| italian garden magic
ideas which I wouldn’t call preconceived or prejudiced exactly, but ideas that he’s picked up both from the travellers who’ve been here before him and from his own reading. They came to Florence and they found a city—Henry James describes it as well—that was very different from anything else around at the time (after the end of the Civil War in 1865, when lots of Americans came to Europe to study); it was very different from Paris. Florence was a city that had hung onto its charm spectacularly well, a charm made of old stones and traces of the past, and it was out of the contemporary art circuit which centred on Paris at the time. So whilst these painters all went to Paris, they also came to Florence. We discovered that when they made the trip to Europe, they stopped off in London and in Paris, but then they came to Italy, and Florence was a destination they couldn’t miss. Now Henry James said that he appreciated Florence precisely for its sleepy air, a city where people went to bed at half past eight and there was no one in the street after that hour, but it was a city that had a very strong pull all the same. So the American traveller would arrive in Florence and stay in a hotel—Sargent’s The Hotel Room is the first painting in the exhibition—pending finding something more satisfactory, say, a villa just outside the city gates or in the hills; a villa he could rent because, among other reasons, renting was cheap in those days, and sometimes it even included domestic help at rock-bottom prices! Or else they’d buy them—for instance Egisto Fabbri bought the Villa di Bagazzano in the early 20th century—because the thing they loved best, especially the painters, was to paint the countryside around Florence, the landscape of the Florentine hills. We should mention that most of the pictures these painters produced and which we’ve rediscovered and included in the exhibition show the countryside, the landscape of the Tuscan hills even outside the immediate Florentine hinterland, moving out towards the villas of Lucca (Sargent and his watercolours of the villas spring to mind). So, living in a villa for them meant that they’d achieved their dream Florentine life. And of course, the world passed through these villas; there was major international traffic, so to speak, because there weren’t only the resident Americans, there were also their guests who’d come here for shorter spells. For instance, we could mention a vast number, including Gertrude Stein, Mabel Dodge or Edith Wharton; they all frequented these villas. Mary Cassatt
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ernestine fabbri, angelus, 1916, drusilla gucci caffarelli
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