March 25th, 1830
Went yesterday morning to Santa Croce to hear a Mass on the completion of a monument which has been erected to Dante; very crowded and the music indifferent. Afterwards to the Gallery and saw all the cabinets, but we were hurried through them too rapidly. I began to like the ‘Venus’ better, best of all the statues. The ‘Niobe’12 cannot have been a group, nor the children have belonged to the mother. Rode to Normanby’s villa at Sesto, five miles from Florence; a large and agreeable house, gardens full of fountains, statues, busts, orange and lemon trees, shrubs and flowers. He pays 600 dollars a year for it, exclusive of the race-ground. In the evening to Burghersh’s opera, which was very well performed; pretty theatre, crowded to suffocation. All the actors amateurs;13 chorus composed of divers ladies and gentlemen of Florence, principally English. Here all the society of Florence was assembled in nearly equal proportions of Italians, English, and other foreigners. Nothing can be worse than it is, for there is no foundation of natives, and the rest are generally the refuse of Europe, people who come here from want of money or want of character. Everybody is received without reference to their conduct, past or present, with the exception, perhaps, of Englishwomen who have been divorced, whose case is too notorious to allow the English Minister’s wife to present them at Court.
| Phædra | Miss Williams | Soprano. |
| Hippolytus | Madame Vigano | Contralto. |
| The Girl | Madame de Bombelles | Soprano. |
| Theseus | Goretti | Tenor. |
| Attendant | Franceschini | Bass. |
Notes
12 The ‘Niobe’ is supposed to have been a group upon some temple so, of which the mother was the centre figure; this makes it more probable, but the difficulty to this hypothesis is, that there do not appear to be the necessary gradations in the size or altitude of the other figures; the sons in the ‘Laocoon’ are certainly little men.