Florence by Christopher Hibbert

Author:Christopher Hibbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2008-12-04T05:00:00+00:00

Caption

Prince Ferdinando (1663 – 1713) and his sister, Princess Anna Maria Luisa (1667 – 1743), with their governess. A portrait by Justus Sustermans in the Museo Stibbert.

Frequently and incapably drunk, swearing and belching his way through meals which he usually ate in bed, he surrounded himself with hordes of handsome youths – known as ruspanti after the coins which were paid for their services – who romped and rioted about the Pitti Palace and, when required, coupled in his presence. Rarely was the Grand Duke seen outside the palace walls and, when he was, he was usually as drunk as he was on St John the Baptist's Day 1729, a festival he celebrated by being drawn through the streets in a carriage, poking his head through the window from time to time to be sick, clambering out at the Porta al Prato to watch the horse-races, and shouting obscenities at his pages and the ladies around him before being conveyed back to the palace fast asleep in a litter.

Gian Gastone's dissolute behaviour, which contrasted so strongly with the propriety of his father, seems to have infected Florentine society in general. A slight though momentarily alarming earthquake in the summer of 1729 was interpreted as a warning from on high. Thirty foreign women whose morals were notorious were banished from the city; but a contemporary diarist considered that Florentine women were just as much at fault. So, according to a German who visited the city soon afterwards, were many Florentine men: ‘They are, even to a proverb, addicted to that atrocious and unnatural vice which brought down divine vengeance on Sodom and Gomorrah. Thus it is not at all strange that, with such lascivious inclinations, the Florentines should not have the best eyes: immoderate and frequent sexual acts being very pernicious to the sight.’

Without troubling to consult the Grand Duke or the Florentine people, representatives of the European powers met to discuss what had become known as the Tuscan Succession. The House of Medici now being all but extinct, the House of Este had come forward as claimants; so had the Emperor Charles VI; so had Philip V of Spain, who was dominated by his wife, Isabella Farnese, niece and stepdaughter of the Duke of Parma, an ambitious woman determined to find territories in Italy for her sons. Eventually the succession was settled in favour of the Empress of Austria's husband, Francis, Duke of Lorraine, whose representative, the Prince de Craon, formerly the Duke's tutor, arrived in Florence – closely followed by six thousand troops and various glum, pedantic foreigners assigned to take the place of Florentine funzionarii in government offices – even before the death of Gian Gastone, the last of the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany, in 1737.

Gian Gastone's sister, Anna Maria, a tall, proud, stiff-backed old lady with a deep, masculine voice, was allowed to live out the few remaining years of her life in the Pitti Palace. The widow of the Elector Palatine, who had infected her

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