Dear readers,

on the 91st anniversary of Vernon Lee’s passing, 13 February 2026, a moving ceremony was organised by the Associazione Culturale Il Palmerino to honour her at Villa Il Palmerino, Florence.

We are now deeply grateful to Professor Rita Severi (University of Verona) for offering us all the opportunity of reading the text of her fascinating scholarly tribute to Vernon Lee and her chosen adopted homeland: Italy.

 

Vernon Lee in Italy: a happy choice*

Rita Severi

Violet Paget/Vernon Lee in Florence

In 1894, at the height of her fame, as a representative of the English aesthetic movement in Florence, Violet Paget/Vernon Lee was chosen by Anatole France (1844-1924)[1] as a role model to represent the “Pre-Raphaelite” writer, Miss Vivian Bell, who in his novel Le Lys rouge[2] is composing a poem about Isolde la Blonde. Miss Bell lives in Maiano, near Fiesole, and is celebrated in England as a great poet, “as are Vernon Lee and Mary Robinson”.[3] She had fallen in love with art and life in Tuscany. Vivian invites her Parisian friend Teresa, Countess Martin-Bellème to spend a holiday in Florence, where she meets, thanks to Miss Bell, the charming artist and art critic Jacques Dechartre, who often went to Italy, which he considered the homeland of his soul.[4] Teresa, who is quietly married to a wealthy politician, lives an intense love affair with him, with frequent meetings in a charming apartment in Via Alfieri, near the English Cemetery and delightful visits to the main sites of Florentine art.

In 1999, the well-known Italian novelist Angela Bianchini published a novel, Un amore sconveniente, in which she celebrates the writer and activist Vernon Lee and introduces as the protagonist the young, handsome, Jewish professor, Edoardo Ascoli, characterized with great sensitivity as a university professor of languages, very similar in his discreet behavior to the ineffable English scholar Mario Praz. The novel is set in the early thirties and follows the events of the Second World War to the end. 

“Secluded from society, the Englishwoman Vernon Lee had lived in Florence for years, in her beautiful villa in Settignano.[5] She was single and solitary. In her youth she had studied the Italian eighteenth century and, in particular, the writers Metastasio and Goldoni, so dear to Edoardo. She had been a pacifist and a feminist and had enjoyed her moment of fame. Edoardo, who knew her only by sight, in the bewilderment of that spring had felt the desire to go and visit her, to talk to her. Perhaps he would have been able to grasp the secret of that life spent entirely in Italy, in contemplation of its beauties, and, yet, now she was alone.

(…) Vernon Lee had died in 1935, before the racial sanctions against the Jews, and before he, Edoardo, had decided to visit her in the beautiful villa in Settignano.  However, he had treasured the memory of the fearless old lady who had always gone against the tide: and partly as a tribute to her, whom he had never had the energy to approach, partly because he felt her akin, a companion in difficult times, at the end, he had written the long, awaited study.”[6]

The presence of Vernon Lee in an almost recent novel shows how her fame in the intellectual circuit, at least in Italy, has never been tarnished, and therefore we can only agree with Mario Praz when he said that Vernon Lee and Edith Wharton were to be considered “the figures of the two representative women in the pantheon of the immortals”.[7] Yet, regarding fame, Vernon Lee was skeptical to the point of writing to her diplomat friend, Maurice Baring: “Neither do I expect much dédommagement from posterity. That’s all lost nowadays. There is no posterity.”[8] What kind of compensation did she expect, given that in her adopted country she had been literally flattered by many of the most important literary figures: the novelist and patriotic hero Giovanni Ruffini, the influential publisher Angelo De Gubernatis, who included a very laudatory voice of the young writer in his Dictionnaire International des Écrivains du Jour (Florence, Louis Niccolai, 1892, p. 1568). She was undoubtedly appreciated by the famous poet and novelist Gabriele D’Annunzio[9], under whose direction she contributed some articles to the Cronaca Bizantina, and by whom she was later remembered as “Violetta the pacifist”[10]. She was well known to Italy’s best critic of English letters, Enrico Nencioni (1837-1896), who reviewed Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy as soon as it was published in 1880, as well as Euphorion (originally published in La Nuova Antologia, 15 June 1884) and Juvenilia[11]. Nencioni was a friend of the painter Telemaco Signorini, who introduced him to the salon of the Paget house, via Giuseppe Garibaldi 5, where he became a habitué[12]. In the first decade of the twentieth century Vernon Lee became a regular contributor to the prestigious magazine La Nuova Antologia, where her only tragedy, Ariadne in Mantua (1903), appeared in 1907, translated into Italian by her dear friend from Ravenna, Angelica Rasponi. Her contributions to that literary magazine included an article entitled “After the disaster of Sicily and Calabria, on the recent earthquake of Messina”, published in the March – April issue, pp. 325-328;  and, in January 1910, in the same magazine (pp. 57-72) appeared the picturesque hagiography, composed as a diary, Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child: An Eighteenth Century Legend, translated with great care by her friend Pia Di Valmarana with the title Suor Benvenuta e il Bambin Gesù leggenda del secolo XVIII[13], partly in Italian, partly in the Venetian dialect. I mentioned these important relationships in my long introduction to the bilingual edition of Ariadne in Mantua[14], but, lately, while trying to redraw Vernon Lee’s Italian circle, I realized that the image was full of shadows, blurred[15].

