shutters … Vaughan-Thomas shouted, “Uccello!”’
I, in the same instant, cried, ‘Giotto!’ For a moment we stood there, quite still, held in the double grip of amazement and delight … We went nearer, and the refugees came round us and proudly exclaimed, ‘ E vero, é vero! Uccello! Giotto! Molto bello, molto antico !’ … Then I heard a sudden clamour of voices, a yell of shrill delight, and Vaughan-Thomas shouting ‘Botticelli!’ as if he were a fox-hunter view-hallooing on a hill. I ran to see what they had found, and came to a halt before the Primavera.
For foreigners living in Italy, the years leading up to the war had been difficult ones to endure. As a consequence of Mussolini’s rise to power and the invasion of Abyssinia, an unsuspected strain of intolerance mingled with nationalism had begun to reveal itself in the Italians, of whom the novelist Sybille Bedford – a teenager in Italy at the time – made this acute observation:
When their rules are too bad, they duck; retreat into personal relations, family relations – there you’ll find riches of good behaviour, devotion and honour as well as endurance and courage. Out in politics they are opportunists and showoffs, clever when they ought to be straightforward, rhetorical when they ought to go home and think, and they haven’t learned how to compromise without treachery.
There was certainly little compromise under Mussolini. Among other draconian reforms introduced by Il Duce, foreign words were expunged from the national vocabulary. ‘ Autista replaced chauffeur,’ Acton remembered, ‘ albergo hotel, and half the hotels in Italy had to be re-baptized in Fascist style, all the Eden Parks and Eden Palaces … besides the countless Albions, Bristols, and Britannias …’ An Italian ‘His Master’s Voice’ (‘La Voice del Padrone’) catalogue from the period advertises recordings by ‘Wladimiro Horowitz’ and ‘Sergio Rachmaninoff’, as well as compositions by ‘Luigi Beethoven’, ‘Wolfango Mozart’ and ‘Francesco Schubert’. Predictably, such xenophobia found its easiest target in Florence, with its ‘English Tea Rooms’ and ‘Old England’ shops. Now the walls of buildings were ‘scrawled all over with slogans which were meant to remind us that “ La Guerra è bella ”(War is beautiful),’ while the artificial inflation of the lira halved the incomes of old Englishwomen already living hand-to–mouth. Earlier, Acton had been impressed by the ‘super lounge-lizards’ cruising Via Tornabuoni, ‘all their goods in the shop window, [spilling] on to the pavement to inspect each passing ankle and compare notes in voices loud enough to be overheard’. Now these ‘unemployed Narcissi’ were taking as avidly to the Blackshirt uniform as they had previously to buttonholes, brilliantine and spats. Foreigners previously cultivated were persone non grate. Even Acton’s mother, Hortense, was taken into custody one afternoon, under the pretense that there was a problem with her passport. For three days and nights the elderly Mrs Acton, ‘in a flimsy summer dress without even a toothbrush’, was ‘immured among prostitutes and others of ill-repute …’
No message reached her from outside except an insolent letter from a Fascist female, wife of an art critic, telling her she had only got what she deserved, she might have been treated much worse, with the slogan ‘ Il Duce ha sempre ragione’ (‘The Leader is always right’) appended to her florid signature. When my mother’s maid telephoned a powerful friend for help, he snapped back at her: ‘Don’t you realize that we are at war and that Mrs Acton is an enemy alien?’ That distinguished official had been a frequent guest in our house for a quarter of a century.
As a coda to this story, James Lord notes a detail that Acton, for the sake of bella figura, left out: in fact, the problem with Hortense Acton’s passport was not an invention; she had altered ‘the
I, in the same instant, cried, ‘Giotto!’ For a moment we stood there, quite still, held in the double grip of amazement and delight … We went nearer, and the refugees came round us and proudly exclaimed, ‘ E vero, é vero! Uccello! Giotto! Molto bello, molto antico !’ … Then I heard a sudden clamour of voices, a yell of shrill delight, and Vaughan-Thomas shouting ‘Botticelli!’ as if he were a fox-hunter view-hallooing on a hill. I ran to see what they had found, and came to a halt before the Primavera.
For foreigners living in Italy, the years leading up to the war had been difficult ones to endure. As a consequence of Mussolini’s rise to power and the invasion of Abyssinia, an unsuspected strain of intolerance mingled with nationalism had begun to reveal itself in the Italians, of whom the novelist Sybille Bedford – a teenager in Italy at the time – made this acute observation:
When their rules are too bad, they duck; retreat into personal relations, family relations – there you’ll find riches of good behaviour, devotion and honour as well as endurance and courage. Out in politics they are opportunists and showoffs, clever when they ought to be straightforward, rhetorical when they ought to go home and think, and they haven’t learned how to compromise without treachery.
There was certainly little compromise under Mussolini. Among other draconian reforms introduced by Il Duce, foreign words were expunged from the national vocabulary. ‘ Autista replaced chauffeur,’ Acton remembered, ‘ albergo hotel, and half the hotels in Italy had to be re-baptized in Fascist style, all the Eden Parks and Eden Palaces … besides the countless Albions, Bristols, and Britannias …’ An Italian ‘His Master’s Voice’ (‘La Voice del Padrone’) catalogue from the period advertises recordings by ‘Wladimiro Horowitz’ and ‘Sergio Rachmaninoff’, as well as compositions by ‘Luigi Beethoven’, ‘Wolfango Mozart’ and ‘Francesco Schubert’. Predictably, such xenophobia found its easiest target in Florence, with its ‘English Tea Rooms’ and ‘Old England’ shops. Now the walls of buildings were ‘scrawled all over with slogans which were meant to remind us that “ La Guerra è bella ”(War is beautiful),’ while the artificial inflation of the lira halved the incomes of old Englishwomen already living hand-to–mouth. Earlier, Acton had been impressed by the ‘super lounge-lizards’ cruising Via Tornabuoni, ‘all their goods in the shop window, [spilling] on to the pavement to inspect each passing ankle and compare notes in voices loud enough to be overheard’. Now these ‘unemployed Narcissi’ were taking as avidly to the Blackshirt uniform as they had previously to buttonholes, brilliantine and spats. Foreigners previously cultivated were persone non grate. Even Acton’s mother, Hortense, was taken into custody one afternoon, under the pretense that there was a problem with her passport. For three days and nights the elderly Mrs Acton, ‘in a flimsy summer dress without even a toothbrush’, was ‘immured among prostitutes and others of ill-repute …’
No message reached her from outside except an insolent letter from a Fascist female, wife of an art critic, telling her she had only got what she deserved, she might have been treated much worse, with the slogan ‘ Il Duce ha sempre ragione’ (‘The Leader is always right’) appended to her florid signature. When my mother’s maid telephoned a powerful friend for help, he snapped back at her: ‘Don’t you realize that we are at war and that Mrs Acton is an enemy alien?’ That distinguished official had been a frequent guest in our house for a quarter of a century.
As a coda to this story, James Lord notes a detail that Acton, for the sake of bella figura, left out: in fact, the problem with Hortense Acton’s passport was not an invention; she had altered ‘the
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