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Catherine Trundle, Americans in Tuscany: Charity, Compassion, and Belonging, Berghahn, New York: 2014

 

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a ‘Grand Tour’ of the Continent by English and American ‘gentlemen of noble blood’ was a popular and prestigious activity. The Grand Tour began to emerge as a social phenomenon after the Renaissance (Chaney 1998: 6). By the seventeenth century a conventional itinerary had been established that involved crossing the English Channel for a sojourn in Paris of several months. It then proceeded through Switzerland and involved an arduous crossing of the Alps into Italy, followed by stays in Turin, Milan, Florence, Venice and Rome. This itinerary had a predominantly urban focus, with long stays in the main cities. A Tour usually took between one and five years to complete (Buzard 2002: 38). Many aristocratic young men regarded the Grand Tour as a vital rite of passage, transforming them into more ‘civilized’ social actors and introducing them to a powerful international elite. As many scholars have argued, the primary role of the Grand Tour was educational; a traditional classical education usually involving study at Cambridge or Oxford was completed by a trip to the Continent. By ‘exposing them to the treasured artefacts and ennobling society of the Continent’ (Buzard 2002: 38) it was expected that young men would become more refined (Hale 1957: 56). Furthermore, many believed that a Grand Tour would prepare young men for the requisite leadership roles within their aristocratic families (Buzard 2002: 38) by providing them with the correct cultural capital and social connections. Francis Bacon wrote of the need to meet ‘eminent persons in all kinds’ (cited in Turner and Ash 1975: 33) during a Grand Tour. Grand Tourists would travel with letters of recommendation from well-regarded and powerful social actors, which would help them to enter ‘high society’ in Paris, Florence, Venice and Rome. This continental social stratum consisted of an international community of diplomats, religious leaders and members of royal courts who often conversed in French – regarded as the international language of its day – and engaged in endless audiences, parties and other social activities through which important strategic connections could be forged (Hamilton 1974: 63). Through his travels, therefore, the Grand Tourist became involved in a network of social activities that proved his status as ‘rich, leisured and well-connected’ (Hale 1957: 100). The Tour also provided a young man with an opportunity to acquire art objects that would stand as recognizable material markers of his wealth, status and life experiences (Baker 1964: 137). Some Grand Tourists spent substantial periods of their travels collecting and viewing classical, Renaissance and contemporary art, developing the complex mode of aesthetic appreciation and taste necessary to partake in this exclusive social world. This emphasized the leisured nature of such travel and lifestyles, and involved an active ‘distancing from necessity’ (Bourdieu 1986: 5) that was a key marker of aristocratic status.

Florence, as the Renaissance capital of Italy, was an important and popular leg on any Grand Tour. While the Grand Tour could provide a young man with opportunities to advance his own or his family’s status and fortune, it was also implicated within broader social and political transformations. James Buzard links the Grand Tourist’s understanding of his journey with the expansive goals of the British Empire:

 

As their overseas empire expanded, well-off Britons drew parallels between their nation’s current position and that of the ancient Roman Empire. They styled their age an ‘Augustan’ one and expected men of taste to admire and imitate Roman models … Personal experience of the places made famous by the Latin texts which the traveller had read in school would seal the bond between ancient and modern empires. (Buzard 2002: 39–40)

 

In contrast to a focus on the past, for the American Grand Tourist, Italy’s contemporary society was of immense moral interest. Paul Baker (1964: 50) describes how Americans in Italy inspected and visited hospitals, orphanages, prisons, poorhouses and mental asylums in order to compare these institutions to those in their own emerging nation. He argues that such experiences acted as a ‘nationalising force whereby the traveller came to see the virtues of his own native institutions, while also witnessing models that might offer improvement back home’ (ibid.: 43). The experiences and writings of American Grand Tourists provided a reflexive moral image of the American nation and what it could become. Through an experience of difference, ‘the American was forced to define himself to himself ’ (ibid.: 203). Reference to a hierarchical Other helped to formulate the ideal of the egalitarian nature of American society. As such, Grand Tourism functioned as a moral project important to the formation of both Anglo-American individuals and nations.

