http://www.italymagazine.com/featured-story/just-time-summer-italys-iced-coffee-drinks
Florence from the Cascine, an old view
I love to look at old images of Florence through the ages. Here is a good one!
Firenze, Panorama dalle Cascine. Stampa Antica.
Lorenzo de’ Medici’s sculpture garden
Ottavio Vannini – Michelangelo Showing Lorenzo il Magnifico the Head of a Faun, surrounded by the other sculpture students
Young Michelangelo Carving a Faun’s head by Emilio Zocchi
The Piazza San Marco on the former Via Larga, which is now Via Camillo Cavour, was where Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Sculpture Garden was situated in Florence. In the map below, you can get a sense of where the garden was in relationship to Piazza San Marco. The sculpture garden would have been where the words “Army Facility” show below.
The Google map showing a satellite view, gives an even better sense of this former garden area. Think away the Army building to the south end of the space, where Via Cavour and Via degli Arazzieri intersect, and you can see that there is still garden area in the site of the former Medici garden.
Created with the hopes of becoming a great educational institution for studying art, Lorenzo de’ Medici curated a garden full of antique sculptures for artists to come and sketch as part of their artistic practice. Lorenzo also added sleeping and dining quarters so that students could easily live among the work they were studying. Francesco Granacci and Bertoldo di Giovanni are two of the many people to enter through its doors.
The most famous story of Michelangelo’s time in the Garden surrounds Michelangelo’s Faun statue. When Lorenzo saw this statue, he jokingly told Michelangelo that he looked too perfect to be an old faun. Michelangelo than took his drill and knocked out one of the teeth in the mouth of the Faun.
He showed his subtraction to Lorenzo who gained much amusement and pleasure from Michelangelo’s ability to listen and act on his critique. Although the Faun statue has not been found, the two works of Michelangelo’s attributed to this time period are the Battle of the Centaurs and the Madonna of the Stairs.
San Marco, Firenze
The monastery of San Marco, which stood just two blocks north of the Palazzo Medici, had been founded in the thirteenth century. However, it had been completely renovated and considerably expanded by Lorenzo the Magnificent’s grandfather, Cosimo de’ Medici in the 1450s.
Cosimo had used his favourite architect Michelozzo Michelozzi, and incorporated the work of the resident monk Fra Angelico, one of the great early Renaissance artists.
Michelozzi would be responsible for some of the finest early Renaissance architecture in Florence, including the renovation of the Palazzo della Signoria and the design of the Medici villa at Careggi.
For his part, Fra Angelico’s ethereal paintings would heavily influence Michelangelo, whose depiction of God’s finger passing on life to Adam in the Sistine Chapel was directly inspired by the artist-monk.
The work of Fra Angelico and Michelozzi came together at San Marco in the delightful shaded San Antonio cloister, whose delicate pillars and colourful frescoes enclosed a tranquil green garden in the midst of the monastery.
Cosimo de’ Medici had undertaken the renovation of San Marco late in his life, intending it as absolution for the sin of usury, which had enabled him to accumulate his fortune as a banker. Yet there had also been a less manifest reason for Cosimo’s benevolence, one that explained why in particular he chose to lavish his wealth on San Marco, rather than other similarly prestigious monasteries in the city.
Before the 1433 coup which had removed Cosimo from power in Florence, almost costing him his life, he had managed in the nick of time to transfer secretly to San Marco a large quantity of the funds held in the Medici bank in Florence.
After Cosimo’s banishment into exile, his enemies had raided all Medici premises, as well as those of known supporters, but had been unable to discover the whereabouts of these funds, which had been held on trust, without a word, by the monks at San Marco.
In consequence, Cosimo had spared no expense on the rebuilding of San Marco, which eventually cost 30,000 florins – an unprecedented sum at the time.
The monastery had been furnished with a library, together with many hundreds of religious manuscripts, intended for public use – the first lending library in Europe.
Instead of the usual communal dormitory, each monk was assigned his own cell, many of which contained frescoes painted by Fra Angelico and his assistants. These were mainly portrayals of angels and biblical scenes.
A special double cell, sumptuously frescoed, had been created for Cosimo’s personal use, to which he would often retire for periods of contemplation.
However, he had taken a more active role in the creation of the gardens across the street from San Marco: as a man who delighted in retiring to the countryside, he had done his best to create a pastoral space here within the walls of the city. These gardens would in turn become a favourite spot of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who began decorating the shady spaces with pieces of ancient classical sculpture.
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Strathern, Paul. Death in Florence: The Medici, Savonarola, and the Battle for the Soul of a Renaissance City, Pegasus. Kindle Edition.
