English Cemetery, Florence

The English Cemetery in Florence, Italy is at Piazzale Donatello. Its names, 'Cimitero Inglese' and 'Cimitero Protestante' are somewhat misleading, as the cemetery holds bodies of Orthodox Christians as well as those of many Reformed Churches; but the majority of those buried here were of the Anglophone British and American communities of Florence.

Before 1827 non-Catholics and non-Jews who died in Florence were buried in the Old English Cemetery, Livorno. In 1827 the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church acquired land outside the medieval wall and gate of Porta a' Pinti at Florence from Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany for an international and ecumenical cemetery, Russian and Greek Orthodox burials joining the Protestant ones. Carlo Reishammer, a young architectural student, landscaped the cemetery, then Giuseppe Poggi shaped it as its present oval when Florence became capital of Italy. He surrounded it with studios for artists, including that of Michele Gordigiani (who painted the portraits of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London).

Among the many Swiss, Russians, Americans and British buried here, those of the English-speaking British and Americans are the majority as the Anglophone community in Florence in the nineteenth century was the largest.

Many famous people are buried in the graveyard: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (in a tomb designed by Frederic, Lord Leighton), Walter Savage Landor, Arthur Hugh Clough, Francesca Alexander, Fanny Trollope and her daughter-in-law Theodosia Trollope and three other family members, Isa Blagden, Thomas Southwood Smith, Hiram Powers, Joel Tanner Hart, Theodore Parker, Fanny, the wife of William Holman Hunt in a tomb he himself sculpted, Mary, the daughter of John Roddam Spencer Stanhope in a tomb he himself sculpted, Louise, sister to Henry Adams, whose dying he describes in his 'Chaos' chapter in The Education of Henry Adams, two children of the Greek painter George Mignaty, whom Robert had paint Casa Guidi as it was when Elizabeth Barrett Browning died there; Nadezhda De Santis, a black Nubian slave brought to Florence at fourteen from Jean-François Champollion's 1827 expedition to Egypt and Nubia, while the French Royalist exile Félicie de Fauveau sculpted two tombs here; Beatrice Shakespeare relative of William Shakespeare.

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