 

The Nineteenth Century

When the Napoleonic Wars ended in the early nineteenth century, France and Italy were reopened and once again became popular destinations for American and British tourists. Many members of the aristocracy and emergent bourgeoisie complained that the Grand Tour – an important marker of their status – was being infiltrated by the middle classes. In 1817 Lord Byron wrote from Venice, ‘I wished to have gone to Rome; but at present it is pestilent with English … who go about gaping and wishing to be at once cheap and magnificent. A man is a fool who travels now in France and Italy’ (cited in Hale 1957: 60). Continuing industrialization led to the widespread development of steamships and trains across Europe (Withey 1997: 63), and increased wealth in the middle stratum of society. The entrepreneur Thomas Cook ran his first package tours in the 1820s, allowing tourists to make shorter and cheaper trips to the Continent (Buzard 2002: 48). No longer the preserve of young men, women increasingly took advantage of the ability to travel accompanied by tour groups without risking their reputations (Withey 1997: 144–45). The steady downward mobility of the tourist experience meant that it could no longer function as an exclusive marker of distinction for the upper classes. Comments such as Byron’s represented a growing trend in the travel records of the upper classes to distance themselves from the new ‘masses’ (Buzard 2002: 50). They began to call themselves ‘travellers’, while

the word ‘tourist’ took on a pejorative tinge. Florence catered for this increased flow of English-speaking migrants with a vast array of apartments and rooms for rent, libraries supplied with English newspapers and books, and coffee houses renowned within Grand Tourist circles. Doney’s tearoom in Florence, which stocked international newspapers and journals, was for many Americans ‘like a second home’ and was a place to meet other compatriots and make friends (Baker 1964: 100).

Long-term tourists gradually became settlers during this era, and the English and American populations became established. In the nineteenth century many American and British literary figures settled in Tuscany. Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth and Robert Browning and the Trollope family were all well-known residents of Tuscany. Prestigious social circles formed around these figures, and it became fashionable for emerging writers to travel to Italy and attempt to

enter into such networks. Despite the obvious allure of the city’s architectural beauty and artistic heritage, many migrants of this era were ‘escaping’ life in England. Percy Shelley and Walter Savage Landor were disgraced when expelled from Oxford – Landor for firing a gun at a fellow (Hamilton 1974: 99) – while Elizabeth Barrett Browning had eloped with Robert Browning to escape her overbearing father. This was a period when tuberculosis and ‘consumption’ affected all social classes, and many wealthy Anglo-Americans escaped to the warm and sunny weather of Tuscany to convalesce. Elizabeth Barrett Browning had ‘weak lungs’ from a young age – an undiagnosed illness that eventually took her life – and found that the Italian weather and frequent trips to the popular mineral springs at Bagno a Lucca in Tuscany aided her condition (ibid.: 138). Until the early twentieth century, famous literary figures continued to visit Florence and popularize the city in Anglo-American imaginations. Charles Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, Mark Twain and Henry James all wrote memoirs of their time in Italy and Florence, and E.M. Foster’s A Room with a View ([1908] 2000) remains one of the best-known English novels set in Florence.

 

The Twentieth Century

By 1900, the British consul estimated that thirty-five thousand Britons were living in Tuscany (King, Warnes and Williams 2000: 51), with most residing in Florence. In a city with a population of around two hundred thousand, this was a sizable presence. The Anglo-American residents supported five or six locally produced English language newspapers that, reading like restrained modern-day gossip columns, recorded the arrivals and departures of all Anglo-American travellers and migrants, and reported on their parties and receptions in great detail (Amfitheatrof 1980: 94). One vivid record of

Florence in the 1920s and 1930s is found in the autobiography of Italian filmmaker, Franco Zeffirelli, who was raised for a portion of his Florentine childhood by a resident English woman.