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Lucrezia de Medici
The major influence on the young Lorenzo (de Medici) would undoubtedly be his mother, Lucrezia, an intelligent and resilient woman in an age when females for the most part had little opportunity to assert themselves beyond the restricted domestic sphere.
Lucrezia came from an old and distinguished Florentine family, the Tornabuoni, and although her arranged marriage to a Medici was undoubtedly contracted for political reasons, she appears from her extant letters to have been genuinely fond of her husband, worrying over his health and betraying her concern that he should not ‘give way to melancholy’.
Yet these letters are not the only evidence of her writing, for Lucrezia de’ Medici was also a talented poet and hymnist. Although the conventional religiosity of her verse is of little modern interest, such piety did not stifle the warmth of her sympathetic personality.
Her verse appears to have been the outlet for a wider creative sensibility, which was used to some effect in guiding her husband’s discriminating patronage of such leading early Renaissance figures as the architect Michelozzi, who had designed the groundbreaking Palazzo Medici; the sculptor Donatello, whose innovative realistic sculptures included the first free-standing nude since classical times; and the troubled artist Fra Filippo Lippi, whose colourful larger-than-life portraits echoed his own larger-than-life personality.
All three of these artists Lucrezia came to regard as personal friends. The Medici were amongst the first patrons to recognise that artists were now becoming something more than mere craftsmen, and the family did their best to accommodate the increasingly difficult temperaments and wayward behaviour of these emergent genius-figures.
Lucrezia was also known to have influenced would be she who persuaded Piero to allow certain members of the Strozzi family to return from the banishment they had suffered for opposing Cosimo. This would prove a particularly astute move.
Of similar impact was Lucrezia’s formative influence upon the youthful Lorenzo, who quickly began displaying precocious brilliance in a variety of fields, ranging from classical literature to horseback-riding. He was also said to have had an exceptional singing voice, accompanying himself on the lyre.*
Strathern, Paul. Death in Florence: The Medici, Savonarola, and the Battle for the Soul of a Renaissance City, Pegasus. Kindle Edition.
Let’s say you are very sick during the Renaissance…
and you are one of the leading lights of the period. What would your doctor recommend for you?
Well, if you were Lorenzo the Magnificent, this remedy was tried:
By this stage Lorenzo was being attended by the celebrated Lazaro da Ticino ‘a very creative physician’, who had arrived from Milan. According to Poliziano: ‘in order not to leave any method untested, he tried a highly expensive remedy which involved grinding pearls and precious stones of all sorts’. This was a traditional remedy deriving from classical times, which almost certainly arrived in Europe from China, where such concoctions were thought to be ingredients of the fabled ‘elixir of life’.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work, and Lorenzo died within a week.
Strathern, Paul. Death in Florence: The Medici, Savonarola, and the Battle for the Soul of a Renaissance City Pegasus. Kindle Edition.
The power of fashion
A sure sign I’ve arrived!
After numerous short visits to Italy of 2 weeks or more over decades, I have finally arrived as an Italian resident! Woo hoo! Since my recent move into my new condo, I finally got to put my name in print on the building’s door bell system. I’m very proud!
Violet Paget in Florence, updated post
26 June 2018, a new article to add on Ms. Paget: https://frieze.com/article/vernon-lee-psychology-art-writer
Vernon Lee, the pseudonym of Violet Paget (1856-1935), was a well-known English expat writer who lived for many years in Florence.
Lee was the author of essays, literary criticism, travelogues, novels and ghost stories. Among her many books are: Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, The Countess of Albany, Limbo, Genius Loci, Hortus Vitae, The Enchanted Woods, The Spirit of Rome, Laurus Nobilis, Louis Norbert, The Handling of Words and The Golden Keys. She is remembered today primarily for her supernatural fiction and her work on aesthetics. An early follower of Walter Pater, she wrote over a dozen volumes of essays on art, music, and travel.
Paget was born in France in 1856 at Château St Leonard, Boulogne, to cosmopolitan and peripatetic intellectual British expatriate parents, who later settled in 1873 their family in Florence.
In 1878, she determined to publish under a masculine pseudonym in order to be taken seriously, and in 1880 her collection of essays that had originally appeared in Fraser’s Magazine was published under the name by which she came to be known both personally and professionally. This work, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, brought to life for English readers the hitherto unexplored world of poet-librettist Pietro Metastasio and dramatists Carlo Goldini and Carlo Gozzi.
The 1881 portrait of ‘Vernon Lee’ by John Singer Sargent
Her collections of essays Belcaro (1881), a work on aesthetics, and Euphorion (1884), which includes essays on Shakespeare and Renaissance Italy, reveal her scholarship, always enlivened by wit and imagination. In her three-volume novel, Miss Brown (1884), she brutally caricatures English aesthetic coteries (especially the Pre-Raphaelites).
