Florentine villas

Bellosguardo near Florence is mentioned as a favourable spot for erecting villas as early as 1427. But the great Villa Bellosguardo was in existence long before, as it belonged to the noble knight Messer Cavalcante Cavalcanti, father of the poet Guido, and lord of the castle of Le Stinche, of Montecalvo in Val di Pesa, of Luco, of Ostina in the Upper Val d’ Arno, and of other places. Some say his ancestors came from Cologne in 806 with the Emperor Charlemagne, others declare them to have come from Fiesole. Dino Compagni mentions Guido, who died about 1301, as “a gracious youth, courteous and brave, but of a quick and solitary temper and much given to study.” He was an intimate friend of Dante, and no doubt the two poets often stood on the terrace of the fine old villa gazing on the fair city below while discussing poetry and philosophy. Both were Guelphs; and Guido’s hatred of Messer Corso Donati, the head of the Ghibelline party, who had tried to assassinate him while on a pilgrimage, was so intense that he tried one day to kill him in the streets of Florence, and in consequence had to fly the country. Villani tells us that when the two rival factions were reconciled in 1267 a marriage was arranged between Guido Cavalcanti and a daughter of the staunch Ghibelline Farinata degli Uberti; but discord again broke out, the Priors of Florence exiled the chief leaders, and Dante was one of the Priori who voted in favour of the banishment of his friend. The Ghibellines were sent to Castello della Pieve; the Guelphs, Guido among them, to Sarzana. He was, however, almost immediately released as the bad air made him ill, and he died soon after reaching Florence.

Lorenzo de’ Medici in a letter to Don Federigo d’ Arragona, son of the King of Naples, writes about “the delicate Florentine Guido Cavalcanti, a subtle logician, and for his century a profound philosopher. Even as he was handsome, winning and of gentle blood, so was he above nearly all the others in the grace and charm of his writings: accurate and admirable in conception, dignified in his sentences, copious and elevated, wise and far-seeing in his composition. All these gifts are adorned, as though with an embroidered vest, by an enchanting, sweet and ever-youthful style, which, had it been used in a wider field, would indubitably have set him in the first rank.” Dante did place him in the first rank, even above Guido Guinicelli then considered the greatest of Italian poets, when he wrote—

He dedicated the Vita Nuova to Guido Cavalcanti, whom he calls “primo de’ miei amici,” and they wrote many sonnets to each other; but Guido’s Ballate are by far the most natural and charming of his productions; “Here,” says Symonds, “we find the first full blossom of genuine Italian verse. Their beauty is that of popular song, starting flower-like from the soil and fragrant in its first expansion beneath the sun of courtesy and culture.” His poem, Donna mi prega perch’ io voglia dire, has had volumes of commentaries written on its beauties, and is one of the poems cited by Petrarch as among the finest in the Italian language.

Soon after Guido’s death new dissensions broke out between the rival factions: Masino Cavalcanti was beheaded by the advice of Pazzino de’ Pazzi, the palaces of the Cavalcanti in Florence were burnt and they fled to their castles, from whence they harried the territory of the Republic. The Florentines marched out to attack the strong castle of Le Stinche which after a desperate struggle fell into their hands, and the defenders were immured in a new prison the Signoria had just built on the site of some houses belonging to the Uberti in the parish of San Simone. From these first inmates the prison came to be called Le Stinche—dreaded name in the later annals of the city. Montecalvo was also taken, and the Cavalcanti were only permitted to return to Florence three years later, to be again driven out in 1311 when Paffiero Cavalcanti murdered Pazzino de’ Pazzi to revenge the decapitation of his brother Masino. Several of the family then emigrated to Naples, where their descendants filled some of the highest posts in the kingdom.

In 1447 the Cavalcanti sold Villa Bellosguardo to Tommaso, son of Gino Nerii de’ Capponi, for 1500 golden florins. After in vain trying on a hill lacking both springs and wells to make lakes and build brick kilns, “which have not turned out what I wished and have cost me fifty florins more than I encashed,” as Tommaso writes to his brother, he soon sold the place again to its old owners the Cavalcanti. Whether they destroyed the villa of their own free will in 1530 when Florence was besieged, or whether the Prince of Orange, or the German commander, Felix von Werdenberg, wilfully made a target of it, is unknown, but in some of the chronicles of that time it is mentioned as being in ruins.

Cosimo I confiscated Bellosguardo with other property of the Cavalcanti in 1559 and gave it to one of his servants for life. Eight years afterwards it reverted to the Medici and was bought from them by Lionardo Marinozzi, another of Cosimo’s favourites. His son sold it in 1583 to Girolamo di Antonio Michelozzi, whose descendants still own it. It was then described as “una torre ad uso di palazzo,” which would seem as though Lionardo had added the magnificent tower on to an already existing villa instead of building, as was usually done, a dwelling-house round an old tower. It has been immortalised by Mrs Browning as—

The front of the villa is ornamented with grafite, and over the front door is a Pietà by Francavilla, a Dutch pupil of Giovan Bologna, while the large entrance hall contains damaged frescoes said to be by Poccetti. The fine old place is now inhabited by Lady Paget, who has converted an orangery into a most picturesque and delightful sitting-room, and restored Villa Bellosguardo to its pristine splendour. All parts of the town can be seen from the terrace; only the Arno lies hidden between two endless rows of palaces, until it reaches the long line of trees in the Cascine, whence its course can be traced for many miles along the valley. From here Florence seems to be closely set between olive-clothed hills, with villas spreading like endless chains as far as the eye can reach, up to the summits above Fiesole, on to the slopes beyond Prato, and behind us towards the Val di Pesa, where the pine woods stand like sentinels against the sky. Straight in front, towards the north, are the heights of Monte Senario, three serrated peaks black even in the sunlight, with the Servite convent lying like a streak of snow among the fir woods. On clear days the point of the Falterona, where the Arno takes its rise, can be seen to the right of the long hill of Vallombrosa on the east.