 

The British colony consisted of ageless ladies who dressed as if nothing had changed since the turn of the century. I remember vividly their arrival at certain hours, particularly at teatime … In spring and summer they caused a sensation with their white lace, cream and lilac colours, parasols and old fashioned hats, at their meeting place, Doney’s tea-room … while each of them had a different story, a life of sadness or happiness, or wealth or poverty, they had all ended up in Florence, where they could preserve an illusion of being or having been ‘great ladies’. There was however nothing gentle or soft about them. They were excruciatingly snobbish. Although they adored Italy, they constantly made us aware we Italians were unworthy of our country and had, wherever possible, to be shown a better way of behaving. Persons would be upbraided for mistreating their animals and mothers scolded for failing to keep their children’s noses wiped. We Florentines tolerated them because they were part of our city. But behind their backs we always called them the scorpioni. (Zeffirelli 1986: 17–18)

 

Zeffirelli’s memories were of an Anglo-Florentine population on the wane. The numbers had decreased dramatically by the eve of the First World War (see also Waterfield 1961: 150), and a second exodus depleted this population further during the Second World War. In 1939 he recalled:

 

Fascist Italy was on the move and propaganda against England was building to a feverish pitch … students were herded through the streets to protest against the ‘pluto-judaean-democracies’ of the West. These mobs always ended up in the via Tornabuoni, where the British Consulate and the British Colony were located … there was endless denunciations of the British, the French and the Americans. Oblivious to reality, the old British ladies still came out of Doney’s and cheered our flags and emblems, waving their lace handkerchiefs as if blind to the nasty propaganda. One day they were pointed out by some demonstrators and were forced to join in the march. When they began to realize what it meant they tried to get away, seeking refuge wherever they could. The demonstrations then turned ugly, with jeering and the hauling of insults. Once a group of English ladies were

trapped in a corner and the situation got out of control, lace dresses were torn, parasols seized … suddenly the scorpioni had become le nemiche, the enemy. (Zeffirelli 1986: 23)

 

By the time that Italy joined the Axis in May 1939, ‘overnight English and American residents found themselves enemy aliens’ (Campbell 2009: 16). In June 1940, the British residents of Tuscany were given only days to leave. Zeffirelli recalled that ‘most of the old ladies had nowhere to go, no homes in England, no relatives to take them in. They did the only thing possible – nothing’ (Zeffirelli 1986: 24). Unlike the American women who, Zeffirelli noted, were wealthy, many British migrant women survived on relatively small incomes. ‘One day I went to via Tornabuoni and realized they were gone … They had been rounded up and taken to the hill towns outside Florence, where schools and other buildings had been converted into prison camps’. According to Zeffirelli, at first the American women – who were ‘despised’ by the British women – provided food charity to them. When the United States entered the war, however, the American and English women were incarcerated together and so, as Zeffirelli recounts being told by one surviving English woman, ‘had four years to make each other thoroughly miserable’ (ibid.). Many Anglo-American villas were sold, bought by wealthy Italians. While some Anglo-American women died during the war, many survived internment, and upon release retreated to reclusive lives in Florence and Tuscany, or returned ‘to homelands which were no longer

home’ (Campbell 2009: 18).

