Save the Brownings' Summer Home

RESTORATION  OF  THE BROWNINGS’ SUMMER HOME, CASA  TOLOMEI,  BAGNI  DI  LUCCA

Calling all Browning and Puccini lovers!  Please help to rescue from neglect and decay this historic house with connections to the Brownings and Puccini, so that it can be enjoyed by people today and in the future.

My son Andrew and his Italian partner Laura are the couple who have had the vision to take on the daunting task of bringing back to life this historic mansion to how it was in the Browning’s time with a view to running it as a possible Heritage Centre and  literary retreat and also a B & B, or renting the Browning floor out so that Browning lovers or students have the opportunity to visit or study there.

Most of the house had been unoccupied for years and time has taken its toll. The restoration of the roof and outside walls has been completed, costing much more than expected, partly due to painstakingly restoring the beautiful old frescoes discovered hidden under layers of paint.  It will be a work in progress over many years but there is an urgent need now to bring the interior, especially the Browning/Puccini rooms, to a condition where they can welcome visitors.  All efforts to secure grants have been unsuccessful in both the UK and Italy - they are completely self-financing and have had no financial help whatsoever.  However, thanks to a very generous gift of $1,000 from  American Browning expert Peter Heydon and  his Mosaic Foundation, the Casa Tolomei Restoration Fund is now underway, with a target of £5,000 towards getting the Browning rooms ready for people to come as soon as possible.




Casa Tolomei is historically important in Bagni di Lucca.   In 1853 Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, their 4 year old son Pen, Flush the dog, lady’s maid Elizabeth Wilson and new chef and manservant  Ferdinando escaped the heat of Florence and spent an idyllic summer from July to October in Casa Tolomei.  A plaque on the house front erected in 1930 by Dr Armstrong of the English Department of Baylor University in Waco, Texas records this.   In its heyday numerous literary figures, including Byron and Shelley, flocked to the little town of Bagni di Lucca.  The Brownings loved both the area and the house, as is evident from the descriptions in the many letters they wrote from Casa Tolomei.  In a letter to her sister Henrietta, Elizabeth even included a plan of the first floor, showing the rooms they were occupying, and which remains virtually unchanged.  (Letter 3235, as published in The Brownings’ Correspondence 19, 190-196)  Opposite the front of the house is an alleyway leading down to the river, where Wilson, Ferdinando and Pen took  Flush each morning to swim in the river.  The riverside walk, dedicated to the Brownings, is called the Lovers’ Walk or Browning Passegiata.  The Brownings were each inspired to write some of their best work while staying at Casa Tolomei. 


In the Brownings’ time the house was owned by Pietro Tolomei, a landowner, who taught Italian to the English people in Bagni di Lucca.  They rented the house from him for  £11 for 13 weeks, which Elizabeth thought was quite a bargain.  In later years, the house was owned by Comm. Dottore Adriano Bastiani, a close personal friend of Giacomo Puccini  who was born in a nearby village. Puccini was a regular guest at the house and had his own bedroom there.  Another musician friend was Pietro Mascagni, composer of Cavalleria  Rusticana, whose  Intermezzo could possibly be the saddest music in the world.  Older residents in the little town still refer to the house as Casa Bastiani, or simply “the General’s house”.  It must have been Dr Bastiani, an eminent physician and Director of the Thermal Baths, who had the outside of the house painted in Art Nouveau style, one of the first in “Liberty” style in the area.  He was sadly missed when he died in 1933.  During World War II the house was headquarters of the Italian Army.


The first phase of the restoration, that of the main fabric of the building, has been completed . The roof and roof timbers have been renewed and the walls repaired and re-rendered.  Beautiful frescoes were discovered under the render, some dating from the early 1900s Art Nouveau period, and earlier ones dating back to Napoleonic times.  In spite of the extra cost, it was decided to keep and restore the Art Nouveau frescoes on the front façade, and restore the Napoleonic ones on the garden side.  The whole house looks beautiful, and floodlights under the eaves add to the effect.  Francis Pettit, an English writer who lives nearby wrote an article about the Brownings and the restoration at:

https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2015/03/17/the-most-beautiful-house-in-bagni-di-lucca-villa/

However, there is still a great deal of work to be done on the inside of the house, and to the Browning rooms on the first floor.  Frescoes have been partly uncovered in several rooms, including Robert’s sitting room, where he worked on “In a Balcony” and the poems that would make up Men and Women.  The huge drawing room, “with its five gaping doors” where Elizabeth worked on Aurora Leigh and wrote her letters, still retains on all walls the beautiful landscape frescoes dated 1775, but work needs doing on them to repair cracks.  Restoring the frescoes alone will cost thousands of pounds. 



There is no electricity or heating in most of the house, including the drawing room and the Browning bedrooms, except for an ancient but beautiful ceramic stove in Robert & Elizabeth’s bedroom.  Robert’s “dressing room” needs to be redone but still retains a very old working toilet, made in England!  This would certainly be used by Puccini, if not the Brownings!  The ancient wood burning stove on which Ferdinando cooked delicious meals for the Brownings is still there but corroded with the damp and badly in need of restoration.


This house, with its historical past and links to two of  England’s most important Victorian poets and two famous composers of worldwide renown, deserves to be saved to tell its story to future generations, and a donation from you, however small, can help towards this labour of love and will certainly be most appreciated.