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Saving Casa Guidi†

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Emily Blanchard Hope
Emily Blanchard Hope
Affiliation:
New York, N.Y.
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Extract

“Casa Guidi,” as Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning affectionately called their apartment in the fifteenth-century Palazzo Guidi, was their home for nearly all of their married life, from 9 May 1848 until Elizabeth's death on 29 June 1861. They took the apartment furnished for three months in the summer of 1847 and found life there so pleasant that when in the following year it became available, they established themselves in Casa Guidi on a permanent basis and furnished the apartment themselves. Their only child, Pen, was born in Casa Guidi. Elizabeth wrote Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh there and Robert, many of the poems in Men and Women. It was to Casa Guidi that Robert brought home “the square old yellow Book” which, metamorphosed by him, became The Ring and the Book. These were years of great happiness for the poets, and it is appropriate that Casa Guidi should be preserved as their memorial.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 1 , January 1973 , pp. 1 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1973

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References

NOTES

1. The Ring and the Book 1.33. A later passage, 11.472–474, describes some features of the room in Casa Guidi in which Robert stood as he read.

2. Robert, and his son left Florence, on 1 08 1861Google Scholar, a month after Elizabeth's funeral. Robert's memorandum of tenancy at Casa Guidi, now in the possession of Gordon N. Ray, reads:

3. Letters of the Brownings to George Barrett, ed. Landis, Paul (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1958), p. 282.Google Scholar

4. The sonnet and sketch are in the Edward R. Moulton-Barrett Collection.

5. Unpublished letter dated 17 June 1888.

6. This information is based on unpublished manuscript journals and notes in the Edward R. Moulton-Barrett Collection.

7. The Centaro correspondence quoted in this article is in the possession of a member of the Centaro family in Florence.

8. See Fig. 1. The apartment now owned by the Browning Institute includes, with the minor exception of a closet, all of the space taken by the Brownings in 1848. In 1850 they took additional rooms as shown in Fig. 1A.

9. It proved eventually to be 6,405,905 lire—substantially more than the third installment of the purchase price.

10. In the end, each of these individuals elected to give rather than lend.

11. These individuals also contributed their services, as did counsel in this country.