Gualtiero Arturo Burlamacchi , Marchese

The Burlamacchi cousins, Italy, 1948 - from Edward Holroyd Pearce's autobiographical notes

When the Long Vacation came in 1948 we went off to Italy to stay with my cousins. My grandmother's sister had travelled about Italy with two beautiful daughters. One had married the Marchese Strozzi and one had married the Marchese Burlamacchi. The latter family which was old and honoured and rather impoverished, had kept up with some of us, particularly my brother and sister. The present Marchese was a very tall handsome young man of 18. He had stayed in England recently and we had arranged that we should go out and visit him and his white haired Mother, Guilietta, with her youthful face and black laughing eyes. The four of us spent the first two nights in Florence with them at an hotel and then went to their villa at Bagni di Lucca, a pleasant homely house set up on the hillside off the winding street. Whenever we wanted a bath we walked across to the little used public baths a hundred yards away where the water was turned on hot from the spring into three or four big marble baths each in a clean cool underground cubicle. The baths were about three or four hundred years old, but their forerunners had been there since Roman times.
Life was sunny and placid and nothing seemed to matter. Guilietta saw fun in everything not least in us. The boys went for walks, while I sat painting on the hot placid hill sides with Erica idling by my side, looking over the chestnut-crested hills nearby, or the bigger, bluer, Apennines in the distance. Sometimes my young cousin drove us very fast for expeditions in his car to Lucca or to nearby villages or hills. At the end of the day we all sat waiting for the evening meal in the enchanting dusk. The time of the meal was 8 o'clock. It arrived at 10. But no one seemed to worry.
The boys went once or twice with their cousins to the village dances and tried to make one or two Italian phrases go a long way. The most effective was "parliamo di autre cose" (let us talk about something else) culled from a very ancient phrase book that we had. It would give a new lease of life to the loquacious torrent of an enthusiastic Italian maiden when the stream was beginning to run dry. Then we went to a big old farm house that they owned near the Carrara mountains close behind Via Reggio. Everything was beautiful with age and disrepair. It had known better days and it had its own chapel. The work was done by the factor and his wife. Each day, when we went to bathe on the blinding hot sand by the blue water of the Mediterranean, the factor rode out on an old motor cycle and provided an elaborate luncheon for us under a huge coloured umbrella by a beach hut with plates and knives and forms and a tablecloth. It was an attractive mixture of picnic and ceremony; a life of grandeur (as it seemed to our egalitarian eyes) coupled with a lack of all suburban comfort.
The factor's swarthy bright eyed son, Claudio, aged eight was in trouble all round. He had just been forbidden to use a gun because twice running he had pulled the trigger and fired off his father's shotgun when his father was carrying it loaded over his shoulder. He had been sent back from school because he would insist on lifting the skirts of the nuns to see if they had legs like other people. He suddenly set to work pelting Bruce from an ambush with green oranges snatched from surrounding trees. Bruce, instigated by us, (since appeasement seemed the wrong treatment) let fly at him, and, being older, got the better of the battle. With some apprehension we saw the Mother come out and drag the intrepid child into a doorway to shelter, as we thought, like some protecting Homeric goddess. But she merely combed his dishevelled hair with a comb that she had in her pocket, straightened his rumpled clothing, and pushed him out again to renew the battle.
One day a sudden storm such as one gets on the Mediterranean tore all the tents and umbrellas askew and drew on an inky blackness lit by flashes of lightning. The beautiful bronzed bodies all rushed for shelter inland. It seemed to us that it would be fun to bathe. The factor, at first incredulous, tried to dissuade us. Then he thought it would be wonderful to be mad along with us and rushed down the beach into the angry waves ahead of us, illuminated by flashes of lightning, shouting with excitement and prancing like a black square muscular little demon lit by the fires of hell.
When we left them our exiguous currency allowance would not really run to a trip to Venice but we hankered to see it. Guilietta said that we must stay at Danielli's since it was the loveliest hotel in Europe; she engineered by charm on the telephone some bedrooms for us, and pressed on me some money which, she said, would be just enough. But she made me promise not on any account to eat or drink anything in the hotel since if so, our money would not last. She had arranged that with the management.
Venice was enchantment - a bathing of the spirit. It is one of those rare places where one would burst if one had not got a kindred spirit to whom one could say at intervals “Isn't this unbelievable"? It would have been a real pain to see it without Erica, to feel that she had not shared the experience. Like everything in Italy it had its heat, its bodily fatigue, its super-typhoid smells. But it had an unearthly beauty that obliterated all these things.
To sit in the shade in the great piazza and gaze at St Marks listening to the gay orchestra seemed the summit of human bliss.
Danielli's Hotel is a real palace with beautiful ochre tinted walls and it's great princely stairs.
We called on an Italian General, Baron Bansa, who was a pen-pal of my father, being a great numismatist in my father's period. They used to correspond and argue about the inferences to be drawn from some small bronze Roman coin or other. My father wanted James (who was keen on coins and very knowledgeable for a boy), to see the General's collection. We found his flat in an unsavoury little alley that looked like a bit of Limehouse. When we rang, a decrepit door opened of itself into a neat courtyard. We crossed this and went up some stairs. At the head stood a trim elderly man in a white jacket and some kind of uniform. I greeted him with pompous deferential ceremony and explained who I was. He ignored my hand, listened coldly, and beckoned me to follow into an airy corridor and thence into a beautiful sixteenth century room that overlooked the canal. He was not the General. He was the butler. My family thought this a very good joke. I was rather flustered. I started off again when I got to the real General. But he gave us a charming courteous, easy welcome. Italy always gives me the feeling that the dividing line between the slums and the palace is very narrow and very wavy. Nowhere else could one find such a lovely dwelling set in so mean a street.
Soon he and James were hard at work on his coins. He implored us to leave James with him for an hour and offered to bring him to us at Danielli's. This would be fatal. If I started offering him a meal or even drinks (as I obviously must) I should be breaking my promise to my cousin and would certainly not have enough currency to pay. We fabricated some mythical plan by which we would in any event be passing his door in an hour's time. So we trudged about the hot streets merely to avoid offering a nice friend a drink or two. It was very humbling and tiresome.
We left Venice in the twilight of the morning. The dark overshadowed canals breathed the spirit of errant beauty and dark intrigue. The occasional cry of a gondolier echoed through the lonely darkness. Then we turned the last comer and we were back in the twentieth century at the noisy station. On the way home we stayed at Fiesch in Switzerland with Freda and Stopford for a few days. We had a few nearby picnics to which she was wheeled in a bath chair a gay gallant little invalid.