Florence Journal: Britain to Close a Consulate With a View

Once a haven for traveling aristocrats and dreamy Britons escaping the strictures of home for the looser ways of Italy, in recent years the consulate has dealt more with lost passports than lost morals. But it holds a central place in the history of British-Italian relations, and news of its closing has been taken as an affront here.

The mayor of Florence has expressed regrets, one Florentine aristocrat says she hopes to raise the issue at the royal wedding, and a leading British historian here has questioned Britain’s diplomatic priorities.

As the sun streamed through the windows of his office overlooking the Arno River on a recent morning, David Broomfield, the man who will most likely be the last British consul of Florence, treated the news wistfully. “It’s not like I’m the last governor leaving the old colony with a feather in his hat,” Mr. Broomfield said. “But it’s the end of an important tradition here for 500 years.” There was an English diplomatic presence in Florence as far back as the 1450s.

Across the room, lists of his predecessors hung framed on the wall in neat calligraphy. They begin in 1698 with Sir Lambert Blackwell, “consul at Leghorn,” as the port city of Livorno was then known, and continue through Sir Horace Mann, who as consul in Florence from 1760 to 1786 turned the consulate into a salon, receiving all Britons of rank who passed through the city.

On one panel, a line of devastating understatement reads, “No British representation in Florence 11 June 1940 to 1 Feb. 1945.” Every year, the city holds a memorial service for the first British soldier killed in the Allied liberation of Florence.

In his autobiographical 1999 film “Tea With Mussolini,” Franco Zeffirelli captured the world of well-heeled, slightly batty English women who had come to Florence seeking beauty and who took their tea in the Uffizi — until Mussolini declared them and all Britons enemy aliens.

When the Arno flooded in 1966, sending all of Florence scrambling to save both its citizens and its priceless art, the consulate opened its doors as a temporary clinic.

With so much intertwined history, it is not surprising that the city is upset that the consulate will close at the end of the year.

“Obviously, I’m very sorry and sad, because the British Consulate in Florence has a very unique and beautiful history,” said the mayor, Matteo Renzi. But, he added, “The world changes, and it’s clear that in the era of EasyJet and Ryanair there’s no more Grand Tour.”

Mr. Renzi said he understood the budget cuts, part of Britain’s austerity plan, but would like to invite Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and his wife to visit Florence before the consulate closes: to show, he said, “that relations between our city and that nation remain strong.”

The Marchesa Bona Frescobaldi, from the Tuscan wine-producing dynasty, was quoted widely in the Italian press as saying that she would try to raise the issue with Prince Charles at the wedding this week of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

Miss Middleton lived in Florence for several months in 2000 and studied at the private British Institute, which has offered Italian- and English-language courses — and an extensive lending library — since it was founded in 1917 to foster better British-Italian relations during the First World War.

Paul Ginsborg, a professor of European history at the University of Florence who has written extensively on Italy, questioned the timing of the closing. “How come we could afford the consulate for five centuries, and we no longer can now? How come they didn’t need to close it in 1820, in 1910 or even in the 1930s, during the Great Depression?” he asked.

“It’s a political decision that will affect the British image abroad precisely in a moment when culture and communications count so much,” Mr. Ginsborg said. “I believe that they should reconsider it.”

For its part, the British Foreign Office “keeps the future shape of its network under constant review,” a spokeswoman said in an e-mail. “We are looking both to broaden and deepen our overseas network, particularly to increase our presence in emerging powers.”

Indeed, since 2007, the Foreign Office has opened consulates in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo; Antananarivo, Madagascar; and Juba, Sudan; and closed them in Durban, South Africa; Geneva; Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Nagoya, Japan; and Aleppo, Syria; among other places.

Britain is also closing its consulate in Venice, meaning that Britons who need help or lose passports will have to travel to Rome, Milan or Naples for assistance.

“From a symbolic point of view, I’m very, very sad,” Mr. Broomfield said. “From a practical point of view, I understand putting consular resources in three posts, not five.”

In a dark chapter, Mr. Broomfield assisted the family of Meredith Kercher, a British student who was killed in Perugia in 2007. Her American roommate, Amanda Knox, and Ms. Knox’s boyfriend and another man were convicted of the murder in 2009.

In the mid-19th century, Florence was one of the first destinations for Thomas Cook package tours. Today, visitors to Florence include scores of college students who often seem as interested in pub crawls as in the church of Santa Croce.

But Florence has long been a haven for those seeking to shake off the confines of England. They include the fictional Lucy Honeychurch in Forster’s 1908 novel “A Room With a View,” who breaks off her engagement to a stuffy man she does not love after finding aesthetic and emotional freedom in Florence. The novelist D. H. Lawrence first published “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” privately in Florence in 1928 after British censors banned the vivid account of adulterous love.

The poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning eloped to Florence and lived at Casa Guidi, where Elizabeth died in 1861, “worn out by illness, addiction and arguments with Robert,” according to the Penguin Classics edition of her poetry, co-edited by Julia Bolton Holloway.

On a recent sunny afternoon here, Ms. Bolton Holloway showed Elizabeth Browning’s elaborate tomb at the Protestant Cemetery. Ms. Bolton Holloway, who has labored to bring the cemetery back from disrepair, said she was sorry the consulate would be closing.

“It’s sad,” she said. “The English community isn’t as strong as it has been in the past.”

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.