This was given as a paper for
ASCE in Italian in Rome's Ara Pacis centre, 2007 and now revised
with further research. For the current catalogue and virtual
e-guide book to the 'English' Cemetery in Florence, see http://www.florin.ms/WhiteSilence.html
Sixteen 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
around 700 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.
No, because last of all I found on the web partly digitized a
number of Notes and Queries volumes of a hundred years
ago, where a Lieutenant Colonel had diligently transcribed the
names from the inscriptions on the English tombs, sector by
sector, this enabling us to find lost tombs or to know where
some of them had been. The English couple, Diana and Tony Webb
indefatigably shared with us their researches into the births,
marriages and deaths from the clergy/Civil Service records of
these.
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. These files are now updated as an e-book, http://www.florin.ms/WhiteSilence.html,
under the title White silence, from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
poem to Hiram Powers' Greek Slave statue. 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
aaSarah 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 OxfordDictionary 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.
This was given as a paper
given in Italian in Rome's Ara Pacis, 2007. For the current
catalogue and virtual e-guide book to the 'English' Cemetery in
Florence, see http://www.florin.ms/WhiteSilence.html
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!
a
aSarah McCalmont
