The three tombs of Evangeline Whipple, Rose Cleveland and Nelly Erichsen stand in their recently restored and re-whitened dignity at the upper left side of the old Protestant cemetery of Bagni di Lucca. Quietly grouped together beneath the Tuscan hills, they tell a story which is at once literary, artistic, political and profoundly human — a story whose resonance seems only to grow stronger with time.

Evangeline Whipple will already be familiar to many readers through her affectionate and evocative book A Famous Corner of Tuscany (1928), one of the most charming English-language portraits ever written of Bagni di Lucca and its expatriate community. Nelly Erichsen, meanwhile, was the illustrator of several volumes in Dent’s celebrated The Story of… series, including works on Italian cities which introduced many readers in northern Europe and America to Italy’s artistic and architectural heritage. Through her artistic circle she also connects with the wider Anglo-Italian world of Lina Waterfield and the cosmopolitan expatriate society of early twentieth-century Tuscany.

Yet it is Rose Cleveland who remains the most historically striking of the three. Known publicly as the sister of President Grover Cleveland, she served for part of his first administration as acting First Lady of the United States before his marriage to Frances Folsom Cleveland. In an era obsessed with appearances, newspapers commented endlessly on her unconventional elegance and intellectual seriousness. More significantly, she was recognised as a woman of exceptional intellect, deeply engaged with literature, theology, politics and philosophy at a time when such interests were still often discouraged in women.
Born in Fayetteville, New York, in 1846, Rose was the youngest of nine children of the Presbyterian minister Reverend Richard Cleveland. After her father’s death, she helped support the family through teaching and scholarship, later becoming a respected educator and lecturer. She published essays and works including George Eliot’s Poetry and Other Studies, You and I: Or Moral, Intellectual and Social Culture, and The Long Run.
Behind the public figure, however, there existed a deeply personal emotional life. In middle age, Rose entered into a relationship with the wealthy widow Evangeline Marrs Whipple. At the time, such relationships between intellectually independent women were often referred to as “Boston marriages” — a term that disguised what society found difficult to acknowledge: that women could form deep emotional, intellectual, and romantic bonds with one another.
The surviving letters between Rose and Evangeline reveal an extraordinary intensity of feeling. They are among the most candid same-sex love letters of their period. Rose writes of “long rapturous embraces” and of “the summit of joy, the end of search, the goal of love.” Written in an era when women were assumed to be passionless and socially dependent, these words now read as both radical and strikingly modern.
Their relationship endured separation, social pressures and personal complexity. Evangeline had previously been married to Bishop Henry Whipple, but after his death in 1901 the bond between the two women re-emerged with renewed strength. Eventually, Rose and Evangeline settled in Bagni di Lucca together, sharing their life there with Nelly Erichsen amid the expatriate artistic and literary circles that flourished in the town during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The First World War transformed this peaceful Tuscan refuge into a place of humanitarian urgency. Following the Italian defeat at Caporetto in 1917, thousands of refugees poured through northern and central Italy. Rose, Evangeline and Nelly responded by assisting displaced families, refugees and orphaned children, placing themselves directly in contact with the suffering caused by war. Soon afterwards, the influenza pandemic known in Italy as La Spagnola swept through the region.

Both Nelly Erichsen and Rose Cleveland died in 1918 during the pandemic. Evangeline survived them by twelve years and was eventually buried beside them. The three adjoining tombs, each marked with a carved flower, remain among the most poignant memorials in Bagni di Lucca — symbols of friendship, devotion, courage, independence and chosen family.
Today, more than a century later, interest in Rose and Evangeline has expanded far beyond specialist historical circles. Their correspondence has become a key source for studies of women’s writing, LGBTQ+ history, and transatlantic cultural life. Rose Cleveland is increasingly recognised not merely as a presidential sister or historical curiosity, but as a serious intellectual figure whose life quietly challenged the assumptions of her time.
This renewed attention also resonates with broader questions about women and political power in the early twentieth century. A particularly striking parallel is found in Edith Wilson, who, after President Woodrow Wilson suffered a severe stroke in 1919, effectively controlled access to the presidency and the flow of governmental business for the remainder of his term. Though never formally empowered, she became a de facto gatekeeper of executive authority at a moment of national and international crisis.
Her role exposes both a constitutional gap — the absence at the time of any clear mechanism for presidential incapacity — and a broader historical reality: that women could exercise significant political influence within structures that formally excluded them. Edith Wilson remains a controversial but essential figure in the history of women’s political agency, positioned between invisibility and authority.
Modern scholarship on these questions has been notably advanced by Rebecca Boggs Roberts, whose book Untold Power re-examines Edith Wilson not as scandal, but as a complex political reality shaped by necessity and circumstance.
We met Rebecca Boggs Roberts last year in Bagni di Lucca, where she was engaging with the wider historical landscape connected to American women who lived, travelled, and were ultimately buried in the area. She kindly presented us with a copy of her book, and she continues to research these interconnected lives — from Edith Wilson in Washington to the expatriate women who shaped their lives in Tuscany.

Seen together, these histories form a revealing contrast: Edith Wilson represents informal power at the centre of political authority in Washington, while Rose Cleveland, Evangeline Whipple and Nelly Erichsen represent a more personal form of independence, creativity and chosen community on the margins of Anglo-American life in Europe. Both illuminate different ways in which women navigated systems only beginning to acknowledge their public role.
This continuing interest will be marked this coming Saturday in Bagni di Lucca at the Biblioteca Comunale “A. Betti”, where the national premiere of the docufilm Evangeline e Rose will take place at 21:00.
The film is presented by the Fondazione Michel de Montaigne and is based on the volume Mia preziosa e adorata. Lettere d’amore di Rose Cleveland e Evangeline Simpson Whipple 1890–1918 (Italian edition, 2021), itself derived from the earlier Precious and Adored (2019), edited by Tilly Laskey and Lizzie Ehrenhalt. The project originated from an idea by Enrica Benedetti.
Directed by Patrizia Lazzari and Mariana Giurlani, and promoted by the Associazione Città delle Donne di Lucca, the Fondazione Banca del Monte di Lucca, the Comune di Bagni di Lucca and the Fondazione Montaigne, the docufilm reconstructs a wholly female historical narrative centred on Rose Cleveland and Evangeline Whipple. It revisits their humanitarian work during the First World War and the Spanish flu epidemic, when they provided assistance to the local population and refugees in Bagni di Lucca.
Filmed in 2025 in key locations around the town — including places still associated with their lives and burial — the documentary blends dramatic reconstruction with historical testimony. The roles of Whipple, Cleveland and Nelly Erichsen are portrayed by Michela Totino, Silvana Rossomando and Rosella Petrucci, interwoven with scholarly contributions from historians and researchers including Tilly Laskey and others who have worked extensively on the Anglo-American presence in the region.
The screening is free and open to the public, and represents not only a cultural event, but also a renewed act of remembrance for a story rooted in both personal devotion and historical transformation.

The story of Rose Cleveland, Evangeline Whipple and Nelly Erichsen therefore belongs not only to American political and cultural history, nor solely to the expatriate world of Tuscany, but to a wider reflection on dignity, education, equality and the freedom to live and love with autonomy. Their graves in Bagni di Lucca remain eloquent reminders that progress is never guaranteed, and that every generation must decide anew which values it is prepared to defend.