Apologies to regular readers for the false alarm about a post yesterday. I’m afraid there was a slip of the editorial finger when instead of saving the draft of next week’s piece I hit “publish”. It happens even to the best of us but you should have known it wasn’t Saturday morning!
Between 1667 and 1669 Cosimo de Medici, the 26 year old heir to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, went on two long trips around Western Europe, which included a three month stay in England. Arriving in Plymouth he travelled by carriage to London calling at places of interest on the way, and later visiting several other towns including Cambridge and Oxford. Despite pretending to travel incognito he had a large retinue, including an artist to record the places he visited and a leading young Florentine scholar, Count Lorenzo Magalotti, who acted as secretary and wrote an account of his journeys.
Now in the Laurentian Library in Florence the manuscript relating to the trip to England became a popular port of call for the more erudite English visitor on the Grand Tour in the 18thc. As a result 200 years ago in 1821 it was translated into English and published. Copies of the illustrations were made by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd and these are now in the British Library. While some parts of Magalotti’s journal are mundane others make fascinating reading and gives an extremely rare narrative insight into the everyday life of the post-Restoration court circle, and well as giving first-hand account of several gardens while making occasional comaprisons with Italian ones.
Westminster
Amongst her many other achievements, including being one of the leading codebreakers at Bletchley Park, she also wrote about the most well-known literary figure associated with the college and the city: Alice Liddell, who was the inspiration behind Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass.
The Garden History Blog 
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