Research in Bologna

Let’s start from Bologna, the city where sixteen-year-old Vernon Lee devoted herself to serious study for a book she had in mind to write on the Italian artistic civilization of the eighteenth century. It was in Bologna that she decided to become a writer for the first time. She visited various libraries and the Conservatory, assisted on that occasion by Gaetano Capocci, choirmaster of the Lateran Chapel. In the hall of the Conservatory, she remained for a long time in contemplation of the large portrait of the sopranist Carlo Brioschi (1705-1782), better known as “Farinelli”, painted by Corrado Giaquinto. He had become the favorite singer of Philip V of Spain (1683-1746) and, when the king was afflicted with incurable melancholy, he did his best to humour him by spending nights at his bedside whispering sweet melodies to him to mitigate his suffering. Farinelli’s presence and the Bolognese musical environment provided Vernon Lee with valuable elements for her research of cultural criticism, but also for two short stories, A Wicked Voice and Winthrop’s Adventure, and for her only closet drama, Ariadne in Mantua.[16] The city of Bologna regaled her with unforgettable memories. That fall of 1872 was particularly dear to her because she could still enjoy the company of her childhood friend and future great painter, John Singer Sargent. She recalled this happy period two years later in the essay Autumnal Impressions in Bologna, which she sent to her friend, the novelist Mrs. Jenkin (1807-1885) to see if she could publish it, but this did not happen and the essay was probably lost forever.[17] In Bologna with John Singer Sargent in 1872 and together, with their respective mothers, they spent “ten days of historic, romantic ecstasy, as only two adolescents with such similar cultural interests could do”.[18] When Sargent died in 1925, Vernon Lee contributed “In Memoriam”, a long essay describing their childhood years, from 1866 to 1868, when they played together in Nice, then again in 1868-1869, when they met again in Rome, where their lives, thanks also to Mrs. Sargent, were full of discoveries, ancient stories, visits to museums and very long walks in the seven hills of Rome for two wonderful winters. Finally, in the autumn of 1872 there was the discovery of Bologna which took place during the day at the Conservatory where Vernon Lee spent hours and hours consulting ancient scores that were illegible because they were scattered with too many keys of Ut. And while she took notes, Sargent began to study the portraits of eighteenth-century musicians that covered the walls of the Conservatory and copy some of them. As soon as Lee and Sargent returned from their studies, the families allowed themselves a few strolls under the arcades, where Violet seemed to hear “that strange chant (…) it echoes drearily through the Bolognese arcades as the white oxen drag the massive carved oaken wain, loaded with wine vats, across the uneven pavement”.[19] They visited the many Medieval squares with crenelated towers and Renaissance palaces, perhaps made a few stops in the local “osterie” to savour the Bolognese cuisine, and took long, wandering walks around the city that to their eyes appeared “enormously picturesque and still unspoilt”.[20] These brief memories are dated Oxford, August 13, 1925. In that year Vernon Lee published The Golden Keys and Other Essays on the Genius Loci (London, John Lane, 1925) which includes, with the exception of the last three essays, datable from 1914 to 1917, material which she had written before the First World War, in particular two essays: “The Old Bologna Road” and “Dusky Many-Towered Bologna”.

In the first essay, the writer describes the itinerary of the old road between Bologna and Florence through Pietramala[21] and Loiano. The road is different from all the others. It immediately rises and winds along the peaks, then overlooks the wide valleys. It doesn’t just move through a district or province, but across Europe and makes you feel with its high, sunny and stormy opening that it doesn’t just unite two cities, but the entire North and the entire South. On this romantic road, the villages have remained unchanged, despite having been traveled by Napoleon and Garibaldi, but also by Goethe, Byron, Shelley and Browning. But in one of those humble villages of black stone, Vernon Lee and her friends met “a melancholy caravan of Dalmatian wanderers who went from fair to fair, with tired and wounded feet, dragging with them a bear and two monkeys. The Apennine road towards Futa and Pietramala runs along the ridges and high open spaces and on the way back gives the writer the feeling of having returned from remote adventures.”[22] 

In the second essay, “Dusky, Many-Towered Bologna”, Vernon Lee quotes in the title a verse from Giosuè Carducci’s poem “Nella Piazza di San Petronio/In the Square of San Petronio” (1877): “Sorge nel chiaro inverno la fosca turrita Bologna”, and introduces us to the oldest and most venerated places in the medieval city, the seven churches around Santo Stefano. To Vernon Lee they seem more than seven: “a labyrinth of low-roofed basilicas, chapels, crypts and shrines; and cloisters, and damp monastic courtyards under the steeples, and mysterious corridors, with hidden tombs and tabernacles; baroque Dead Jesus crammed where one would expect only broken chairs and shabby brooms, and the Three Wise Men, huge pieces of the gothic chess board that scare you with their petrified gaze, when you suddenly bump into them. Sanctuaries of all kinds, one inside the other, which smell of bats and mice, where I also seemed to breathe the fetid air of past centuries. These Seven Churches, especially the Church of the Templar, also known as the House of Pilate, are the kind of mise en  scène that Wagner himself would have liked to create in his Parsifal. This house of Pilate is certainly a place of indescribable mystery and fear, (…) whose appropriate sounds would not even be simple songs, (…) but murmurs and lamentations and solitary steps; It is a building that has the characteristics of the creepy nightmare typical of the moments before the winter dawn.” On the way out, Violet turns her gaze to a Roman tablet with the inscription “Dominae Isidi Victrici”which reminds her that the site occupies the ancient Iseo, the temple dedicated to Isis. As often happens in Italy, ancient pagan temples welcome Christian churches with their saints. In this Bolognese itinerary, Vernon Lee remembers the poet Giosuè Carducci (1835 -1907) whom she never met during her visits to the city, yet she read his poetry, and knew about his enormous fame. But he too noticed the talented English lady, who had written a book of great value entitled Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, reviewed by Enrico Nencioni in La Fanfulla della Domenica on August 1, 1880, who suggested to the author to include the poet’s name in her bibliography.[23] Enrico Nencioni had been Carducci’s closest schoolmate since high school, and the two men kept in touch, exchanging what they were writing. It is therefore undeniable that Nencioni’s evaluation of Vernon Lee’s Studies introduced her into the predominantly masculine hortus conclusus of Italian letters.

