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dogs). Neither beautiful nor elegant, Ouida enjoyed, nonetheless, an expensive and extravagant life, ordering most of her clothes from Worth and giving parties in her suite at the Langham Hotel in London. She considered herself daring; at these parties, a sign was sometimes posted that read ‘Morals and Umbrellas to be Left at the Door’. In the early 1870s – in part, at least, because she was suffering from bronchitis – she moved with her mother to Florence, renting the Villa Farinola in Scandicci (today she could take the tram into town) and throwing herself full force into the social life of the Anglo-Florentine colony, which was then about thirty years old. Although English writers had been traveling to Florence for centuries – among them John Evelyn, Milton, Boswell, Byron, and the Shelleys – the community had only really become entrenched inthe 1840s, when Fanny Trollope had established the first Anglo-Florentine dynasty (and literary salon) at the Villino Trollope on the Piazza Maria Antonia (now the Piazza dell’Indipendenza). Her son Thomas carried on the tradition, first at the Villino, then at the Villa Ricorboli, beyond the Porta San Niccolò. Presently the Brownings showed up, settling at Casa Guidi near the Pitti Palace; by this time Florence had started to be known as a refuge for expatriate intellectuals. ‘Ville toute Anglaise,’ the Goncourt brothers, Jules and Edmond, declared of the city in 1855, ‘where the palaces are almost the same dismal black as the city of London, and where everything seems to smile upon the English …’ By the time Ouida got there (she was thirty-two), thirty thousand of the two hundred thousand residents of Florence were English or American.
    Ouida seems now to have decided to make it one of her Florentine priorities to fall in love. As a suitor, she chose the Marchese della Stufa, who lived not far from her in Scandicci, in a house called Castagnolo. The unmarried Marchese was a scion of the old Florentinearistocracy, a gentleman-in-waiting to King Umberto and a landowner who treated both his agricultural and social duties with the utmost gravity. A few years earlier, in the company of an Englishman named Dr Clement, he had traveled to Burma to investigate the possibility of building a railroad from Mandalay to Rangoon, but nothing had come of the project, and he had returned to Florence, where he now took to escorting not only Ouida but the woman who would become her rival, Janet Ross.
    Much has been written, over the years, about Janet Ross, and from what I have read of it, I have developed an intense dislike for the woman. No doubt she was both shrewder and more intelligent than Ouida, yet she hated dogs, and appears to have cultivated with alacrity her own reputation for being ‘formidable’. Even her daughter, Lina Waterfield, and her granddaughter, Kinta Beevor – both of whom wrote memoirs of Anglo-Florentine life – seem to have found her intimidating and mean. Herself the author of numerous books, among them Old Florence and Modern Tuscany and the 1899 Leaves from Our Tuscan Kitchen (one of the first Italian cookbooks ever published in England and – if the instructions to cook spaghetti ‘for nearly twenty minutes’ are to be taken as an example – very much geared to Victorian tastes; either that, or pasta was a lot thicker in those days), Mrs Ross held court first at Castagnolo, which she rented from the Marchese, then at Poggio Gherardo, near Settignano, one of the villas in which the storytellers gather in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Here she distilled a famous vermouth according to a secret recipe that she claimed to have been given by the last of the Medicis, and sold it at the Army and Navy stores in London. Her husband, Henry Ross, was a banker, but she appears to have had little to do with him, and for social purposes, at least, to have sought out the company of her landlord. Then as now, women in the colony whose husbands did not like to go