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becomes exasperating in the classical’. Florence, with its dark alleys, its death worship and sexual secrets, wins out not just for Lucy, but for Isabel Archer, whose Tuscan seduction leads only to the bankrupt Roman marriage that is at the heart of The Portrait of a Lady.
    As for the writers who stayed in Florence, they wrote mostly about Florence, and themselves: literary travel guides, art history, history, romans-à-clef, and of course endless memoirs. Garden know-how combined with gossip is the classic recipe for the Anglo-Florentine memoir, which usually devolves, atsome point, into a catalogue of the famous, glimpsed and chatted with. Thus Acton writes in Memoirs of an Aesthete :
In Florence there was a plethora of writers, and you were bound to meet them in the Via Tornabuoni; D.H. Lawrence with his Rubens frau and his string bag after marketing; Norman Douglas chewing the cud of a Toscano; Ronald Firbank capering into a flower-shop; Aldous Huxley who maintained that in Florence ‘every prospect pleases, but only man is vile’; Scott Moncrieff, who kept up a doggerel offensive against the Sitwells in The New Witness: dining at Betti’s, scandal-mongering in Orioli’s bookshop, drinking vermouth at Casone’s, there was no avoiding one of these in the city …
    Acton’s prose is at once listless and list-y, as arid as the world it seeks to portray. If he was the scribe of Florence in the nineteen twenties, he was also its avatar, promoting across the channel an image of the city as a Shelleyesque ‘paradise of exiles’. Thus when the young Evelyn Waugh (Acton’s boyfriend at Oxford) was offered the chance to become Scott Moncrieff’s secretary, he lapsed into a reverie in which he was ‘drinking Chianti under olive trees and listening to discussions of all the most iniquitous outcasts of Europe’. (In the event, the job fell through.) Likewise the young Jocelyn Brooke, in a memoir of ‘Miss Wimpole’ published in Private View (1954), described a colony synonymous, at least for those back in England, with impropriety:
Dark hints would be dropped in undertones: Mrs. So-and-so, it seemed, had met Mr Watkins in Florence, and it was said … Oh yes, it was common talk among the English colony … Why, the wretched woman had actually admitted it, quite openly … And that poor Miss Shute – so talented – one feels quite sorry for her … Oh no, no doubt at all – Mrs Bellingham actually saw her, coming out of the Red Lion … Such a pity – but of course, after that, one can hardly have her to the house, can one?
    The reality was rather more tepid. Although there were feuds galore, they were usually more on the level of petty squabbling thanShakespearean drama. (An example is Vernon Lee’s long feud with Berenson, after he accused her of plagiarism.) The Bohemianism of the Anglo-Florentines, moreover, was of a distinctly neutered variety. In England they had lived under the threat of social ostracism or even arrest and imprisonment. In Italy they were freed from this threat, yet rather than exult in their liberty, they created for themselves a society as artificial as the ‘miniature castle’ that Lord Richard Vermont builds in Osbert Sitwell’s poem ‘Milordo Inglese’, complete with ‘miniature’ palace intrigues. (We will return to Sitwell’s poems later. For the moment, suffice it to say that an odor of frantic exhaustion clings to them – of children resisting the dusk that will cut off their games.)
    In the end, it was less iniquity than spitefulness that distinguished the community. Reviewing Friendship in The Atlantic Monthly, Harriet Waters Preston complained of the colony’s ‘frivolity and irresponsibility, its meanness, moral and pecuniary, its prostrate subservience to rank, and its pest of parasitic toadies and busy bodies …’ Eccentricity itself grew wearisome. ‘There was a Marchese Fioravanti, apassionate anglophile who gave parties at which guests danced Scottish reels,’