The first Italian translation by the poet Alessandro Arnaboldi was published in two volumes, in 1882 by the Dumolard Brothers, in Milan with the title Il Settecento in Italia.[24] In Carducci’s library in his house in Bologna, where every book on the original shelves of the library can be easily consulted, there is a copy (catalogue number: 1.a.482) that bears the traces of a very scrupulous and careful reading. Giosuè Carducci read Il Settecento in Italia with evident and curious interest. Throughout the two volumes there are many question marks, mainly to point out mistranslation (e.g., vol. 1, pp. 11-18) or typographical errors that, in this edition, abound. Carducci then underlines some relevant points. For example, it is quite clear that he approves of the two chapters concerning “Metastasio and the Opera” and “The Comedy of Masks”, but what seems to capture his attention and inspire his complete satisfaction are all those passages that describe the poet and playwright Vittorio Alfieri with indignation. The phrases “The fastidious, faultless, pleasureless Alfieri (…) the disdainful amateur (…) energetic Alfieri (…) the plays were ordered and had to be produced at once”[25] are heavily underlined. As for the “Misogallo”, “Hater of the French”, Giosuè Carducci and Vernon Lee agree and share the same point of view, that is a great appreciation for French culture. It is incredible that these two writers who were so honest and frank, who had so much in common, never wrote to each other, or never met. At least so far, no documentary evidence has emerged.

Not surprisingly, then, the other Vernon Lee book preserved in the library[26] is the original edition of The Countess of Albany (1884) (catalogue number: 2. b. 331), which she considered “a sort of completion of my previous studies on eighteenth-century Italy”.[27] Carducci probably leafed through it, but there are no notes.

In the Preface to The Countess of Albany, Vernon Lee acknowledges her gratitude to her friend, the “eminent novelist” Mario Pratesi (1842–1921),[28] now remembered for his travel sketches and the novel set in Siena, L’eredità (The Legacy) (1889). As a Tuscan, he was also well known to the Tuscan Carducci. However, it does not seem that Pratesi ever introduced Lee to Carducci.

The Italian poet, in a very short time, would acquire European fame. In 1892, Frank Harris, whom Vernon Lee had called “a sort of strange genius,”[29] sent a letter to Mr. Carducci, at an address in Rome, to persuade him to write an article for The Fortnightly Review. When the letter arrived in Rome and Carducci was not found, it was sent directly to Bologna without an address and was immediately delivered because, according to Harris, Carducci had gained “a worldwide reputation”. In fact, in 1906 Carducci won the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

In Bologna, Vernon Lee’s presence seems to hover in the old University Library. There are many first editions of her works that are still given to students for reference and, some time ago, it was even possible to borrow the first edition of Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy with its autographed dedication to John Singer Sargent. And, by the way, the library staff failed to unravel the mystery of this particular book on its shelves. When I pointed out to a sensible librarian that the book might be ruined or disappear and perhaps reappear in some antique shop, she suddenly remembered that the library had acquired a holographic letter from Vernon Lee.

Ms. 4258, CLXX1 turns out to be an original and unpublished letter from Vernon Lee to Arnaldo Cervesato (1872-1944)[30] written in English, in which she apparently answers some questions concerning the philosophical concept of idealism. It is difficult to understand her point of reference, but it seems quite clear that she rejects the definition suggested by Cervesato. The letter is dated 18 May 1901 and, according to the Library’s records, comes from Lucca. Arnaldo Cervesato was a journalist who had worked at the newspaper Italia in San Francisco and at the Tribune de Lausanne. He also wrote novels, critical essays, and published translations of Ibsen, Swinburne, Maeterlinck, and Stevenson. He had many philosophical and esoteric interests, as evidenced by his translations from Bergson, Gobineau and Schuré. In 1902 he directed La Nuova Parola, a magazine dedicated to art, science and life. Perhaps the letter he sent to Vernon Lee, to which she replied informally, beginning with: “Dear Li, although I feel very honored by your interesting communication and wish you every sort of success in your enterprise, I cannot answer your question…”, was an invitation to contribute to his new magazine, or perhaps it was simply a friendly exchange of opinions on philosophical questions. Many writers accepted his invitation: Sibilla Aleramo, Giorgio Amendola, Lucio D’Ambra, Edmondo De Amicis, Arturo Graf, Ada Negri, Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, whose acquaintance in the new century, seemed much appreciated by Vernon Lee. But Cervesato was not trustworthy: his exuberant and ornate speeches and his nationalist inclinations were soon enlisted in the depraved politics of the fascist regime.     

