An old English cemetery in Italy is a pleasantly melancholic place. Here amid the crowded, almost tenement like excrescences, characterising the typical modern cemetery in that country one may come across a patch of rural green scattered with decayed tombstones where each inscription silently cries out that “there’s some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England”. Of course, although a considerable bevy of retired colonels are buried in these consecrated plots, there are few of them who died in battle – the British War Cemeteries Commission looks after them in some very beautiful settings. (See my account of one at https://longoio.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/liberation-day-and-the-last-trumpeter/ ).
Unfortunately the majority of the English buried here came to Italy for health reasons and died when the balmier Mediterranean clime failed to cure them. We think of the one whose ‘name is writ in water’ buried near the Caius Cestus pyramid in Rome’s evocative burial ground. This cemetery had lost its little group of ex-pat volunteers tending it during the last war. It was up to my Italian-born mum, then a student at Rome University, and her fellow students to come and help keep the graves clear from weeds. How the dead can truly unite peoples, even those at war with each other!
Our Bagni di Lucca cemetery is, instead, a paragon of loving care. The tombs of the dearly departed have many examples of those who died from Tuberculosis, that disease which took away so many before antibiotics were discovered by Alexander Fleming. (TB – which I too had although antibiotics were around by then – an infection which even in the last century took away from us some of the finest writers in the English language well before their fiftieth birthday, like D. H. Lawrence and George Orwell). Bagni di Lucca’s ‘cimitero inglese’ has been masterfully restored over the past ten years and, together with its cypresses encircling the walls, its well-kept gravel paths and its regular opening hours, has once again become a hallowed place in our spa town.
For more details see https://longoio3.com/2020/09/06/the-dead-live-anew-at-bagni-di-luccas-anglican-cemetery/
I think also of that haunting spot in Florence, the inspiration for Boecklin’s painting ‘The Island of the Dead’, Rachmaninov’s lingering tone-poem and the eternal home of such idols of literature as Elisabeth Barrett Browning and Walter Savage Landor.
Sadly, the oldest of these English cemeteries which Italians more accurately term ‘cimiteri acattolici’ (non-Catholic i.e. non-Roman Catholic) cemeteries, is in considerable need of TLC. As a diversion from a scan at Livorno’s epic hospital yesterday we visited the city’s English cemetery.
It must be remembered that Livorno (or ‘Leghorn’ as the brits called it – based on what they heard pronounced in the local dialect) was for centuries the main trading station for British interests in the central part of the Italian peninsula. There was a considerable colony of English speakers there, a consul and an Anglican church of Saint George. The English presence in Livorno can be traced back as early as the seventeenth century, when, after the port’s expansion projected by Sir Robert Dudley, Queen Elizabeth’s’ favourite’ – the English word for what in Italian would be called a ‘cicisbeo’ – the Royal Navy made Livorno its base for patrolling the Mediterranean routes .
Despite the opposition of the Catholic clergy, in the eighteenth century permission was granted to the English consul for an Anglican clergyman to reside there. A former Jesuit chapel was first used but in 1839, an Anglican church was started designed by Angiolo Della Valle. Dedicated to the patron saint of England, the classically inspired building was completed in 1844. Damaged by the bombings of the Second World War, Saint George’s passed to the Confraternity of ‘La Misericordia’ (a volunteer body dedicated to the health, welfare and an ambulance service for deprived people) who restored and consecrated it for Catholic worship in 1956. It is now leased by the Misericordia to the Romanian Orthodox Church.
Returning to the cemetery I found it locked. Perhaps not unsurprisingly some might add. It always seems be locked. Do they really expect the dead to escape while no-one is watching?
Despite the presence of a former Anglican church, a Waldensian chapel nearby in this little-known corner of Livorno and a few phone calls to the pastor I was unable to find anyone with a set of keys to unlock the gates of the English cemetery. Not trusting my acrobatic skills I did not venture to scale those gates but had to content myself with taking a few shots of the tombs I could see through the barred entrance and in searing mid-noon heat.
I know that Tobias Smollett, the Scottish surgeon, playwright and picaresque novelist beloved by Dickens and ridiculed by Lawrence Sterne lies buried here. Sadly, smitten by the death of his 15 year old daughter and with health problems arising from an intestinal disorder, Smollett set out on a second Italian trip after the success of his ‘Travels through France and Italy’ which is filled not so much with transcendent descriptions of the artistic beauties of Italy but with the inhabitants’ social life, customs, economy and morality. These include accounts of extortionate inn-keepers, the immorality of Italian noblewomen in having a ‘cicisbeo’ in their service, anti-Catholic rhetoric, a diatribe against duelling and so forth, all nicely caricatured by Sterne in his own ‘Sentimental Journey’ where Smollett appears in the character of Smellfungus.
Apart from Smollett, interred here in 1771, and a smattering of retired British army colonels there are other literary remains buried in the sequestered shades of Livorno’s cimitero Acattolico. Among these are:
Margaret King, teacher’s pet of Mary Wollstonecraft. Later in Italy, she helped and befriended Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary Shelley and her travelling companions, husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and stepsister Claire Clairmont.
Louisa Pitt, wife of Sir Peter Beckford, lover of William Thomas Beckford, the author of the novel ‘Vathek’.
So there we are. I wonder how many other corners of foreign fields there are where the English – or rather the British – lie buried in serenity (apart from Allied bombing during the last war which heavily damaged some tombs). I wonder too how, when and where my own interment will take place. No worries; for some years now I have been a member of the Società Della Cremazione. (Headquarters in Livorno…or Leghorn if you like).
See also with regard to Livorno my posts at:
https://longoio2.wordpress.com/category/livorno/
I hope your interment is in the very, very distant future.
Thankyou Karen