Iris Origo

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Iris Origo , née Iris Margaret Cutting (born August 15, 1902 in Birdlip, Gloucestershire , † June 28, 1988 in Siena ) was an Irish-American writer and historian who lived in Italy and left a number of important biographies, including works on Cola di Rienzo , Bernhardin von Siena , Francesco Datini , Gaetano Salvemini and Giacomo Leopardi . From 1927 until her death she lived with her husband Antonio Origo in the Villa La Foce near Chianciano Terme near Montepulciano in Tuscany , and later also in Rome . The construction of this estate and the cultivation of the valley are an important part of her life's work, as are the historical works, which play a role in the specialist sciences, but above all contributed to its popularization.

Life

Origin and youth

Iris Margaret Cutting was the daughter of William Bayard Cutting, scion of a wealthy New York family who had made their fortune building railroads, and Sybil Cuffe, daughter of Lord Desart, an Irish peer . The Desart branch of the family prided themselves on having come to the country with Oliver Cromwell and, unlike the rest of Ireland, being Protestant rather than Catholic. Iris only became aware of this sharp contrast when her property was burned down during the civil war in 1922. The family never returned to Ireland.

Her father, however, came from a completely different world. Cutting studied philosophy at Harvard University and received his doctorate from George Santayana with an outstanding thesis on David Hume . Iris Origo later asked George Santayana, who lives in Italy, for the foreword to her first book. 14 servants were employed in the large household of the Cuttings, and another 21 worked outside the house. They owned a private train that they used to travel across the country. The Westbrooke Estate became a state park, now called the Bayard Cutting Arboretum .

The Villa Medici in Fiesole

The parents married in 1881 and traveled a lot, but were particularly fond of Italy. The father died in 1910, the mother then moved to Fiesole with her daughter Iris , where she acquired the Villa Medici in Fiesole in 1911 . There they met the important art connoisseur Bernard Berenson , whose Villa I Tatti was very close to them. Many British and Americans lived in the vicinity of the Origo. But unlike most of the neighbors, Sybil Cuffe respected the art of horticulture in Tuscany and did not try to replace the existing one with an English garden. She also bought the interior fittings from Florentine antiquarian bookshops, which resulted in disputes in the English colony.

Iris attended school in London for some time , but was mostly homeschooled. When she went to New York with her mother in 1914, they were surprised by the news that the First World War had broken out. Her mother decided against the will of the Cuttings, who would have liked to take care of the upbringing of their daughter Iris, that they should return to Italy immediately. As Iris Origo later recalled, from now on she grew up with her mother like an ivory tower, with almost no contact with her peers.

Her teacher was Solone Monti, the language skills and manners brought her French and German governesses . Monti had again been recommended by Berenson. She often went to Florence for class. She called him her "caro maestro" and studied Virgil and Homer with him . Iris helped her mother put together an anthology called A Book of the Sea in 1918.

In 1918 Iris' mother met the architect Geoffrey Scott, whom she married for the second time. In her third marriage, she married Percy Lubbock after her divorce from Scott in 1927. She died in 1942.

Marriage to Antonio Origo, building her estate, children

View from La Foce west to Monte Amiata , Scott Williams 2007

Iris met the Scottish entrepreneur Colin Mackenzie in 1922, who was working in Milan . A romantic correspondence connected the two, from which a lifelong friendship developed. At the age of 17 she met Antonio Origo, who was ten years older. Her mother asked her to stay away from the man who she thought was too old and too handsome for six months. But the two met secretly. On March 4, 1924, Iris finally married the illegitimate son of Count Clemente Origo. They bought La Foce in the province of Siena , a villa with 1,400 hectares of land. At this point at the latest, Iris Origo had decided on an Italian lifestyle. While the two went on their honeymoon, the architect Cecil Pinsent prepared the run-down estate for them.

On June 24, 1925 a son was born who was named Gian Clemente Bayard, but "Gianni" died on April 30, 1933 of meningitis . Iris Origo gave birth to her daughter Benedetta on August 1, 1940, and Donata on June 9, 1943. During this time the property, which was in a dry landscape, and by no means corresponded to the image of a Tuscan villa, grew to 57 farms; around 600 people lived in all the buildings belonging to it. A school was built, wells were built, streets and paths. The main house from the 16th century has been restored.

Second World War, resistance, writer

View over the Orcia Valley

After the death of her son, Origo began to write, although in view of her numerous obligations she was mostly forced to fill breaks with it. She used these interruptions on planes and trains, or simply when she was ill. It is neither clear how she approached the publishers, nor how she progressed from concept to work at all. She was not sponsored by any literary agent, and it is not known whether she used her social contacts to approach Oxford University Press.

In 1935 she published two biographical works. The first described the brief life story of Lord Byron's illegitimate daughter who died at the age of five, the other is about Giacomo Leopardi . In 1938 she published a biography of Cola di Rienzo : Tribune of Rome: A biography of Cola di Rienzo .

Despite the beginning of the Second World War, she stayed in Italy. Her mother, who benefited from the measures taken by the fascists under Mussolini as a landowner, sympathized with the regime, albeit in a "naive" way, as Bernard Berenson noted with horror. Iris Origo, on the other hand, felt the inner turmoil when she, together with the assembled peasants, heard Mussolini's address on the radio in which he declared on June 7, 1940 that Italy would enter the war. Her friend Elsa Dallolio gave her the opportunity to work for the Red Cross, although she was hostile to the regime.

Iris Origo with husband Antonio and daughter Donata, 1943

Nevertheless, she did not comment on the regime, only found the crude cult of masculinity to be repugnant. She took in 23 refugee children from Turin and Genoa , later allies dispersed, escaped prisoners of war and partisans. One of these partisans brought her news that her mother, who had to leave Italy, had died in Switzerland in December 1942. As the war front drew closer, Origo became involved with the common people, with whom the highly privileged woman had previously felt no connection. In June 1944, German soldiers asked her to leave her home. With her daughters and refugee children, she walked the 12 km country road to Montepulciano , where the family was allowed to live in the mayor's house.

She processed these events literarily in her work Guerra in Val d'Orcia , a diary that began on January 30, 1943. The biographies of important anti-fascists in Italy followed almost four decades later.

After the war, the Origos went to their New York relatives for a few months, their own property was badly damaged. When they returned to Italy in the fall, Iris visited George Santayana. The Origos soon lived between La Foce and Rome , where the family moved into an apartment in the Palazzo Orsini . Origo wrote biographical works, among which the biography of the Tuscan merchant Francesco Datini (1335-1410) stands out.

The Villa La Foce in 2016

But Italy's economic situation was dire. As in the rest of the country, the Origos peasants resisted the continuation of the mezzadria system. For them, the Origos were representatives of the old system of taxes and services, which dates back to the Middle Ages, in this case around half of the harvest. The Origos modernized the company under the prevailing capitalist conditions of the 1950s, which initially meant free wage labor, market-mediated prices, and open competition. Antonio Origo was even elected mayor of Chianciano . When Florence was hit by a catastrophic flood by the Arno in November 1966 , the Origos helped the victims. In the same year Iris Origo received the Isabelle d'Este Medal for her historical work.

Antonio Origo died on June 27, 1976. Iris received the British title Honorary Dame Commander the year after his death for her services to British-Italian relations and British cultural interests. In 1984, almost four decades after the end of the war, she wrote four biographies of Italian opponents of the fascists: Ignazio Silone , Gaetano Salvemini , Ruth Draper and Lauro De Bosis . A few months before her death, she published a biography of her friend Elsa Dallolio.

Biographies

Caroline Moorehead published a biography in 2000 that, although the private person Iris Origo unfolds, classifying her role as an author remained a desideratum. Stelio Cro tried his hand at this a few years later. Iris Origo's importance as a historian has still not been explored.

membership

In 1967 Origo was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Works

  • Gianni , memories of her son, private print
  • Allegra (1935), Life of Lord Byron's daughter, German at Wagenbach 1993
  • Leopardi (1935), biography of Giacomo Leopardi , English 1953
  • Tribune of Rome: A biography of Cola di Rienzo , 1938
  • Il Mondo di San Bernardino (1935), biography of San Bernardino da Siena , in which his world is in the foreground, German The Saint of Tuscany: Life and Time of Bernardino of Siena , Beck 1989
  • Guerra in Val d'Orcia (1947), a diary-like description of the war, was published in 1985 under the title Tuscan Diary 1943/44: Years of War in the Val d'orcia by CH Beck
  • L'ultimo legame (1949), describes the relationship between Byron and the Contessa Guiccioli
  • Giovanni e Jane (1950), a children's book
  • Il Mercante di Prato (1957), the most widely read biography of Francesco Datini, German In the Name of God and Business (1985)
  • Immagini e ombre (1970), an autobiography, German Golden Shadow: From my life , Beck 1996
  • Un'amica. Ritratto di Elsa Dallolio (1982), Memories of a Friend, published on the occasion of her death
  • Bisogno di testimoniare (1984), biographies of the anti-fascists Ignazio Silone , Gaetano Salvemini , Ruth Draper and Lauro De Bosis , English A Need to Testify , 1984, reprint 2001
  • Un'amica. Ritratto di Elsa Dallolio (1988)

literature

  • Caroline Moorehead: Iris Origo, Marchesa di Val d'Orcia , John Murray, London 2000.
  • Stelio Cro: Iris Origo: dalle radici del neorealismo alla solitudine dell'utopia , Le balze, 2002
  • Benedetta Origo: Iris Origo. 1902-1988 , in: Alba Amoia, Bettina L. Knapp: Multicultural Writers since 1945: An A-to-Z Guide , Greenwood Press, 2004, pp. 399–403
  • Helen Barolini: Iris Origo: To the Manor / Manner Born , in: Dies .: Their other side: six American women and the lure of Italy , Fordham University Press, 2006, pp. 234-274
  • Benedetta Origo: La Foce. A Garden and Landscape in Tuscany , University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

Web links

Commons : Iris Origo  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bayard Cutting Arboretum
  2. Helen Barolini: Their Other Side: Six American Women and The Lure of Italy , Fordham University Press 2006, p. 244.
  3. ^ American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Book of Members ( PDF ). Retrieved April 6, 2016