Despite fewer Anglo-American migrants and tourists from the 1920s to the 1940s, important foundations were laid during the 1920s and 1930s by the Italian Fascist government for the later boom in tourism, particularly in Tuscany. The Fascist regime attempted to reinterpret, re-symbolize and often physically restore key urban sites in Italy with reference to a newly venerated renaissance and medieval past. These political acts of memory were designed to strengthen a nationalist sense of racial superiority. In Florence, the Fascist government established new museums of the renaissance past. In Siena, they promoted and re-popularized the Palio horse race, while in the hill town of Arezzo they rebuilt or heavily restored the ‘classic’ medieval buildings. Such towns were then carefully promoted to Italians as new ‘heritage/tourist product[s]’ (Lasansky 2005: xli). Certain forms of architecture became important examples of Italy’s ‘glorious’ and ‘noble’ past, such as San Gimignano’s square, il Palazzo del Podest., and Siena’s il Campo (ibid.: xlii). As Medina Lasansky argues, ‘[t]he representation of these sites as icons of Italian culture were so well packaged in the 1920s and 1930s that it has remained successful today’ (ibid.: xlii). While the guide books and aesthetic fashions of the Grand Tour had earlier canonized these tourist sites, this period laid local infrastructural and discursive foundations for the boom in Tuscan tourism that was to occur at the end of the Second World War. All of the sites mentioned above, key to the Fascist’s historical project, became highly popular with Anglo-American tourists and migrants from the 1960s onwards. These tourists were, however, slow to return in the 1940s and 1950s. For many Anglo-Americans, the stain of Fascism and the threat of communism remained spectres that overruled the allure of Italy for over a decade (Campbell 2009: 17).

Several trends began to encourage Anglo-American migrants and tourists to return to Tuscany in the 1950s. Under the previous mezzadria agricultural system, peasant share-croppers worked the land as tenants, living in large farmhouses (case coloniche) set picturesquely atop hills. As Jeff Pratt notes, ‘[t]he Mezzadria created a landscape that is especially attractive to a recent generation of visitors and settlers: a sharp division between town and country, a rural population resident in imposing stone farmhouses, a mixed and intensive pattern of land-use’ (Pratt 1994: 1). After 1945, the mezzadria system collapsed due to agricultural reform. Migration to the cities meant many such houses were simply abandoned. In the Orcia valley of Tuscany, for example, half the population and three-quarters of the farmers had left by the end of the 1950s (ibid.). From the 1960s, immigration trends in Tuscany shifted from the city of Florence to the rural countryside, as mostly British migrants bought up case coloniche for small sums. Harold Acton noted that ‘the ancient farms of Greve and Castellina have been converted to cosy cottages… the .migr.s have imported an atmosphere of weekend Surrey’ (cited in King, Warnes and Williams 2000: 51).

 

The shift to the countryside was most notably in the Chianti region. The term ‘Chiantishire’ was coined in the 1960s and referred to ‘a period of around ten to fifteen years during the 1960s and 1970s, of a powerful group of people – politicians, industrialists, financiers, aristocrats – who symbolized the ruling classes of Britain (and to some extent also, of the European and international economy) at the time’ (King, Warnes and Williams 2000: 154–55). Raymond Flower, who was the first Briton to buy a farm in the Chianti area in the 1960s, was a good example of the upper-class background of these migrants. Interviewed by geographers Russell King, Tony Warnes and Allan Williams in the 1990s, Flower made clear the privileged status of such part-time migrants: I was the first of the British, in 1962, and then my friends came, and the friends of my friends, and then it got completely out of control … there were 60,000 houses available in those days in the whole of Tuscany, and around here practically every second house was abandoned … And – this is where the Chiantishire thing came in – you had this extraordinary situation of going into a Tuscan farmhouse… and finding all the central bank heads of Europe sitting under an olive tree by a swimming pool debating … And you’d go to the little bar in Castellina – there were no telephones in the houses in those days – and you would find Oliver Poole, who was chairman of Lazard’s [a global finance company], as I did one day, and he was trying to get through to London, having a coffee while he was waiting, to arrange the merger between Leyland and the British Motor Corporation! So, yes I suppose there was a sort of Chiantishire feel about the place in those days … all the big names were here, and they brought other names, and it was actually very jolly, but only in the summer, that is what we mean by Chiantishire … but it only lasted a very short time. (Quoted in King, Warnes and Williams 2000: 154)