Reading Vernon Lee’s works, consulting her letters, Italian names constantly resurface: all the names of her Florentine and Paduan aristocratic friends, of her Roman friends, of the numerous acquaintances throughout Italy who admired her and asked her to be their guest because she had acquired, over time, not only a spiritual kinship with her Italian neighbours, but also a deep understanding of their traditions.

Cividale and “Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child“

This is especially true when Vernon Lee explores the simple religion of Italian peasants by recounting the lives of their favourite saints. For example, this is quite evident in her narration of Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child: An Eighteenth-Century Legend (1905), which is not a completely fictional story, as many have thought.[31] As usual with Vernon Lee, her stories are the result of extensive research, thorough documentation, and meditative writing that has been re-read and corrected several times in order to obtain memorable phrases, incisive descriptions, in-depth narratives at the level of musical reading. Therefore, any commentary on her writings must take into account the slow process necessary to bring her characters to life. As readers we must be aware of how each of her works went through a rather laborious “gestation” and how they were originally composed.

Lee probably began writing the story when she visited Cividale for the second time, around 1902[32]  because in her essay she mentions the collapse of the bell tower of San Marco in Venice that occurred in that year. In Cividale she learned of the ascetic and visionary mystic, Blessed Benvenuta Boiani (1255-1292),[33] known for her extraordinary devotion to the Virgin Mary and the Child Jesus, a figure, like the many Italian characters who crowd Lee’s writings, who belongs to precise historical contexts, in this case medieval, which she prefers to contextualize in the eighteenth century, an era that she had studied for a long time and that seemed to her more suited to the artistic transformation of Sister Benvenuta Loredan in a naïve and good noble adolescent, left to herself and her fantasies. In December 1905 Lee published Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child in The Fortnightly Review, also taking inspiration from the documentary material of the beatification of Benvenuta Boiani, wanted by Pope Clement XIII, dating back to the eighteenth century (1765). She not only translated it into English, but metamorphosed the holy Benvenuta and romanticized the hagiography. In 1910 she contributed the same story to the Italian magazine La Nuova Antologia[34] where the entries of Benvenuta’s diary are translated into Venetian by Pia Di Valmarana. Before comparing Sister Benvenuta to one of Freud’s psychoanalytic studies or dismissing her as one of the many “tender religious fables,”[35] critics should have considered how Benvenuta’s hagiography and the account of Lee’s journey and her knowledge of eighteenth-century Italian sources had influenced and documented the entire story. This is probably true of most of Lee’s writings that took place in Italian contexts, where she met and described the genius loci (a meeting that actually took place for the first time in Verona).[36]

Vernon Lee in Modena and surroundings

In all of Vernon Lee’s seven books of travelogues, Modena, where she had been several times, rarely recurs. On September 27, 1925, in a postcard sent from Montericco (Imola) to her friend Mary Robinson,[37] she tells her how she changed the train twice to be able to stop in Modena, even if only for two hours, to re-visit the Duomo that she had not seen for thirty years. It was therefore a well-known city, and she does not stop to describe it. Vernon Lee prefers to guide readers through the landscapes that are more congenial to her and less frequented by tourists. The essay “The Forest of the Antonines” dedicated to Fiumalbo in the Modenese Apennines is one of the thirty travel memories collected in the volume The Enchanted Woods.[38] In the text Vernon Lee imagines that the forest surrounding Fiumalbo was very ancient, dating back to the time of the Antonine emperors (from 96 to 192), referring to the best known for their cultural legacies: Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, who were very successful among the English decadent aestheticizing writers. In the 1880s and early 1890s Vernon Lee assiduously frequented the house of the critic Walter Horatio Pater (1839-1894), author of very famous essays on the Italian Renaissance (1873) and of the novel Marius the Epicurean (1885), which describes the education of a young Roman in the period of the first Antonine emperors. The novel was very successful because it advocated an ideal of a sober, proto-Christian life, lived far from power, in Arcadian places, where nature was respected by humans, who worked for the good of others without expecting any recognition. For Vernon Lee Marius was a real revelation, a consolatory novel, which took her back to the times when the Good and the Beautiful were the founding principles of all things.[39] In the epilogue of the second volume of Juvenilia, Vernon Lee tells her dedicatee, Carlo Placci, about the sense of total freedom that she enjoyed walking in the woods of the Apennines, from the Tuscan refuge of San Marcello Pistoiese to a village, surrounded by cypresses and chestnut trees, on the Modenese side, from which she appreciated the high peaks, Mount Cimone and Mount Rondinaio, which can be reached from Fiumalbo[40]. As she walked, the writer repeated like a mantra the verses of a Petrarchan sonnet by William Wordsworth (1770-1850).

The World is Too Much with Us (1807):

Wordsworth believed that his sonnet was an invective against the decadent material cynicism of the industrialized world; Vernon Lee remembers him for this same reason and for his ecological struggles[41].

