Maurizio Burlamacchi

I knew Maurizio (who was born three days before I was) since we were both about 17, shortly after the end of the Second World War.

Maurizio was Italian but his great-grandmother was British and so was his grandmother, Lilian Grace Steward, who married his grandfather, the Marquis Burlamacchi. Lilian\'s mother Florance was the daughter of Allan Maclean Skinner, Q.C., hence the connection with my mother\'s family, descended from Florance\'s sister Euphemia (Effie), who was own my great grandmother \'Dear.\' Lilian\'s sister Gwendoline also lived in Florence, and married the Marquis Massimiliano Georgio Alessandro Strozzi, whose palace is a well known architectural landmark near the Duomo. Thus two beautiful British sisters married two Italian Marquises. An account of Gwendoline during the Second World War when she was old and very much on the other side, and he was a Captain in the Eighth Army, is given by my Uncle Jack (J A C Pearce) in \'UJack.\'

In 1947 (I think) Maurizio was sent to Britain by his entrepreneurial mother to learn English, so that he would be able to help her in her business exporting Italian craft products. Thus he was translated from his beautiful and gracious Italian surroundings to our wooden bungalow at Middlemead in Little Baddow, and employed by my mother (amongst other things) in digging a large pit in freezing weather to receive the content of our latrine (see photos). But he and I had a great time, debating the rival merits of Italian and British motorbikes (I had a BSA 250 for a while) and singing in the Essex lanes "Be kind to your web-footed friends, for a duck may be somebody\'s brother", to the tune of the American National Anthem. Our pleasant time together came to an end too soon when he went on to New York to learn how things were done in America, but somehow we fitted in one or more holidays in Viareggio around this time, when I got so sunburnt in the unfamiliar Italian sun on the beaches there that I had to lie indoors on my front for two days or so while my back peeled.

The Burlamacchis had a flat in Florence, a country house at Bagni di Lucca and a large farmhouse at Selvaiana, a kilometre or two behind Viareggio, and one of my memories is getting from the house to the beach and vice versa, by bike or by bus. We must have done that many times. I remember a very hot and dusty road and very beautiful buses with enormous windscreens and lots of chrome, so different from the rattlebang British buses and coaches of the post-war period. And the house so very cool and suitable for gracious living in the heat. And I remember also a party at the house, when I became rather inebriated - one of the only two occasions I recollect when I really took more than was good for me!

There was another time, not much later, when as an architectural student at University College London I spent a month in Florence and stayed with Maurizio and his family. I remember particularly the first meal, when I was presented with an enormous plate of spaghetti and tucked into it with gusto, thinking that was it. And my astonishment at finding that it was only the starter. I think perhaps it was followed by tripe, my first encounter with tripe. And then a long siesta in the middle of the day, very necessary after so much food.

After that our contacts with Maurizio were sadly few, just occasional and brief visits to him in Bagni di Lucca and Florence and visits by him once to our new-town house at Northbrooks in Harlow, and many years after to the Barbican in London before my mother died.

But after his wife Tiziana died - in 1999 - he astonished my Uncle Jack (who spends a lot of his time in Viareggio and some in Florence) and us, by marrying again - this time Karina Kirilenko - much younger than himself - from the Crimea, who already had a son. He met her in Prague on New Year\'s Day 1999. We were living in Prague at the time (though on that day we were in England) and learned about this later in the year when we received a wedding invitation, see \'MB_announcement.\'

He wrote to me in November 2000 that they were in Prague for four days in total and that it was quite cold "At that time of the year frankly I did not think or remember that Elizabeth and you might have been there rather than London. Karina became very ill with flu and the return to Crimea was adventurous."

Maurizio was a very charming person with a ready wit. In the same letter he wrote: "... I never went to Crimea by car - it seems that they may hold you 24 hours at the border hoping to get a bigger tip (which is sensible in the circumstances established by the great Catherine, when she told all state employees to help themselves to it because she would not give them any salary). You should be informed of the fact that madness prevailed enormously in both the Steward family (my grand mother\'s) in Italy, and in the Burlamacchi-Lang family (Lucy Lang my great-grandmother). They were all insane lunatics incapable of getting along together and of not spending twice what they had. Recently I learned of a letter written in 1963 by Uberto Strozzi (my father\'s first cousin) to a cousin of his in England: "last week Gerio (his brother) and I visited the Burlamacchis\' at Selvaiana ..... they live well in a nice house with a nice car ... etc. Who would ever have thought this possible." Meaning - after the terrible financial situation in the family 50 or 60 years before."

Burlamacchi Family

Burlamacchi means Joker or Jester in Italian. My first cousin Maurizio, who was three days older than me, recently married again and had a young son. He told me a long time ago that Burla is ‘joke’ (as in burlesque?) and that his Burlamacchi ancestor was the Jester, at court in Lucca. I remember that when I was in Italy with him sometime in the 1950s local people came up to him in the street and addressed him as Marchese, but times they have changed, and a title is not necessarily something you shout about in modern Italy. Anyway, Maurizio is a true democrat and a very nice person.

The British connection still continues, for Pio’s son Martino has married Cherie Hewitt, from Sheffield.