Casa Guidi: The Brownings' Florentine Windows

Why is it significant?

Find the corner where Via Maggio opens into little Piazza San Felice, and look up at the first-floor windows of the plain palace on the corner.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Find the corner where Via Maggio opens into little Piazza San Felice, and look up at the first-floor windows of the plain palace on the corner. Under them a marble plaque, written in Italian, thanks an English woman for something unusual: for making, with her verse, a golden ring between Italy and England.

That woman was Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In 1846 she had secretly married the poet Robert Browning in London and fled with him to Italy, escaping a father who had forbidden all his children to marry. In 1847 they rented rooms here, in Casa Guidi, and they stayed for fourteen years. Their son, nicknamed Pen, was born here in 1849.

From these windows Elizabeth watched Florentines marching in the streets in 1847 and 1848, demanding reform and dreaming of a united Italy. She poured it into a long poem called Casa Guidi Windows. The English reading public was startled: a famous poetess, an invalid who had barely left her bedroom in London, now writing about Italian politics with passion. Italians never forgot it, which is why the city of Florence put up that plaque.

And there was a third member of the household. Flush, Elizabeth's devoted cocker spaniel, had followed her from London. Decades later Virginia Woolf wrote his biography, told from the dog's point of view, and in it Flush ends his days here, in the Florentine sun, and is laid to rest in the vaults beneath the house.

Elizabeth died in these rooms in June 1861, in Robert's arms. She was buried in the English Cemetery on the other side of the city, and Robert left Florence and never came back. The apartment is preserved today by English trusts, a small pocket of Victorian England in the Oltrarno. Now walk east, past the end of Via Maggio, into the great sloping square of the Pitti Palace.