Vernon Lee’s Forest draws on these ideas. In those years and throughout the 1890s Vernon Lee and her mother spent the summer in Bagni di Lucca, and was often a guest of Baroness Elena Cini French (1844-1922) in the property of San Marcello Pistoiese, where some renowned intellectuals, such as Carlo Placci and Gaetano Salvemini, met.[42] Together with her friends she reached Modena, made excursions to Abetone and Fiumalbo. It was probably from the Cinis or at Fiumalbo that she learned about the Abbey of Nonantola, only ten kilometers from Modena.[43]

Although Vernon Lee does not dedicate an entire essay to Modena, it was a place she knew well since she mentions it both in the story “A Wicked Voice” (in Hauntings, 1890, where she introduces a professor of the College of Modena) and in the essays of Euphorion (1885), Juvenilia (vol. II, 1887) and The Sentimental Traveller (1908), where she describes “the old Modena Road”, that led from Modena to Lucca, a route that the writer traveled several times.

Fiumalbo, however, was known by English travelers in Italy, because the American artist living in Florence, Francesca Alexander, a pupil of John Ruskin, in her famous collection of Tuscan songs, Roadside Songs, 1885, had published the hymn “Tu scendi dalle stelle”, which she had heard for the first time in Fiumalbo from the rural poet and shepherdess, Beatrice Bugelli (1802-1885), thinking that it was an original song of the place, but in fact it was composed by saint Alfonso Maria de’ Liguori in 1764. Alexander in her writings mentions Rosa Donati, a shopkeeper from Fiumalbo, married to a carpenter, who visited her in Florence. The relationship that Francesca Alexander had with Fiumalbo and her testimony on Christmas carols, convinced John Ruskin that it was a place that had preserved its traditions, where the inhabitants lived in harmony, and he was convinced of the authenticity of the hymn. Linda White, a friend of Vernon Lee, a well-known writer, wife of the Florentine historian, Pasquale Villari, writes about her summer vacation at Abetone, where she met the improviser Beatrice who, being then seventy years old, arrived at the Grand Hotel in Abetone on foot, because a tourist painter wanted to paint her portrait. Linda White, who lodged in the same hotel, describes her as attractive and still beautiful, tall in stature and erect, who recited poetry and sang. Perhaps intrigued by this visit, Linda went to Fiumalbo, “the little grey town”, which boasted a medieval church, with sculptures of the Knights Templar on the façade, and houses adorned with flowers of all colours. Walking through the village she met Mr. Coppi, an antiquarian by profession and owner of the ruined castle of Fiumalbo. Linda visited him, without great enthusiasm because the antique dealer had filled the palace with junk.[44]

As for Vernon Lee, also for Linda White Villari the most favourable impression of her summer was not the villages, but the large intact woods, dark and solemn, little frequented by the Italians themselves, but which still gave serenity in the quiet of nature. Unfortunately, the visit to Fiumalbo ends with an ante litteram ecological warning: 15 years earlier a great catastrophe had occurred. With the felling of part of the trees that surrounded the town, the streams overflowed and flooded the town and only half of the population was saved.

The Abbey of Nonantola and Pope Hyacinth

For the other story, “Pope Hyacinth”,[45] the only foothold that binds it to the Modenese is the first sentence: “Forming Part of the Codex Eburneus of the suppressed Abbey of Nonantola.” Unfortunately, as confirmed by the director of the Abbey Archives, Monsignor Riccardo Fangarezzi, there is no evidence of Vernon Lee’s passage through that monastery,[46] but such a precise reference cannot be of invention alone. As is well known, three very precious manuscripts are preserved in the Museum of Nonantola: the Countess Matilda Gospel book, bound in silver, richly illuminated; the gradual of the end of the 11^th century,  bound with an embossed silver foil with ivory inserts inside (a branch with leaves in the front, and St. Gregory the Great, “seated on the falsistorium with a baculus in an oratorical attitude”, with the angel suggesting the song and the student with the open book,[47] and the hagiographic codex, called Acta Sanctorum, which collects the lives of the saints celebrated in the abbey:  popes Sylvester I and Hadrian III and the martyrs Synesius and Theopompus.[48] The subject of the story, the reference to a figure of the pope, but above all the initial quotation of a Nonantola codex eburneus, are clues that lead us to believe that Vernon Lee was actually in Nonantola, and meditated on what she saw, then poetically recast her travel experience in the story of Pope Hyacinth.

Her destination that summer was not the villages, but the large intact woods, dark and solemn, little frequented by the Italians themselves, but which still gave serenity in the quiet of nature. Vernon Lee was actually in Nonantola, and meditated on what she saw, then poetically recast her travel experience in a symbolist tale with an imaginary protagonist.

