Florence in February? Why not! It’s a good time to visit this exquisite city after Christmas but before Easter for there won’t be too many tourists and museum queues around. The climate, too, will be quite equable for Florence is notorious for having the most extreme temperatures of any Italian city. In winter temperatures can plummet to well below freezing and in summer the place turns into an insupportable sauna. It’s all to do with the city’s geographic location at the point where the Arno valley closes in and traps air.
We enjoyed our recent stay in the City of the Lily very much. Here are a few photos from our time there.
Florence is a very safe city as far as Covid-19 regulations are involved. Since January Italy has made a distinction between the ‘Green’ and the ‘Super Green’ pass. The ‘Super Green’ is issued if one has had a minimum of three vaccinations including the booster; it is the only way to gain admission into museums and other public institutions like stadiums and night clubs. The common ‘Green Pass’ is not valid here and is only useful in gaining entry into bars and restaurants.
These regulations – strict government decrees with imposing fines if transgressed – are to continue to the end of March at the very least. This is all very different from laisse-faire Brexitania where anti-covid vaccinations are merely ‘suggested’ or ‘recommended’. Having had my Super Green Pass issued to me as a result of vaccinations taken in Italy I wonder how visitors from the UK will fare in Italy’s harsh regime. One thing is sure, however: having no Super Green pass or its equivalent means no way of enjoying the rich artistic treasured of Florence’s galleries although admission to the wonderful frescoes many of its churches contain is sometimes a little less strict and does not always depend on the ‘super’ green ‘.
Behind the former archbishop’s palace which stands in front of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence’s cathedral, I came across this plaque:
It reads in translation as follows: “The ‘Black Eagle’ hotel stood here. The fourteen year old Mozart stayed here in the spring of 1770 during the first of his three journeys to Italy and showed his musical genius to the city of Florence.” Placed here on April 30th 2006 by etc.”
Anything to do with this celestial musician animates me whether it is in Salzburg, London, Paris, Prague or any of the other Europeans cities Mozart stayed at during his hopeful but sadly unsuccessful journeys to get a decent job as composer-in-residence.
On 2 April 1770 the fourteen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) performed in a concert in Florence at the villa of Poggio Imperiale (now a prestigious girl’s academy) in the presence of the grand-ducal court. Mozart had arrived in Florence on March 30, 1770 and left on April 9. On his first trip to Italy Wolfgang was accompanied by his father Leopold (1719-1787), who too was a composer and also a writer of a manual on violin playing. Leopold had brought the young Amadeus to Italy mainly to study that country’s musical heritage although he also wished to find important professional appointments for his son, particularly in Florence, at the court of the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo. In fact, Pietro Leopoldo had already heard the young Amadeus perform on two occasions, in 1762 and in 1769, and enthused about him. The Mozarts, leaving from Bologna, arrived in Florence on the evening of March 30, 1770, entered the city from the Porta di San Gallo, in today’s Piazza Libertà, walked along Via Larga, today’s Via Cavour, and Via Martelli, and, reaching Piazza di San Giovanni, took lodging in the most important hotel in the area, the ‘Aquila Nera’ or ‘Black Eagle’. The ‘Black Eagle’, no longer extant, was located on the corner between the Via Cerretani and Piazza dell’Olio and this is the place where the commemorative plaque was placed.
The day after their arrival in Florence, Amadeus had to stay in bed because of a cold caught in a rain storm as they crossed the Apennines. On 1 April father and son were able to go to the court chancellery to obtain an audience with the Grand Duke. Thanks to a letter of introduction, they were able to meet Duke Pietro Leopoldo the same morning. He welcomed the Mozarts with great cordiality and was happy to see Amadeus again. So much so that he arranged a concert for the following day at the villa of Poggio Imperiale.
On the evening of 2 April in the ballroom of the Medici villa of Poggio Imperiale, the summer residence of the grand dukes, in the presence of numerous Florentine notables, the young Mozart played the harpsichord accompanied on the violin by the famous Pietro Nardini, first court violinist, performing some sonatas by Luigi Boccherini. Unfortunately Leopold Mozart’s desire to see his son fill a position at court did not happen. Wolfgang Mozart was however paid 3336 Lire for his performance at the concert.
