Thursday 10th September 2026, 7 for 7:30pm
Join historian Dr. Stella Fletcher as she completes an ‘Italian trio’ of talks with a lecture on the British relationship with Florence.
Having previously addressed SWISH audiences on the histories of Venetian palaces and papal elections, Dr Stella Fletcher is now completing her third Italian-themed talk, with a lecture on the British relationship with Florence, which Elizabeth Barrett Browning reckoned to be ‘The most beautiful city ever devised by man.’
The cast list for this Anglo-Florentine story includes poets and novelists, painters and collectors, eighteenth-century Grand Tourists, and nineteenth/twentieth-century villa residents who offered generous hospitality to their fellow countrymen and women. Theirs was a relatively enclosed society, so there are many connections that can be made among the British in Florence, and some of them may come as a surprise.