The city of Trent and the Villa of Margon

Lately I discovered that Vernon Lee had friends in Trent/Trento, a city which is the topic of a short essay in the collection The Enchanted Woods.[49] To understand her involvement with Trento, I did some research among her manuscripts preserved at the Harold Acton Archive in Florence, but there is no reference to that northern Italian city. Vernon Lee mentions it only once in a letter, addressed to Lady Ottoline Morrell, on October 17, 1899, from “Margrove near Trent”. The first editor of the correspondence evidently misread the writer’s handwriting[50] and fortunately the error has been corrected in the forthcoming volume (volume IV) of Selected Letters of Vernon Lee edited by Sophie Geoffroy with Amanda Gagel (contributing editor) and Christa Zorn (associate editor). On that date, in fact, Vernon Lee was in the surroundings of Trento, in the wooded hills of Margon, where the Villa Salvadori is located, a welcoming Renaissance residence, equipped with porticoes and loggias with frescoes, dating back to 1560. None of the writer’s biographies has ever reported this frequentation in Trentino, nor is there ever any mention of the short essay dedicated to the city. In Margon’s Villa Vernon Lee was a guest of the Barons Valentino Salvadori and Teodora Contessa Marcello in 1899, maybe also in 1901, and then in 1903. There was a sincere friendship, especially with Countess Theodora, to whom Vernon Lee gave a special copy of the first edition of her only tragedy Ariadne in Mantua, with an autograph dedication: “To Baronessa Teodora Salvadori Marcello with grateful remembrances from the author 1903”.[51] She gave a copy of the second edition of Hauntings Fantastic Stories (London, John Lane, 1906) to Baron Valentino with the handwritten dedication “with grateful remembrances from Vernon Lee”.

Although most of the numerous Italian names can be traced, it is still impossible to take a complete and clear picture of Vernon Lee’s many Italian acquaintances. The identities and relationships with the writer are still confused, but they are also revealed through small details, which shows that Vernon Lee’s Italian life is still very surprising, sometimes absolutely extraordinary.

---

*See the present writer’s short article on the subject: Notes on Vernon Lee and her Italian Circle, in “Bollettino del C.i.r.v.i.”, n. 68, 2013, pp. 400 -410 and E. Bizzotto, Vernon Lee e il suo circolo femminile, in “Leggere Donna”, 118, 2005, pp. 22-24.

[1] Vernon Lee was already a reader of the brilliant French writer, whom she remembers in The River Temple of Cividale in The Sentimental Traveller, Leipzig, Tauchnitz, 1908, p. 110, for “Picturesqueness and charm such as Anatole France has taught us to perceive in our Harlequin-civilization; and which it is so much to the good to appreciate. But, still, not quite the same thing as the memories one carries away when the Genius Loci has stirred in a place in one’s heart.” On May 19, 1894, Oscar Wilde, who was in Florence, visited the poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Vernon Lee’s half-brother, and spoke with both of them with great pleasure. He was then particularly impressed by the writer, as reported by R. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1987, p. 395. According to Matthew Sturgis, Oscar A Life, London, Apollo, 2018, pp. 503-504, Oscar Wilde was accompanied by Mary Costelloe, at the time Bernard Berenson’s mistress.

[2] Anatole France, Le Lys rouge, Édition de Marie-Claire Bancquart, Paris, Gallimard, 1992, p. 47, 136-137. Cf. Peter Gunn, Vernon Lee Violet Paget (1856-1935), London, Oxford University Press, 1964, pp. 140-141. Oscar Wilde liked to read the works of Anatole France and it is very likely that he was inspired by the French author for his one-act play, La Sainte Courtisane (1894). In fact, this one act drama seems to have been conceived on the example of the famous novel Thaïs (1890) by Anatole France, which inspired Jules Massenet’s opera with a libretto by Louis Gallet, performed at the Opéra Garnier in Paris on March 16, 1894. A short story by Anatole France, “Le Prince du Monde”, from the collection Les Puits de Sainte-Claire (1895), ends with a phrase “Je t’aime parce que tu m’as perdu”, which Oscar Wilde reported in a letter to Robert Ross on his feelings about Bosey, dated 21 September 1897, cf. Oscar Wilde Il Canto del Cigno, edited by R. Severi, Milan, Mursia, 2019, p. 180.

[3] A. France, Le Lys Rouge, cit., p. 47.

[4] Ibid., p. 103.

[5] Actually, Vernon Lee went to live at Il Palmerino, in Maiano, Florence, in 1889.

[6] Angela Bianchini, Un amore sconveniente, Milano, Frassinelli, 1999, p. 79 and p. 155. Translation by the present writer.

[7] M. Praz, Studi e svaghi inglesi, Milano, Garzanti, 1983, vol. 2, p. 506.

[8]  Quoted in P. Gunn, Vernon Lee. Violet Paget, 1856-1935, London, Oxford University, Press, 1964, p. 210.

[9] They met in Venice in the summer of 1887. Vernon Lee was not impressed by the young D’Annunzio, whom she described in a letter to her mother as “a little blond chap”, quoted in P. Gunn, Vernon Lee, cit., p. 119. But, after reading his novels, she defined his style somewhat similar to that of Flaubert and his prose “magnificent” in The Handling of Words, London, John Lane, 1923, p. 60: “His long Latinized sentences, where adjectives are rare and verbs vague, leave the impression that everything happens at a much slower pace than it can happen in reality; his people spend as much time on putting on their hats and walking to the gate as real mortals do to change their clothes and reach the other end of the city.”

[10] G. D’Annunzio, Libro segreto (1935), edited by P. Gibellini, Milan, Mondadori, 1995, p. 198.

[11] The last two reviews are collected in E. Nencioni, Saggi critici di letteratura inglese, with a preface by Giosuè Carducci, Florence, Le Monnier, 1910, pp. 77-98 and pp. 331-342.