Lee wrote more than 30 books, including a play, Ariadne in Mantua (1903), and several collections of stories, among them Pope Jacynth and Other Fantastic Tales (1904). Her powerful allegorical drama Satan the Waster (1920) reveals her ardent pacificism.
Although Lee primarily wrote for an English readership and made many visits to London, she spent the majority of her life on the continent, particularly in Italy. In 1889, she purchased the property known as`Il Palmerino’, where she received visits from famous figures in the world of literature: Berenson, Aldous Huxley, Carl Placci, Anatole France, Mario Praz, etc. Everyone who visited found a woman of high intellect, though sometimes aloof, according to the then young Mrs. Flavia Farrini Cini. But we also know that Lee organized wonderful theatrical recitations and plays, belying her reputation for standoffishness.
In 1922, she restored the property’s country house and Limonaia, and transformed the horse stables into a beautiful salon. She moved into this house, where she remained the rest of her life.
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Villa il Palmerino, Florence, Italy
A commemorative plaque was installed on Il Palmerino, which reads:
VIOLET PAGET – VERNON LEE 1856-1935 LIVED IN THIS HOUSE SINCE 1889. FROM HER YOUTH SHE LOVED ITALY WITH HER PASSIONATE SEARCH FOR BEAUTY, HER MANY BOOKS REMAIN TO PROVE IT.
Lee had an important impact on the city of Florence as well, and protested against the city-sponsored plans to demolish historic buildings, and against the construction of ill-designed ones. She conducted most of this protesting in long letters to the London Times.
An engaged feminist, she always dressed à la garçonne. She was gay and had long-term relationships with three women, Mary Robinson, Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, and British author Amy Levy.
Lee played the harpsichord and her appreciation of music animates her first major work, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880). In her preface to the 2nd edition (1907), she recalled her excitement as a girl when she came across a bundle of 18th-century music. She was so nervous that it wouldn’t live up to her expectations that she escaped to the garden and listened rapturously through an open window as her mother worked out the music on the piano. Along with Pater and John Adding Symonds, she was considered an authority on the Italian Renaissance, and wrote two works that dealt with it explicitly, Euphorion (1884) and Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895).
Violet Paget, Violet Keppel Trefusis e le altre Scrittrici, giornaliste, femministe, protagoniste della società del loro tempo
She was known for her numerous essays about travel in Italy, France, Germany, and Switzerland, which attempted to capture the psychological effects of places rather than to convey any particular piece of information. Like her friend Henry James, she wrote critically about the relationship between writers and their audience, pioneering the idea of critical assessment among all the arts as relating to an audience’s personal response.
She was a proponent of the Aesthetic movement, and after a lengthy written correspondence, met the movement’s effective leader, Walter Pater, in England in 1881, just after encountering one of Pater’s most famous disciples, Oscar Wilde.
Lee’s open resistance against World War I and her work Satan the Waster led to her being ostracized by the younger generation of scholars and writers. Feminist research led to a rediscovery since the 1990s.
Sources: After Lee’s death in 1935, over 400 books from her library at the Villa ‘Il Palmerino were presented to The British Institute of Florence by her friend and executrix, Irene Cooper Willis.
See also:
June 2, Republic Day in Italy
Festa della Repubblica (Festival of the Republic) is a national holiday celebrated in Italy on June 2 each year. It celebrates the day when Italians voted to abolish the monarchy in 1946 so their country could become a republic.
The day commemorates the institutional referendum in 1946, in which the Italian people were called to the polls to decide on the form of government, following WWII and the fall of Fascism. With 12,717,923 votes for a republic and 10,719,284 for the monarchy, the male descendants of the House of Savoy were sent into exile and Italy became a republic.
Each year, a wreath is laid at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Republic Day. The tomb has an eternal flame that was added on November 4, 1921, even thought the tomb, which was designed by sculptor Alberto Sparapani, was not completed until 1924.
To recognize this holiday, official ceremonies are held, as well as military parades, and the laying of a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, inside the Altare della Patria in Rome.
The Altare della Patria (Altar of the Fatherland), also known as the Monumento Nazionale a Vittorio Emanuele II (National Monument to Victor Emmanuel II) or Il Vittoriano, is a monument built in honor of Victor Emmanuel, the first king of a unified Italy, located in Rome. The monument occupies a site between Piazza Venezia and the Capitoline Hill.
Republic Day is a federal holiday in Italy and organizations and businesses that close include government offices, post offices, banks, schools and other educational institutions.
get back, lauretta! 
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