This view has been celebrated by more than one poet and has given the world-known name—Bellosguardo—to this side of Florence. But only at twilight does the whole beauty of the scene appear. Strange white gleams touch the hills, and in the uncertain light of the closing day there is a confused sense of colour as though the wind were driving great masses of autumn leaves before it through the valley. Then the clearer evening glow succeeds the twilight, and Florence and her russet-coloured roofs stand out clear again in a setting of shadowed hills.

Adjoining Villa Bellosguardo is the Villa dell’ Ombrellino, now belonging to M. Zouboff. Here lived for sixteen years one of the greatest of Italians—Galileo Galilei; and here he composed the dialogue discussing the Ptolemaic and the Copernican systems. All learned Florentines and every foreigner of distinction breasted the steep hill of Bellosguardo to listen to the wonderful conversation of Galileo. Eloquent, sarcastic, brimming over with fun and humour yet full of learning, he was a delightful companion. Virgil, Horace and Seneca he knew by heart and often quoted, as he did the poetry of Petrarch, of Berni, and especially of Ariosto, for whom he had a great admiration. He never permitted Tasso to be compared to Ariosto, saying there was the same difference between them as though a man tried to eat a cucumber after a good melon. Galileo was only happy in the country, declaring cities to be the prisons of human intellect, “whereas the country is the book of nature, always open to him who cares to read and study it with intelligence, for the writing and the alphabet in which it is written are so many propositions, problems and geometrical corollaries, by whose help some of the infinite mysteries of nature may be penetrated.”

In 1633, after the second bitter persecution suffered at Rome by Galileo, he was allowed to return to Florence and live on

At Arcetri, Galileo rented a villa from his pupil Esau Martellini, called “Il Gioiello” (the Gem). This was practically his prison, as the Inquisition forbade him to hold meetings, give lectures, receive friends to dinner, or “commit any action showing a want of reverence.” In 1634 his favourite daughter, a nun in the convent of San Matteo in Arcetri died, and the sick man was inconsolable, but Urban VIII, and his worthy advisers the Jesuits, continued their persecution, ordering that he was not to converse with anyone “not even the most wise and respectable person.” Through the Grand Duke he petitioned the Pope to grant him some mitigation of his rigorous imprisonment, whereupon the Inquisition commanded him to desist from further supplications on pain of instant punishment. In 1638 Galileo became blind and died four years later. Viviani describes him in his old age as “strongly built, of middle height, full-blooded, phlegmatic and very strong, but hard work and pain, both of body and mind, had debilitated his frame, so that he often fell into a languid condition.” He was a good musician and played well on the lute, a clever draughtsman, and so able an architect that the government consulted him on the new front they desired to build for the Cathedral of Florence. After 1633 all his letters are dated “from my prison at Arcetri.”

Not far from the Bellosguardo villa, but on the other slope of the hill, overlooking the lower valley of the Arno, stands the old Villa Montauto, once belonging to the Bonciani, who owned large possessions about there. In the tower of this villa Hawthorne wrote Transformation, and the peasants still remember the foreign gentleman who “sat like an owl up in the tower and refused to come down to talk to visitors.” He describes it accurately in the twenty-fourth chapter of his novel.

“About thirty yards within the gateway rose a square tower, lofty enough to be a very prominent object in the landscape, and more than sufficiently massive in proportion to its height. Its antiquity was evidently such that, in a climate of more than abundant moisture, the ivy would have mantled it from head to foot in a garment that might by this time have been centuries old, though ever new. In the dry Italian air, however, Nature had only so far adopted this old pile of stonework as to cover almost every hand’s-breadth of it with close-clinging lichens and yellow moss; and the immemorial growth of these kindly productions rendered the general hue of the tower soft and venerable, and took away the aspect of nakedness which would have made its age drearier than now.

“Up and down the height of the tower were scattered three or four windows, the lower ones grated with iron bars, the upper ones vacant both of window-frames and glass. Besides these larger openings, there were several loopholes and little square apertures which might be supposed to light the staircase that doubtless climbed the interior towards the battlemented and machicolated summit. With this last-mentioned war-like garniture upon its stern old head and brow, the tower seemed evidently a stronghold of times long past. Many a crossbowman had shot his shafts from those windows and loopholes, and from the vantage height of those grey battlements; many a flight of arrows, too, had hit all round about the embrasures above, or the apertures below, where the helmet of a defender had momentarily glimmered.... Connected with the tower, and extending behind it, there seemed to be a very spacious residence, chiefly of more modern date. It perhaps owed much of its fresher appearance, however, to a coat of stucco and yellow wash, which is a sort of renovation very much in vogue with the Italians.”