English Cemetery, Florence

History

Before 1827, non-Catholics who died in Florence were buried in the Old English Cemetery, Livorno, the city then known to English-speakers as Leghorn. (The Jewish monumental cemetery, Florence had been established in 1777.) In 1827 the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church acquired land outside the medieval wall and gate of Porta a' Pinti from Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany for an international and ecumenical cemetery, Russian and Greek Orthodox burials joining the Protestant ones. A young architectural student, Carlo Reishammer, landscaped the cemetery. Giuseppe Poggi then shaped it as its present oval when Florence became capital of Italy in 1865. He surrounded it with studios for artists, including that of Michele Gordigiani, who painted the portraits of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Burials

Among the many Swiss, Russians, Americans and British buried here, those of the English-speaking British and Americans are the majority as the Anglophone community in Florence in the nineteenth century was the largest.

Louise, sister to Henry Adams, whose dying he describes in his 'Chaos' chapter in The Education of Henry Adams, two children of the Greek painter George Mignaty, whom Robert had paint Casa Guidi as it was when Elizabeth Barrett Browning died there; Nadezhda De Santis,

a black Nubian slave brought to Florence at fourteen from Jean-François Champollion's 1827 expedition to Egypt and Nubia, while the French Royalist exile Félicie de Fauveau sculpted two tombs here.

American historian, abolitionist and author Richard Hildreth, who died in Florence in 1865 after resigning his position as consul in Trieste, is also buried here near the grave of Transcendentalist minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker. These two tombs were toppled in the great storm of 19 September 2014 and are now restored.

Giovan Pietro Vieusseux, Swiss, the founder of the Gabinetto Vieusseux (where John Ruskin, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, Sarah Parker Remond, and Robert Browning were readers), is also buried here; and likewise the Swiss historian Jacques Augustin Galiffe, who with Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi pioneered genealogical, archival research, and his wife Emilie, daughter of Charles Pictet. …

Closure and re-opening

The cemetery had to be closed in 1877, when the law forbade burials of bodies within city limits.

The Scorpioni, a small group of elderly English ladies who lived in the city in the 1930s and 1940s, used to frequent the cemetery. Franco Zeffirelli based his semi-autobiographical film Tea with Mussolini on these expatriates.

The Comune of Florence has now allowed the Swiss Church to reopen the cemetery for burials, but only of cremated remains, not bodies.

The custodian of the cemetery is medieval scholar Julia Bolton Holloway, formerly a nun of the Anglican order Community of the Holy Family. Under her auspices, a library has been gathered, including books by and about those buried in the cemetery. Research is being carried out on the burial records in Britain, Russia and Italy, these being published in the virtual guidebook. An appeal seeks to continue restoring the cemetery after many years of neglect and abandonment. Its former beauty is recorded in Victorian era guidebooks and early sepia photographs, particularly those taken by Hiram Powers's son, Longworth Powers, now in the Gabinetto Vieusseux.