The Mozarts’ stay in Florence continued for a few more days, during which Amadeus visited the singers Giovanni Manzuoli and Carlo Niccolini. However, the most memorable meeting was when Amadeus met the contemporary English and musical prodigy Thomas Linley (1756-1778), son of the composer Thomas Linley. The two immediately became close friends so much that they performed on April 5 a violin duet in the Aquila Nera hotel.
The Mozarts left Florence for Rome on the morning of April 9, 1770. The last person to greet them was Thomas Linley who accompanied them all the way outside the city walls. The two young men would never see each other again, eight years later Thomas died in an accident. Amadeus Mozart would never see Florence again, although Leopold Mozart in a letter to his wife in the spring of 1770 described Florence as follows: “I wish you could see Florence, its surroundings, its position: you would say that here you have to live and die. The Mozarts did return to Italy twice more, but on both occasions they did not visit Florence. Yet, in their last Italian journey, between the winter of 1772 and the spring of 1773, Leopold still waited for an invitation from the Grand Duke for a position at court for his son, but Pietro Leopoldo, too busy giving Tuscany political stability and economic development, once again did not take the opportunity to have Mozart’s musical genius recognized with a court appointment.
Here is something more about the Linleys and the Mozarts. Thomas Linley Senior had twelve children, seven of whom were the really musically talented ones and one of whom, Thomas Linley junior, was the Mozart-equivalent England might have had. Here unfolds a story full of joy and tragedy in equal measure. The three beautiful daughters, true English roses, exquisite singers and eloquent actresses, Elizabeth, Maria and Mary (odd to have both versions of the name in an English family) all died in their twenties or early thirties of TB.
Worse of all, however, was Thomas junior’s fate. The boy was an exact contemporary of Mozart when he came to Lucca and Florence to study with the great violinist Nardini, who imparted a ‘Galante’ grace to the compositional style “Tomasino” (as he was called in Italy) learnt from his Handelian teacher William Boyce. Sadly Thomas was caught in a storm while boating at his friend, the Duke of Ancaster’s castle at Grimsthorpe, and drowned, aged 22, when the boat overturned in spite of every effort to swim to shore.
The meeting between Linley and Mozart in Florence in 1768 is legendary. The two child prodigies got on like a house on fire playing both games and music together, with Mozart accompanying Linley’s violin on the piano, and cried buckets when they learnt that each would have to go their own way the next day. How wonderful and touching it would be to have been there and witnessed that exceptional evening! Charles Burney did, however, in retrospect and recounted it in his vivid volume of the state of music on the continent.
Thomas Linley senior died of a broken heart in 1795 having seen all his most promising and talented children die before his very eyes. Mrs Linley, however, lived to a ripe old age of 90, in 1820.
When interviewed shortly before his death, Wolfgang Mozart declared that “had he lived Thomas would have been by far that country’s greatest composer, equalling even myself.”
The gorgeous Linley family portraits by Thomas Gainsborough were bequeathed to the art gallery designed by Sir John Soane, belonging to my old school, Dulwich College and I always love to see them when I visit this gem of a place in South London.
“What would have happened to English music if Thomas Linley junior had not been victim of a tempest?” I wondered. Linley was at the heights of his powers when he died. The “Song of Moses” (ironically dealing with the drowning of the Egyptian hordes in pursuit of the Israelites across the Red Sea) is full proof of that. It’s just another of life’s eternal mysteries.
I have recordings of the best of Thomas Linley’s extant music on the Hyperion label, surely one of the most wonderful rediscoveries of a composer who was said to show more child prodigy talent that even Purcell or Mozart.
There is so much more to the story that I have had leave out and so many mysteries concerning the “nest of nightingales” as the Linley family was called.
I remain, however, grateful that a plaque in one of Florence’s back streets is there to recall some of the most magic moments in the history of music and to make us yearn for what might have been in the world of music if both Mozart and Linley had been able to live longer.