[12] Simonetta Berbeglia, “Robert Browning and Enrico Nencioni: A Story of Friendship and Devotion,” in Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, n. 10 (2009), pp. 151 -160.

[13] The articles appeared in the following issues of La Nuova Antologia: April 1, 1907; 16 March 1909 and January-February 1910.

[14] “Vernon Lee e l’Italia,” in Arianna a Mantova-Ariadne in Mantova, (bilingual edition), Gazoldo degli Ippoliti-Verona, Postumia-Cierre, (Fondazione Marcegaglia), 1996 (reprinted in 2003), pp. 10-45.

[15] Cf. Dalla stanza accanto. Vernon Lee e Firenze settant’anni dopo / From the Next Room. Vernon Lee and Florence Seventy Years Later. Proceedings of the international conference of studies (Florence 26-27-28 May 2005), edited by S. Cenni and E. Bizzotto, Firenze, Consiglio Regionale della Toscana, 2006. Reading the many contributions it is possible to trace Vernon Lee’s involvement in the reality of the two cities she loved most, Rome and Florence.

[16] See Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget), “An eighteenth-century singer: an imaginary portrait” (9999). Vernon Lee: Manuscripts, Published Works, and Typescripts. 7. https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/vl_published/7. The writer describes an imaginary sopranist, Antonio Vivarelli in Bologna, cf. A. Teets, “Singing Things: The Castrato in Vernon Lee’s Biography of a ‘Culture Ghost’,” in “The Sibyl”,  https://thesibylblog.com/singing-things-the-castrato-in-vernon-lees-biography-of-a-culture-ghost-by-anthony-teets/

[17] P. Gunn, cit., p. 61. Cf. A. Gagel, Selected Letters of Vernon Lee (1856-1935),  PhD Dissertation, Boston University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2008, pp. 133-137. Gagel believes that Vernon Lee might have used the essay in her other published writings on Bologna, but this seems unlikely. It is interesting to read Violet Paget’s correspondence with Mrs. Jenkin in Vernon Lee’s Letters 1870-1894, edited and privately printed by Irene Cooper Willis, Colby College Library, 1937, pp. 19-59. 

[18] Evan Charteris, John Singer Sargent, New York, Scribner’s, 1927, p. 248.

[19] V. Paget, “Tuscan Peasant Plays,” in Fraser’s Magazine, Vol. XV, No. LXXXVI, Feb. 1877, pp. 224.

[20] “John Singer Sargent In Memoriam” by Vernon Lee, in Evan Charteris, cit., pp. 23-255 and pp. 248-9.

[21] See Gian Lorenzo Bezzi Mellini, Pietramala Centiloquio, Bergamo, Edizioni Bolis, 1991, exergo: “Petramala civitas amplissima est…, Dante, De vulg. Eloq. 1, Vi, 2 -3,” and p. 26-27: “Pietramala is a small land to the south of the Raticosa along the road that from Bologna winds Nella piazza di San Petronio/ towards Tuscany through the town of Scarperia and then, from the eighteenth century, through the Futa pass. Today this artery, emptied of traffic by the Autosole, serves only local commerce and tourism, but in the past it saw the transit of gigantic armies, individual cavalrymen, sovereign processions, carriage travelers (including Canova, Foscolo, Byron, Stendhal), companies of actors, pilgrims, carts of lewd women, priests, criminals, D’Annunzio’s roaring Bugattis and countless anonymous people.”

[22] Vernon Lee, The Golden Keys, Leipzig, Tauchnitz, 1925, pp. 63 – 67.

[23] Cf. S. Pantazzi, “Enrico Nencioni, William Wetmore Story and Vernon Lee,” in English Miscellany, 10, 1959, p. 258.

[24] The second translation was more accurate: Vernon Lee, Il Settecento in Italia Accademie-Musica-Teatro, trans. by Margherita Farina-Cini, Naples, Riccardo Ricciardi, 1932 with a dedication “To the dear memory of Enrico Nencioni I dedicate after twenty-five years this new edition of the book that was the beginning of our friendship Autumn 1931 Autumn 1907”.

[25] Vernon Lee, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, London, T. F. Unwin, 1887, p. 144, p. 195.

[26] Evidently Carlo Placci was wrong when he said that Carducci had praised Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown, as reported by S. Pantazzi, “Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee,” in English Miscellany, 12, 1961, p. 109.

[27] V. Lee, The Countess of Albany, London, W. H. Allen & Co., 1884, pp. viii and x.

[28] Cf. Mario Pratesi in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol, 85 (2016), edited by Jole Sodateschi. Cf. Unpublished correspondence by Mario Pratesi, eds. Anne Urbancic, Carmela Colella, Victoria University Library, University of Toronto, 20009 (http/pratesi.vicu.utoronto.ca/ricerca). In the correspondence there are 4 letters from Violet Paget.  On 20 October 1881 Paget recommended the publication of a literary collection by her friend Mario Pratesi to the publisher Piero Barbera; on 20 November 1883 she thanked him for the help received in cataloguing the letters of the Countess of Albany preserved in Siena and Milan; on 17 March 1889 she thanked him for a book and informed him of the change of address from 5 Via Garibaldi, Florence to the Villa Il Palmerino, in Maiano; on November 20, 1898 Violet explains to him that she is very busy, especially with the “Society for the defense of ancient Florence” of which she was a founding member. 

