Florence Read Free

appositely titled ‘Anglais Mort à Florence’.
    Florence is the only European city I can think of whose most famous citizens, at least for the last hundred and fifty years or so, have all been foreigners. With whom, after all, do we associate this city? Well, Harold Acton to start with, whose Villa La Pietra has recently become the Tuscan campus of New York University. (Better remembered for his conversation than his books, he was the reputedmodel for Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited – a ‘smear’ he spent much of his later life trying to erase.) Forster comes to mind, though he spent only five weeks in Florence as a young man. So does the great art historian Bernard Berenson. (His villa, I Tatti, on Via Vincigliata, now belongs to Harvard.) Today, close to twenty-five American universities maintain campuses in Florence, with the result that the city teems with American college students. There is an American bakery, Carly’s, and an American bar, The Red Garter. Movies are shown in versione originale with subtitles, still a rarity in the rest of Italy. In Florence one often meets American women who came here as students, fell in love with Florentine men, and married them. My stepsister, Leslie Blumen, was one of these. During a semester abroad she met Marcello, with whom she lived for a couple of years in an apartment on Via delle Belle Donne. After they married they moved to Washington, DC, where she opened a shop selling Florentine paper. More commonly, American women who marry Florentine men stay in Tuscany. An example is ourfriend Emily Rosner, who now runs, with her husband Maurizio, an American bookshop in Florence, the Paperback Exchange on Via Fiesolana. Their sons, perfectly bilingual, contrast sharply with the offspring of the original Anglo-Florentines, who were usually given over to Tuscan women to be raised. ‘Anglo-Becero’ these children were called – ‘Anglo yokels’ – because of the accent they picked up from their minders. By the same token, Florentine aristocrats often hired British nannies to raise their children, who ended up speaking cockney English.
    According to Italians, Tuscans speak the purest Italian, if not the most beautiful. (The ideal is ‘una lingua Toscana in una bocca Romana’ – a Tuscan tongue in a Roman mouth.) This may be why the city also abounds in language schools, most of them named after great Renaissance figures such as Dante and Michelangelo. Mark and I studied Italian at the British Institute, which Acton founded in the nineteen thirties with his friend the biographer Joan Haslip. Here most of our fellow students were English, many of them teenagers on their way to Oxford or Cambridge.One of the girls, whose parents had a house in Chianti, complained that when she tried to speak Italian to ‘the peasants’, she could not understand their replies ‘because they haven’t got any teeth’. What she might actually have been hearing was the famous aspirated ‘C’ of Florence, which turns the word casa (house), for example, into ‘hasa’. A drollery in the rest of Italy is to go up to a Florentine in a bar and ask him to order ‘a Coca-Cola with a short straw’. ( Una Hoha-Hola h on un h annuccia h orta. )
    As the saying goes, however, the best place to learn a language is in bed, and so most of the American women we know in Florence speak flawless Tuscan Italian, right down to the aspirated ‘C’. Many live in rambling apartments, or farmhouses high in the hills, twenty minutes outside of town – a far cry from the pensions where they sojourned in student days. These pensions still thrive, though, and every year, more students arrive, tides of them, some of whom end up staying for the rest of their lives. They lend the city an atmosphere not unlike that of an American university town. Because of them, perhaps, pizza isimmensely popular here, though as a dish the pizza has its origins in Naples. One afternoon at Yellow Bar, an