Grand Tour

The popularity of the grand duchy’s capital as a destination, and its worldwide fame, owed a great deal to the British community. It can even be said that it was the British who made Florence the artistic capital of the world. If in the second half of the 19th century a third of the population of Florence was made up of foreigners, the majority of them came from Great Britain (other foreign colonies who played a significant part in the Tuscan tradition were the German and French ones). A numerous colony, which included the poet and writer Walter Savage Landor, the Brownings (Robert and Elizabeth, with their literary salon in Casa Guidi on Via Maggio), George Nassau, the third Earl Cowper, and the countess of Orford, to mention just a few. The phenomenon, appreciable in the 19th century, had roots further in the past if as far back as 1729 Montesquieu had been able to assert: «the English carry off everything from Italy: pictures, statues, portraits [...] but the English rarely take away things of value: the Italians let as little go as they can, for they are connoisseurs selling to a people who are not. An Italian would rather sell his wife in the original than an original by Raphael».
The Anglo-Florentines formed a cultured community, which collected as we have seen, but wrote as well, and not just letters about their travels, and read a great deal. Their story is also linked with the residences outside the city that often, in the transfers of ownership that followed the decline of the Medici and the cost-cutting policy of the Lorraine, ended up in their hands. This was the case with Lady Orford, who acquired the Villa Medici at Fiesole in 1772 (and which became Villa Spence in the 19th century, remaining in Anglo-Saxon hands even after that), with George Nassau who lived at Villa Palmieri, with Lord Holland, British ambassador to the Tuscan court, who rented the Villa of Careggi in 1845, and with many others.
The image of the British community in Florence is closely bound up with the figure of the man who was long its moving spirit, Sir Horace Mann. The cousin of Horace Walpole, distinguished prime minister to Kings George I and George II of England, Horace Mann at first held the post of secretary of legation in Florence, but was subsequently promoted to that of envoy and finally, in 1738, accredited as British minister in the capital of the grand duchy, a position that he held until his death in 1786, serving during the passage of the grand duchy from Medici rule the that of the Lorraine.

Horace Mann was a brilliant man and a good host: his weekly receptions became a place of rendezvous for fashionable and intellectual Florentine society. He was described as a «very wealthy person, extremely amiable and, despite being English, full of charm and good taste», and with even more enthusiasm by Lady Orford, the eccentric heiress of the earl of Devonshire and Horace Walpole’s sister-in-law who bought Villa Medici in 1772: «the most considerate and amiable man who ever lived, he has a house that is a delight, is seen a great deal in public and lives with great magnificence». She went on to point out a factor that explains even better the preeminence of Tuscany and Florence for the itinerant community par excellence, that of the British, at that moment in history: «the mixture of Germans and other foreigners makes this place more suitable than Rome or Naples for social life».