The English Cemetery & Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Why is it significant?
In the middle of a roaring traffic island rises a small hill of cypresses, white marble and wild grass, closed by an iron gate. Cars swirl around it all day, and inside it is astonishingly quiet. This is the English Cemetery, though not everybody buried here was English.
Key Facts
| Place | The English Cemetery & Elizabeth Barrett Browning |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazzale Donatello 38, 50132 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.77750, 11.26820 |
| Part of Walk | Florence, Capital of Italy: Boulevards, Exiles and the English Cemetery |
| Generated | Generated |
In the middle of a roaring traffic island rises a small hill of cypresses, white marble and wild grass, closed by an iron gate. Cars swirl around it all day, and inside it is astonishingly quiet. This is the English Cemetery, though not everybody buried here was English.
Until the nineteenth century there was no place in Catholic Florence to bury Protestants. In 1827 the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church bought this land, then just outside the walls near the gate of Pinti, and opened a cemetery for all Protestant foreigners. British, Americans, Swiss, Germans, Russians, even a few converts... well over a thousand people from many nations. It closed to new burials in 1877, once the city had grown around it.
Find the raised tomb on columns, designed by the painter Frederic Leighton. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one of the most famous poets of her age, died in Florence in June 1861 in her husband Robert's arms. She had thrown herself into the cause of Italian freedom, and wrote a long poem about watching history from the windows of their apartment. Florentines mourned her as one of their own. The city later placed a plaque on that house, saying that her verse had made a golden ring between Italy and England.
Around her lie a whole society. The fierce old poet Walter Savage Landor, Arthur Hugh Clough, the American preacher and abolitionist Theodore Parker, and Frances Trollope, whose salon you heard about in Piazza dell'Indipendenza. It is often said that the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin, who lived in Florence and buried a young daughter here, was thinking of this cypress island when he painted his haunting Isle of the Dead.
So the boulevard that destroyed the walls also created this island, which has survived every plan since. From here, walk south for a few blocks to Piazza Massimo d'Azeglio, a garden square of the capital years.