Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations by Norman Davies
Book: Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations by Norman Davies
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Authors: Norman Davies
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is light, held together by water. I wish I’d said that, but Galileo did.
From the yard above the road, I see the cypresses graph a rise and fall against a sky blown clean of clouds by this afternoon’s wind. Stars are shooting over the valley, stars that fell even before the Etruscans watched from this hillside… Five, six, stars streak across the sky. I hold out my hand to catch one. 12
This is not a backward-looking city, however. Its president (that is, mayor), elected in February 2009, is a young, dynamic, centre-left politician, who is tipped to leap to the forefront of Italy’s national politics. Matteo Renzi (b. 1975) is demanding a clean-out of Berlusconi’s Augean Stables. His views are condensed in a book entitled Fuori! (‘Out!’). ‘I get nauseous thinking about Italy’s political class,’ he says; ‘it has done nothing in thirty years, and spends its time arguing on chat shows.’ 13
*
Florence guards its secrets well. Those who know the city best are aware of things that never cross the path of the average tourist. The British colony in Florence, for example, goes back to medieval times. It did not originate with the stream of temporary visitors, like John Milton in 1638, who came here on the Grand Tour but then returned home, though it obviously did much to enliven the stay of such artistic tourists. It has been graced, among others, by such notables as George Nassau, 3rd Earl Cowper and Reichsfürst of the Holy Roman Empire (1739–89); Lord Henry Somerset (1849–1932), songwriter, sometime comptroller of Queen Victoria’s household and former husband of Lady Isabella Somers-Cocks; Una, Lady Troubridge (1887–1963), sculptress and sometime wife of an admiral; the inter-war group of English ladies known as I Scorpioni (‘The Scorpions’), who featured in Franco Zeffirelli’s film Tea with Mussolini (1999); and most recently Sir Harold Acton (1904–94), author of the inimitable Memoirs of an Aesthete (1948). A parallel list of literary names would include Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943), author of The Well of Loneliness (1928); Violet Paget (Vernon Lee, 1856–1935), novelist and inventor of the concept of ‘empathy’; Violet Keppel-Trefusis (1894–1972), daughter of King Edward VII’s mistress; 14 and the extraordinary double-bodied poet Michael Field (Katherine Bradley, 1846–1914 and Edith Cooper, 1862–1913), affectionately known as ‘the Mikes’. All of these exiles (and many more) can be described as art-lovers, bohemians and connoisseurs, and many were aristocrats, real or imagined. Yet they did not advertise the most important cause of their exile. All, or nearly all, were fugitives from the British law, and many were devoted to personal relationships that in Dante’s time – as in the case of Brunetto Latini – would have alerted the so-called ‘Office of the Night’. Habitual pretence was part of the game. Harold Acton threatened to sue on hearing that he might be ‘outed’ by a biographer and, while claiming to be merely observing ‘certain men in Florence’, coined the immortal phrase, ‘the queerer, the dearer’. 15
Another secret pertains to a further period of Florentine history, which followed the ‘Lorraine Period’ and preceded the Risorgimento, but which the city’s website fails to mention. For reasons not entirely clear, few guidebooks even mention its leading figure, the ghost that stalks the Florentine feast. He was a great man with Florentine roots, who transformed Europe and was said always to carry a copy of Il Principe on his person.
Rosenau
The Loved and Unwanted Legacy
(1826–1918)
Rosenau
The Loved and Unwanted Legacy
(1826–1918)
Tsernagora
Kingdom of the Black Mountain
(1910–1918)
Tsernagora
Kingdom of the Black Mountain
(1910–1918)
Rusyn
The Republic of One Day
(15 March 1939)
Rusyn
The Republic of One Day
(15 March 1939)
II
In the early twentieth century the Rusyns of Carpatho-Ukraine possessed
From the yard above the road, I see the cypresses graph a rise and fall against a sky blown clean of clouds by this afternoon’s wind. Stars are shooting over the valley, stars that fell even before the Etruscans watched from this hillside… Five, six, stars streak across the sky. I hold out my hand to catch one. 12
This is not a backward-looking city, however. Its president (that is, mayor), elected in February 2009, is a young, dynamic, centre-left politician, who is tipped to leap to the forefront of Italy’s national politics. Matteo Renzi (b. 1975) is demanding a clean-out of Berlusconi’s Augean Stables. His views are condensed in a book entitled Fuori! (‘Out!’). ‘I get nauseous thinking about Italy’s political class,’ he says; ‘it has done nothing in thirty years, and spends its time arguing on chat shows.’ 13
*
Florence guards its secrets well. Those who know the city best are aware of things that never cross the path of the average tourist. The British colony in Florence, for example, goes back to medieval times. It did not originate with the stream of temporary visitors, like John Milton in 1638, who came here on the Grand Tour but then returned home, though it obviously did much to enliven the stay of such artistic tourists. It has been graced, among others, by such notables as George Nassau, 3rd Earl Cowper and Reichsfürst of the Holy Roman Empire (1739–89); Lord Henry Somerset (1849–1932), songwriter, sometime comptroller of Queen Victoria’s household and former husband of Lady Isabella Somers-Cocks; Una, Lady Troubridge (1887–1963), sculptress and sometime wife of an admiral; the inter-war group of English ladies known as I Scorpioni (‘The Scorpions’), who featured in Franco Zeffirelli’s film Tea with Mussolini (1999); and most recently Sir Harold Acton (1904–94), author of the inimitable Memoirs of an Aesthete (1948). A parallel list of literary names would include Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943), author of The Well of Loneliness (1928); Violet Paget (Vernon Lee, 1856–1935), novelist and inventor of the concept of ‘empathy’; Violet Keppel-Trefusis (1894–1972), daughter of King Edward VII’s mistress; 14 and the extraordinary double-bodied poet Michael Field (Katherine Bradley, 1846–1914 and Edith Cooper, 1862–1913), affectionately known as ‘the Mikes’. All of these exiles (and many more) can be described as art-lovers, bohemians and connoisseurs, and many were aristocrats, real or imagined. Yet they did not advertise the most important cause of their exile. All, or nearly all, were fugitives from the British law, and many were devoted to personal relationships that in Dante’s time – as in the case of Brunetto Latini – would have alerted the so-called ‘Office of the Night’. Habitual pretence was part of the game. Harold Acton threatened to sue on hearing that he might be ‘outed’ by a biographer and, while claiming to be merely observing ‘certain men in Florence’, coined the immortal phrase, ‘the queerer, the dearer’. 15
Another secret pertains to a further period of Florentine history, which followed the ‘Lorraine Period’ and preceded the Risorgimento, but which the city’s website fails to mention. For reasons not entirely clear, few guidebooks even mention its leading figure, the ghost that stalks the Florentine feast. He was a great man with Florentine roots, who transformed Europe and was said always to carry a copy of Il Principe on his person.
Rosenau
The Loved and Unwanted Legacy
(1826–1918)
Rosenau
The Loved and Unwanted Legacy
(1826–1918)
Tsernagora
Kingdom of the Black Mountain
(1910–1918)
Tsernagora
Kingdom of the Black Mountain
(1910–1918)
Rusyn
The Republic of One Day
(15 March 1939)
Rusyn
The Republic of One Day
(15 March 1939)
II
In the early twentieth century the Rusyns of Carpatho-Ukraine possessed
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