In his own memoir, Flower recalls how the peasant farmers (contadini) were increasingly supplanted by ‘the disappointed city-dweller’ from both Italy and abroad (Flower 1979: 219). These homebuyers were overwhelmingly part-time residents who came for a few weeks in spring and autumn (ibid.: 211). A New York Herald Tribune article from September 1968, entitled ‘Remodelled Hideaway in Chianti is Europe’s Latest Vacation Chic’, reported the influx of ‘fashionable British, Dutch, Americans, and even a few Italians’ over the previous three years:

 

The secondary residence has become the new sign of the times. People may be stuck within the center where they have to make their money, but where they live, entertain and decorate with more lavishness than home bases are the vacation centers of the world. The lustre places on the international circuit for lucky house guests are Marbella near Malaga in Spain; Port Ercole on Italy’s Monte Argentario, and now Chianti. To keep the heavily staked game on the move, house-swapping has become a norm among proprietors who want to see the same people, but against a different view. (Cited in Flower 1979: 212)

 

Infrastructural changes in Italy and Tuscany also played a part in increasing the ease with which new Anglo-American migrants could access holiday and retirement homes. New autostrade (motorways) between Rome, Florence and Siena, built in the 1950s and 1960s, meant people could now reach their holiday homes in a two-and-a-half-hour drive from either Rome or Pisa (Flowers 1979: 211). Furthermore, the Italian Christian Democrat’s land reforms of the 1950s involved building roads, schools, petrol stations and shops in ‘backward’ and remote rural areas in an attempt to modernize peasant populations and to connect them to urban centres (Pratt 1994: 60). Italy now became a fashionable and chic country of residence for upwardly mobile American professionals and artists. By the mid-1960s, fifty thousand Americans had moved to Italy, including diplomats, journalists, scholars, artists, and those working in the vibrant Roman movie industry (Amfitheatrof 1980: 179). Between the 1970s and 1990s, rural tourism in Italy increased dramatically, with British tourists representing one of the largest groups. A new form of tourism was developing. By the 1990s Tuscany and Umbria had the highest number of agriturismi, or farm-based home-stays, in Italy (King, Warnes and Williams 2000). This tourism introduced increasing numbers of Anglo-American visitors to new areas of the countryside where cheap case coloniche were still available, creating new waves of Anglo-American immigration. Unlike the previous aristocrats who had bought and renovated grand villas in the nineteenth century, case coloniche offered less affluent Anglo-Americans a chance to pursue the Tuscan idyll.

In the early twenty-first century, second-home ownership trends have further increased due to a combination of emerging budget air travel, the popular rise of ‘reality TV’ programmes portraying Americans and Britons buying properties abroad, and burgeoning industries in countries such as Italy catering to foreign property buyers. This industry includes ‘international property experts’ (de Magalh.es 1999: 13) who utilize local contacts and expertise, helping foreigners to navigate ‘different laws, contracts in foreign languages, varied financial arrangements, local building methods and firms whose authenticity is difficult to check’ (Furnell and Jones 1997: 131). Transnational financial markets have also expanded to facilitate house buying abroad. As one of the many ‘living abroad’ guides marketed to Britons advises, ‘foreign currency mortgages are frequently available to expatriates when they do not wish to borrow in their home currency, and these may well be expressed in the currency of the country in which the property is situated, or there could be a choice of a third currency’ (Cooke 1993: 36).

Guides to buying property in Italy recommend that buyers consider placing their assets with a professional trust company located in a low-tax country. This, such guides assure, masks the real value of income generated from an individual’s assets, and helps property buyers to avoid taxes in Italy (Larner and Howell 2006: 172). These practices link recent migration trends to increasingly mobile and transnational monetary markets.

This short history of Anglo-American migration to Italy and Florence demonstrates that it has a long and complex past. Driven not only by travel and class fashions, these trends reflect technological and economic developments, and political shifts. These transformations provide an important context for the lives of contemporary Anglo-American migrants in Tuscany, helping to explain the continued prevalence of rural and urban markers of distinction, the political and economic forces that have shaped patterns of mobility, and transnational migrant imaginations that are both evolving and

enduring.