Description
The English Cemetery is an island of cypresses and white tombs in the middle of the traffic of Piazzale Donatello, in Florence, just outside the historic center. A quiet, romantic garden where poets, artists and travelers from sixteen nations rest, who had chosen the city as their second homeland.
The painter Arnold Böcklin, who had buried a little daughter here, took inspiration from it for “Isle of the Dead,” and from that painting Rachmaninoff drew a symphonic poem. The oval, raised and enclosed between the lanes of the avenues, is enough to show why.
Inside, gravel paths climb a small hill and divide the garden into four sections. In the center stands a column given in 1858 by Frederick William IV of Prussia. Statues, crosses and gravestones are laid out without symmetry, among trees and shrubs of many species.
The most famous tomb is that of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, designed by Frederic Leighton. Also resting here are the writer Walter Savage Landor, the novelist Frances Trollope and the American sculptor Hiram Powers.
There is also Giovan Pietro Vieusseux, founder of the Gabinetto Vieusseux, and the tomb of Nadezhda De Santis, a Nubian girl brought to Florence at fourteen by Champollion's expedition to Egypt. The inscriptions are in Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and many languages, with passages from the Bible, something then forbidden to Catholics.
It is called “the English one,” but it belonged to a Swiss Protestant church, which in 1827 bought the land outside Porta a Pinti. Until then, anyone who was neither Catholic nor Jewish had to be buried in Livorno when they died in Florence.
It was Giuseppe Poggi who, when he pulled down the walls for Florence's years as capital, turned it into an island in the middle of Piazzale Donatello. By 1877 the city had swallowed it up, and new burials were forbidden to the Protestant community.
In half a century 1,409 tombs had ended up here, 760 of them English. Among the last descendants of Shakespeare, Beatrice Shakespeare and Edward Claude Shakespeare Clench are buried here.
The painter Arnold Böcklin, who had buried a little daughter here, took inspiration from it for “Isle of the Dead,” and from that painting Rachmaninoff drew a symphonic poem. The oval, raised and enclosed between the lanes of the avenues, is enough to show why.
Inside, gravel paths climb a small hill and divide the garden into four sections. In the center stands a column given in 1858 by Frederick William IV of Prussia. Statues, crosses and gravestones are laid out without symmetry, among trees and shrubs of many species.
The most famous tomb is that of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, designed by Frederic Leighton. Also resting here are the writer Walter Savage Landor, the novelist Frances Trollope and the American sculptor Hiram Powers.
There is also Giovan Pietro Vieusseux, founder of the Gabinetto Vieusseux, and the tomb of Nadezhda De Santis, a Nubian girl brought to Florence at fourteen by Champollion's expedition to Egypt. The inscriptions are in Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and many languages, with passages from the Bible, something then forbidden to Catholics.
It is called “the English one,” but it belonged to a Swiss Protestant church, which in 1827 bought the land outside Porta a Pinti. Until then, anyone who was neither Catholic nor Jewish had to be buried in Livorno when they died in Florence.
It was Giuseppe Poggi who, when he pulled down the walls for Florence's years as capital, turned it into an island in the middle of Piazzale Donatello. By 1877 the city had swallowed it up, and new burials were forbidden to the Protestant community.
In half a century 1,409 tombs had ended up here, 760 of them English. Among the last descendants of Shakespeare, Beatrice Shakespeare and Edward Claude Shakespeare Clench are buried here.