[29] P. Gunn, op. cit., p. 124.

[30] Cf. N. Merola, Arnaldo Cervesato, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Roma, Treccani, 1980, vol. xxiv, pp. 89-90. Cf. Inventory of the Arnaldo Cervesato Archive (1872-1944) BUB, ms. 4548, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, edited by Rita De Tata, 2008.

[31] See V. Colby, Vernon Lee. A Literary Biography, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2003, p. 240 defines the story as “a simple miraculous story of a nun’s devotion to a doll representing the Child Jesus in the Christmas representation…” and P. Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales, Burlington, Ashgate, 2008, pp. 88-89. Pulham considers it a story suitable for a psychoanalytic reading. See the present writer’s review of Pulham’s book in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 28, no. 1, Spring 2009, pp. 190-192.

[32]  V. Lee, “The River Temple of Cividale,” in The Sentimental Traveller, London, John Lane, 1908, pp. 106-114.

[33]  Cf. A. Tilatti, Benvenuta Boiani, Trieste, Lint, 1994.

[34]  La Nuova Antologia, vol. CXLV, series V, January 1910, pp. 4-72, with illustrations by Emma Ciardi.

[35] V. Colby, op. cit., p. 240.

[36] V. Lee, Genius Locis. Notes on Places, London, Grant Richards, 1899, pp. 1-9. Cf. G. Pomata, Genius Loci Vernon Lee e la via amatoriale alla scrittura della storia, in “Storia delle donne”, 20, 2024, pp. 211 – 242. This paper is not really convincing because it doesn’t even say where Vernon Lee discovered the Genius Loci, nor can we define her writing “amatoriale” , amateur. Cf. F. Favaro, Vernon Lee e l’Italia: un Genius Loci in mille forme, in “Transalpina”, 28, 2025, pp. 17 -34.

[37] Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget), Vernon Lee, Letter to Mary Robinson – September 27, 1925, 1925-09-27. Project EMAN, Holographical-Lee, Sophie Geoffroy, University of La Réunion & Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes, CNRS-ENS. Consulted on 2026/04/02 on the EMAN platform : https://eman-archives.org/HoL/items/show/1319

[38] V. Lee, The Enchanted Woods, and Other Essays on the Genius of Places, London & New York, John Lane: The Bodley Head, 1905, pp. 139 -150.

[39] V. Lee, Juvenilia, vol. 1, London, 1885, p. 7.

[40] G. Tigri, Guida della montagna pistoiese, Pistoia 1878, p. 133, from Bagni to Fiumalbo.

[41] V. Lee, Juvenilia, vol. 2, London, 1887, pp. 207 – 209.

[42] Cf. A. Panajia, Elena Cini French: Dal borgo di San Michele degli Scalzi al “Petit Cènacle au Nido” di San Marcello Pistoiese, Pisa 2001. Elena was the daughter of Bartolomeo Cini, owner of the Lima paper mill in San Marcello Pistoiese, the family home. She had married the Belgian Baron Antonio French, owner of the French & C Bank in Florence. The Baroness considered Vernon Lee an idealist with a manly wit (p. 55). Vernon Lee cultivated a friendship with Gaetano Salvemini, whom she met at Carlo Placci’s house, then all three met again in San Marcello, cf. G. Salvemini, Carteggio 1894 – 1902, edited by S. Bucchi, Rome – Bari, 1988, in particular, pp. 12, 99, 372, 496.

[43] V. Lee, Letters Home, edited and privately printed by her executor Irene Cooper Willis, Colby College Library, 1937, p. 317 and p. 320.

[44] Linda Villari, On Tuscan Hills and Venetian Waters, London, 1885, pp. 71 – 95.

[45] Vernon Lee, Pope Hyacinth and Other Fantastic Tales, London, John Lane, 1907, pp. 3 – 17.

[46] To my knowledge she rarely signed “visitors registers” during her travels. She did sign the Libro dei Soci at the Vieusseux library in Florence.

[47] M. Branchi, Lo Scriptorium e la biblioteca di Nonantola, Nonantola, 2011, p. 230 and P. Golinelli, Nonantola: i luoghi e la storia, Abbazia di Nonantola 2007 (English translation by R. Severi, Nonantola the Abbey and its History, Abbey of Nonantola, 2007).

[48] Cf. P. Golinelli, Note e problemi di agiografia nonantolana, in AA. VV., Benedictina. Contributi di studio per la storia dei Benedettini a Modena, Modena 1981, pp. 53 – 76.

[49] Vernon Lee, The Enchanted Woods and Other Essays on the Genius of Places, London & New York, John Lane, 1905, pp. 85-91.

[50] A. Gagel, Selected Letters of Vernon Lee (1856 – 1935). PhD Dissertation, Boston University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2008, vol. 2, pp. 609-610.

[51] I happened to find a copy of this particular first edition of the work, Ariadne in Mantua, London, Blackwell, 1903, with the original eighteenth century paper cover by Giuseppe Rizzi of Varese, who was a renowned printer active in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, famous for his coloured woodblock papers,  often used as glance sheets or covers for fine books. Some of his works are on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. This particular edition bears a handwritten dedication: “To Baronessa Teodora Salvadori Marcello with grateful remembrances from the author 1903”.