of whom,
Americans, came to be buried with us, number amongst the most famous of
the nineteenth century. I have written a separate essay on these
sculptors at http://www.florin.ms/sculptors.html.
Essential for this work is a good digital camera, a computer, and
a website, as well as files for the incoming information concerning the
burials of different nationalities from descendants and scholars, again
a taxonomy, this time
geographical, ours consisting
of folders on the English, the Swiss, the Russian (Russian and Polish),
the American, the Continental (French, Dutch, German, Swedish, Danish,
Finnish,
Latvian, Hungarian), and the Australian burials.
This research is ongoing. The entire catalogue is now placed on the web
in
four files at http://www.florin.ms/cemetery1.html,
etc.
to
http://www.florin.ms/cemetery4.html.
Descendants
from
as far away as Australia and Africa then find
their ancestors. Daily, I get e-mails with further information and/or
queries, many having found these entries through searching with Google.
Sometimes photographs taken in 1960 can arrive from Australia enabling
us to replace lost inscriptions from tombs that are now vandalized. Or
fine portraits are sent to us of those buried here for our archives.
UNESCO's conference on information technology and museums suggested I
also weblog, which I do at http://piazzaledonatello.blogspot.com.
What
we
now have is a global and interactive oral history project using
the latest information technology centred on one small but famous
historic cemetery in Florence. Our taxonomies tend to use the alphabet,
itself an 'IT' (Information Technology) invention from millennia ago,
and geographical space, as well as enabling genealogical and
biographical research in time. The Oxford
Dictionary
of
National Biography has praised this work as
most useful to them. We have the Swiss historian Jacques Augustin
Galiffe and his family buried here and he with Jean Charles
Léonard de Sismondi pioneered the study of archives
for genealogical writing and history, to be followed in turn by Robert
Davidsohn, also buried here, whose monumental Storia di Firenze, based on
archival work is magnificent. Also, Mary Somerville buried her husband
William here, and she, with no university education, had discovered two
planets, her books on science being used as textbooks at Cambridge
University, and she taught Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter,
mathematics. Ada Lovelace, in turn, assisted Charles Babbage in
inventing the computer, she suggesting to him the use of Jacquard loom
cards with holes punched in them and the binomial theorem, of using
zeros and ones.
Because so many of our burials are of famous writers, in particular,
women as well as men, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walter Savage Landor,
Arthur Hugh Clough, Frances Trollope, Theodosia Trollope, Isa Blagden,
Richard Hildreth, we also have a library which includes their writings
and research concerning the Abolition of Slavery, a concern they deeply
shared. We have as well six participants in the Battle of Waterloo and
many friends of Florence Nightingale. We even have the tomb of the
former Black slave who came to Florence at 14 from Nubia and was
baptised in a Russian Orthodox family with the name 'Speranza, 'Hope',
her story told on the marble in Cyrillic letters. We key the tombs in
the catalogue
of the cemetery to the books in the library's on-line catalogue and
vice versa. Likewise, we have catalogued the remaining plants (the
Cemetery had all been put to weedkiller), and we plan the cemetery's
restoration as the beautiful garden it once was, restoring it from old
photographs, Victorian travel book accounts, diaries and oral
information: http://www.florin.ms/landscape.html.
For a cemetery is a library, an archive, written on marble. Having
already edited the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (our most
famous burial) for Penguin, I now use this Cemetery and its archive as
primary material to teach myself and
others such
ancient and modern archival skills necessary to learn how to make these
dead
bones, as in Ezekiel,
come back to life for our visitors, and
virtually on the web. The catalogue, the taxonomy, is to assist in
finding them. Each tomb has a human story that can now be unlocked,
told and
shared with all.
Let me give you one. One day two cousins came, seeking the tomb of
their ancestress. She had died in childbirth, as so many women did in
the nineteenth century. Likewise their babies. So I asked about the
baby. 'Oh he's our ancestor, too', they explained, telling how Sarah
McCalmont's Anglican clergyman husband had brought the motherless bairn
and its wetnurse home to England, at one point in France pushing the
carriage up a hill. Pietro Bazzanti would have been paid handsomely for
this tomb with its many inscribed letters. I asked whether there was a
portrait of her. And here she is, straight out of the pages of a Jane
Austen novel.
*°§SARAH
McCALMONT/ ENGLAND
/ Calmont/ Sara/ / Inghilterra/ Firenze/ 24 Agosto/ 1836/
Anni
27/ 140/ GL23773/4 N° 49, Rev Knapp/ [°=Christopher
Stuart Rawlins, Bristol, England], Extant
Portrait/
See Calmont/ [On urn] JESUS
WEPT
[On
square column's four sides] BENEATH IS DEPOSITED ALL THAT WAS
MORTAL
OF/ SARAH/ THE BELOVED WIFE OF T. RD THOMAS MCCALMONT/ OF WIMBOURNE
MINSTER
DORSET/ DIED AT FLORENCE/ IN CHILDBIRTH/ AUGUST 24TH 1836/ AGED 28
YEARS/
BUT I WOULD NOT HAVE YOU TO BE IGNORANT, BRETHREN, / CONCERNING THEM
WHICH
ARE ASLEEP THAT YE SORROW / NOT EVEN AS OTHERS/ WHICH HAVE NO HOPE FOR/
IF WE BELIEVE THAT JESUS DIED AND ROSE AGAIN EVEN SO/ THEM ALSO WHICH
SLEEP
IN JESUS WILL GOD BRING/ WITH HIM 1 THESS IV.13/ AND THEY SHALL BE
MINE,
SAITH THE LORD OF HOSTS/ IN THE DAY WHEN I MAKE UP MY JEWELS. MAL 3.17
/ BLESSED BE GOD
EVEN
THE FATHER OF OUR LORD JESUS/ CHRIST THE FATHER OF MERCIES AND THE GOD
OF ALL
COMFORT
WHO COMFORT/ETH US IN ALL OUR TRIBU/LATION THAT WE MAY BE ABLE TO
COMFORT
THEM/ WHICH ARE IN ANY TROUBLE BY THE COMFORT WHERE/WITH WE OURSELVES
ARE
COMFORTED OF GOD. 2 COR 1.3// [Indistinct]// IT IS THE LORD LET
HIM/ DO THAT WHICH SEEMETH HIM/ GOOD II SAM 1O.12/ THE LORD GAVE AND
THE/
LORD HATH TAKEN AWAY/ BLESSED BE THE NAME OF/ THE LORD JOB 1.21/ A10T(162)/ Sculptor: Pietro Bazzanti, Signature: P.BAZZANTI.F
a
aSarah
McCalmont
Next, I was able to bring a Swiss scholar, writing a
biography of the son, together with the two cousins in England who are
his descandants. Often so we join lost branches of families, including
those in France with those in Australia of a half-Italian, half English
family, or of a Swiss family with members in Stockholm with those in
Florence.
In this way, too, we involve numerous persons, descendants
and
scholars, and associations: the Browning Society, Trollope Society,
Walter Savage Landor Society, Historic Gardens Foundation, Waterloo
Society,
Friends
of Leighton House Museum, Somerville
College, Oriel College, the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography,
the
Museo
Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze, ASCE (Association of
Significant Cemeteries in
Europe), Association for Gravestone Studies, etc., globally in the
challenge of finding funds for the
very beautiful but ruined cemetery's much-needed restoration.
On taxonomies may I recommend: