date of her birth to make herself appear a decade younger. Why she should have cared what customs officials and frontier police knew her age to be is a mystery, but a very significant clue must be looked for in the vanity and arrogance of the lady in question. Tampering with a passport, even for such a frivolous reason, may be considered a serious matter …’
In the event, as soon as she got out of jail, Mrs Acton left for Switzerland.
At last war broke out; by then all but the most entrenched colonists had, quite sensibly,fled Italy, though a few refused to abandon their houses, most notably the Jewish Bernard Berenson, who eventually had to go into hiding in the countryside. In his autobiographical film Tea with Mussolini, the director Franco Zeffirelli portrays a group of elderly English ladies – the sort for whom the adjective ‘indomitable’ is inevitably trotted out – who stick it out in Florence after war is declared and are consequently sent by the military to a makeshift prison in the hill town of San Gimignano. The film’s climactic sequence, in which Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Joan Plowright quite literally interpose themselves between the village’s famous medieval towers and the Germans who intend to bomb them – thus saving art from history – makes for a camp spectacle that recalls some of the graver excesses committed by Zeffirelli in his career as an opera director; yet as a fantasy, it also highlights the intensity of the foreign community’s devotion to the country they had adopted – and that they believed had adopted them.
In the end, the worst loss was that of the bridges that crossed the Arno, some of themhundreds of years old, and all of them, with the exception of the Ponte Vecchio, blown up by the Germans on 4 August 1944. Earlier the Swiss Consul, Karl Steinhauslin (after whom a Florentine bank is now named), had pleaded that the statues of the Four Seasons on the Ponte Santa Trinità be spared; they were not. After the liberation, divers scoured the bottom of the Arno for the statues, even as members of the all black American 387th Engineer Battalion set to work building temporary Bailey bridges of wood and steel in order to reconnect the two halves of the severed city. Eventually all four seasons were found, with the exception of spring’s head, at which point, Mary McCarthy recounts in The Stones of Florence, a rumor began circulating that ‘an American Negro soldier had been seen carrying it away during the fighting and confusion’. Posters went up all over the city, featuring a photograph of the statue, asking ‘HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?’ and offering a three-thousand–dollar reward for her safe return. But the head failed to reappear, and in 1958, after a precise replica of the bridge was built using precise replicas of sixteenth-century tools, theauthorities had no choice but to return a headless spring to her old position on the northeast corner. (Only three years later, during work on the Ponte Vecchio, did the head turn up; it had not, as rumor claimed, been smuggled off to Harlem, or New Zealand, or buried in the Boboli Gardens, but had been at the bottom of the river all along.)
Today, although all the bridges that the Germans destroyed have been rebuilt, not all the Bailey bridges have been taken down; indeed, there is one near Galluzzo, on the outskirts of Florence, that we cross every time we leave to go to the country. Its wooden boards make a racket when the wheels of the car pass over them; we feel, for a few seconds, a worrisome vibration … and then we’re on solid ground again. Every time this happens I think, for a moment, of the liberation I wasn’t alive to witness, its much-heralded scenes – American soldiers giving chewing gum to children – as well as those that remain unnarrated: the black members of the 387th Engineering Batallion, prohibited from actually fighting because of their race, and now going quietly about the unglamorousjob of
In the event, as soon as she got out of jail, Mrs Acton left for Switzerland.
At last war broke out; by then all but the most entrenched colonists had, quite sensibly,fled Italy, though a few refused to abandon their houses, most notably the Jewish Bernard Berenson, who eventually had to go into hiding in the countryside. In his autobiographical film Tea with Mussolini, the director Franco Zeffirelli portrays a group of elderly English ladies – the sort for whom the adjective ‘indomitable’ is inevitably trotted out – who stick it out in Florence after war is declared and are consequently sent by the military to a makeshift prison in the hill town of San Gimignano. The film’s climactic sequence, in which Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Joan Plowright quite literally interpose themselves between the village’s famous medieval towers and the Germans who intend to bomb them – thus saving art from history – makes for a camp spectacle that recalls some of the graver excesses committed by Zeffirelli in his career as an opera director; yet as a fantasy, it also highlights the intensity of the foreign community’s devotion to the country they had adopted – and that they believed had adopted them.
In the end, the worst loss was that of the bridges that crossed the Arno, some of themhundreds of years old, and all of them, with the exception of the Ponte Vecchio, blown up by the Germans on 4 August 1944. Earlier the Swiss Consul, Karl Steinhauslin (after whom a Florentine bank is now named), had pleaded that the statues of the Four Seasons on the Ponte Santa Trinità be spared; they were not. After the liberation, divers scoured the bottom of the Arno for the statues, even as members of the all black American 387th Engineer Battalion set to work building temporary Bailey bridges of wood and steel in order to reconnect the two halves of the severed city. Eventually all four seasons were found, with the exception of spring’s head, at which point, Mary McCarthy recounts in The Stones of Florence, a rumor began circulating that ‘an American Negro soldier had been seen carrying it away during the fighting and confusion’. Posters went up all over the city, featuring a photograph of the statue, asking ‘HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?’ and offering a three-thousand–dollar reward for her safe return. But the head failed to reappear, and in 1958, after a precise replica of the bridge was built using precise replicas of sixteenth-century tools, theauthorities had no choice but to return a headless spring to her old position on the northeast corner. (Only three years later, during work on the Ponte Vecchio, did the head turn up; it had not, as rumor claimed, been smuggled off to Harlem, or New Zealand, or buried in the Boboli Gardens, but had been at the bottom of the river all along.)
Today, although all the bridges that the Germans destroyed have been rebuilt, not all the Bailey bridges have been taken down; indeed, there is one near Galluzzo, on the outskirts of Florence, that we cross every time we leave to go to the country. Its wooden boards make a racket when the wheels of the car pass over them; we feel, for a few seconds, a worrisome vibration … and then we’re on solid ground again. Every time this happens I think, for a moment, of the liberation I wasn’t alive to witness, its much-heralded scenes – American soldiers giving chewing gum to children – as well as those that remain unnarrated: the black members of the 387th Engineering Batallion, prohibited from actually fighting because of their race, and now going quietly about the unglamorousjob of
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