Bluestocking Oxford

By Elena Bonacini

‘It kept revolving in my mind, this question of old houses and their charm’, Vernon Lee wrote about a trip to a medieval village near Florence. The sight of the rustic architecture reminded her of her own remote rural villa. ‘I sat there’, she continued, ‘and wondered why I loved this house, and why it would remain, as I knew it must, a landmark in my memory’. Was this love because of her tendency to invest the house with the human drama of which it was the scene? ‘Yes, the charm must lie in the knowledge of the many creatures who have lived in this house’, she determined, ‘the many things that have been done and felt’. A cosmopolitan aesthete, a feminist pacifist, and a sharp wit, Lee was an art historian, literary critic, and fiction writer who lived in a picturesque villa near Florence between 1889 and 1935. Lee attributed the mystical aura of her house to what she described as its intimate sense of history rather than to its architectural features or its geographical environment, but today’s visitors find that its allure has as much to do with its tenant. 

A traditional Tuscan farmhouse, built out of local stone, with red terracotta tiles and green ivy draping over its walls, il Palmerino was a comparatively modest home, but there was nothing modest about Lee’s oeuvre. Fluent in English, French, Italian, and German, she contributed to some of Europe’s most authoritative literary periodicals and wrote over 40 books, including novels, short stories, plays, memoirs and polemics. Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Edith Wharton often visited her gentrified farmhouse perched on the hillside overlooking Florence. ‘She was at home among Italian books, pictures and music, and in the eighteenth century’, another of her most frequent guests wrote, ‘she had breathed that air all her life; it was native to her’. It was at the villa that she surrounded herself with the objects that evoked the deep sense of connection to the past that became central to her ideas about aesthetic experience. As she concisely explained her aesthetics of empathy: ‘the work of art requires for its enjoyment to be met halfway by the active collaboration of the beholder, or, I may add, the listener and the reader’.

Little is known about the villa’s early history, but there is a vivid account of it in Giorgio Vasari’s Life of Artists. This account suggests that the house already existed in the early 1400s, when it was not just a house, but also a workshop, where Agostino di Duccio, a Florentine goldsmith, and his brother Attaviano occasionally hosted the merchants, pilgrims, and other travellers who walked the ancient Roman military road from Bologna to Florence. Vasari believed that Agostino and Attaviano were related to Luca della Robbia, the celebrated Renaissance ceramic artist, but the nineteenth-century scholar Gaetano Milanesi disputed this claim when he published his own research on the history of il Palmerino. Milanesi concluded that while Antonio had distinguished himself as a sculptor, Attaviano had inherited the villa. ‘He possessed a farm that was later called the Palmerino’, a footnote to his revised version of the Life of Artists reads, ‘and lately Villa Pieruccioni located near the Affrico stream’. It is probably after Attaviano’s niece Margherita Palmerini that the villa was later named.

The Medici family wrote a unique chapter in the history of il Palmerino when their patriarch, Cosimo de’ Medici, turned the villa from a goldsmith’s shop into the seat of a secret knightly society. Cosimo founded the chivalric order of Saint Stephen in 1562 as a naval force to mount a crusade against Moorish pirates that threatened Florentine trade in the Mediterranean. However, il Palmerino’s crusading knights also played a central role in the Medici family’s campaign for political and cultural influence in Renaissance Italy. The order survived for over two centuries, and approximately 80 members are currently associated with its mysterious lore. Such an evocative atmosphere seems to have provided an important source of literary fodder for Lee’s Gothic fiction. As one order left, a different one arrived in 1855. A community of Franciscan friars known as the Frati Minori Conventuali di Santa Croce converted the property into a monastery, and turned the Medici’s former opulent retreat into a place of asceticism. 

Lee’s villa entered the next phase of its existence when it became involved in the politics of the Italian Risorgimento. In 1866, 38,000 religious orders were suppressed, and the following year many of their properties were confiscated to punish the papacy for its opposition to the unification of Italy. Current tenants vacated its rooms, new tenants moved in. The villa’s ownership passed first to Count Pier Luigi Uguccioni, then to Count Pio Resse, a Florentine diplomat married to the American suffragette Elizabeth Phelps. The Resse family’s tenure at the villa coincided with significant renovations under the architect Corinto Corinti. Corinti is now mainly remembered as the controversial leader of the programme of urban renewal of nineteenth-century Florence that destroyed a large area of the old city. Lee was an ardent opponent of this programme, and for the next forty years of her association with il Palmerino, she would passionately criticise Corinti’s urban renewal efforts.

Lee’s family arrived at il Palmerino when the Resse family left Florence in 1889, and she settled there permanently in 1906, after she bought the villa with its podere and its cascina. Il Palmerino’s distance from the city centre meant that the property had been traditionally isolated from Florence, but Lee’s hospitality turned this unpretentious villa into the most internationally renowned literary salon in the city. Mario Praz vividly described the atmosphere of inclusion Lee fostered in her home in his The House of Life (1958). ‘So began the conversations, for me so important, at the Villa del Palmerino’, he reminisced, ‘it was a whole new world that opened out before me, and this was the first villa inhabited by English people in the neighbourhood of Florence that I visited’. Lee’s commitment to collaboration with intellectuals from different countries, disciplines, and backgrounds ensured that her house remained a centre of cosmopolitan literary culture from 1906 until her death in 1935. 

‘We have moved here mainly for my brother’, Lee discussed the move in a letter to Louisa Wolseley, ‘who could neither stand the summer in Florence nor a railway journey’. The letter goes on to describe the ‘little half villa, half farm’ in greater detail. ‘This little house is old, awfully old’, Lee wrote, ‘it has a glazed loggia, two projecting windows with gratings, gate posts with moss, a pine & an oleander’. The main house extends across ‘an infinite variety of levels’ but there is ‘just room for ourselves & two guests’. ‘It is about a mile from town’, she continued, ‘on a slope of the Fiesole hill, among cornfields & vineyards’. Lee also described a park with lilies, nightingales, a cicala, ‘vying with the maid’s sewing machine’, and a garden ‘with nothing growing in it except pumpkins’. Lee’s resolution to plant this garden with the seeds that some of her friends had sent her as a gift from other countries speaks to the sense of community she sought to create at her villa.

Although il Palmerino provided a peaceful retreat for Lee and her family, Lee’s engagement with a diverse group of thinkers, writers, and artists ensured that its inhabitants were never really isolated from Florence or its citizens. Just as the young characters of Bocaccio’s Decameron who tell each other stories in a country villa to escape the plague, Lee and her fellow intellectuals came together at il Palmerino to exchange ideas, engage in spirited debates, and draw inspiration from Florence’s cultural heritage. Lee explicitly told her brother about her willingness to invest a substantial amount of money in the villa: ‘If I am in the least to make it useful to others, the Palmerino, which is the only thing I care for in the world, will cost me from £400-£450’’. Her mission was to look after it for the benefit of her circle of friends. ‘The reason why I cling to it’, she professed, ‘is that the Palmerino might represent great pleasure & profit to people poorer than myself’. Today, the Associazione Culturale il Palmerino continues to honour this mission.

References

Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003)

Crystal Hall and Stefano Vinceri, ‘Isolated from any village: Vernon Lee’s Florence’, Open Inquiry Archive, vol. 3, no. 1 (Spring 2014)

Stefano Evangelista, ‘Aestheticism’s Italian mise-en-scene: Vernon Lee and Mario Praz’, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism, vol. 3 (January 2019)