This book is a reflection of the author’s research and restoration of the formerly abandoned Victorian Swiss-owned so-called English Cemetery in Florence. It presents a control group of burials, documented in marble and on paper, of foreign non-Catholics (English, Swiss, American, Russian, Scandinavian, etc.), between 1827-1877 in one Florentine piazza, giving their stories. The book documents the burials of writers, artists, abolitionists, slaves, serfs, and servants who lie alongside industrialists, noblemen and royalty, death being a democracy. Some notable burials covered in the book include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Frances Trollope, Walter Savage Landor, Arthur Hugh Clough, Thomas Southwood Smith, Hiram Powers, Theodore Parker, Jean Pierre Vieusseux, 14 participants against Napoleon at Trafalgar, Waterloo and the Peninsula, and Nadezhda de Santis, a slave brought to Florence at 15 from Nubia. The book also details the cemetery’s sculptors (Lorenzo Bartolini, Odoardo Fantacchiotti, William Holman Hunt, Frederic, Lord Leighton, Francesco Jerace, Emilio Zocchi, Launt Thompson, Hiram and Preston Powers, and William Wetmore Story) and visitors (King Frederick William IV of Prussia and the ex-American slave, Frederick Douglass). The book will be of interest to historians in general, and in particular historians of medicine, genealogists, sociologists, and those studying the history of global immigration, imperialism and slavery.
