Robert Browning and Enrico Nencioni : a story of friendship and devotion

Abstract

Enrico Nencioni learned of Robert Browning's death from Edith Story Peruzzi. In a few lines written in haste, the Marchesa Peruzzi broke the news of the death of 'the Great Poet' to one of his most fervent admirers. This was fitting because it had been Edith's father, the American sculptor William Wetmore Story, who had introduced Enrico Nencioni to Robert Browning. In the summer of 1859, while the Story's were in villeggiatura at Villa Belvedere in the countryside near Siena, the Brownings were staying half a mile off in another villa and Walter Savage Landor was 'at a stone's cast' away. On one of the neighbouring hills Enrico Nencioni, pressed for money, was spending his summer tutoring the son of Count Augusto de' Gori Pannillini, a Sienese nobleman. It was on a soft August evening, in the garden of the cool Villa Belvedere, that the twenty-two year- old Enrico, an avid reader of English authors and a poet himself, was admitted into the circle of those he considered 'enlightened spirits. [excerpt]