More about Pensione Morandi in Florence

I became curious about the Pensione Morandi in Florence.  It received frequent enthusiastic mention in the Lockwoods’ letters home.  I decided to search for the name, and immediately found the Hotel Morandi alla Crocetta, about a half block away from the Piazza Annunziata.

I wrote to the information email address at the Hotel Morandi, and just a few hours later got a response from Paolo Antuono, the owner of the hotel.  A few hours later I heard from his brother, Piero Antuono, a physician and medical school professor in Wisconsin.  Thanks to both of them for giving me permission to publish their comments.  First from Paolo Antuono:

The Irish lady (Theresa McIntyre) running the Pensione Morandi was an aunt of my mother’s. She came to Florence at the beginning of the  20^th century and married Attilio Morandi, when she also started the Pensione Morandi. She convinced her sister Daisy McIntyre who lived in Yorkshire (England) to let her daughter (my mother, Kathleen Doyle) come to Florence and live with her, where she would enjoy a better climate and better education. Thus my mother lived with her aunt at the Pensione Morandi from 1928 till 1939, when she had to go back home, being an English national (not Irish). After WWII my mother came back to her aunt in Florence, married my father, continued the Pensione Morandi and passed it on to me (both my father and mother passed away). We are no longer in the Piazza SS. Annunziata, but, since 1986,  in the nearby Via Laura, where the Pensione Morandi had a dependence and where the 16^th century Crocetta convent was. This is why it is now called Hotel Morandi alla Crocetta.

I was reading with great interest your parents’ letters from Italy. They mention the waiter Primo, whom I never knew, but my mother and her aunt always spoke greatly of, and Oskar Press, who remained a great friend of my mother’s. He was sent to an imprisonment camp in Russia, after an attempted escape to Sweden that failed.  He came to visit my mother in the late ’70s.

Your parents were amazed that there was no jazz music on the radio. This is because Mussolini banned jazz as it related to America and the “hostile” nations.

“Piazza Annunziata and Hospital of the Innocents with bambinos by Della Robbia. View from our room at Mrs. Morandie’s Pensione. Festival on Evening of our Arrival.”

The picture of the Piazza Annunziata taken from your parents’ room at the Morandi is during the Annunciation feast and the “things that look like crisp pancakes or waffles and taste like heaven” sold at the stalls are what we call “brigidini”: sort of anise  flavored crisps.

I passed your e-mail on to my brother (Dr Piero Antuono), who now lives in the USA. He will get in touch with you if he has any more information that may be of interest.

Best regards, Paolo Antuono, Hotel Morandi alla Crocetta

Paolo’s brother, Piero, a physician in Wisconsin, also wrote me:

I am Paul’s Brother, Peter and I have read with interest your pages. It has rekindled many memories from my childhood days. Paul and I grew up in the same hotel until the 80s. I will talk to him about Oskar Press whom I remember my mother mentioning many times. After the war many previous guests never returned.

 As children there was a room in the hotel where guest left their luggage till the next yr. This mysterious room, (a very mysterious room for us children) had belongings of several people who never came back after WWII. We found a very large flag with the Swastika a Union Jack and an Italian Royal Flag which my aunt (Theresa McIntyre) would hang out of the window overlooking the Piazza depending on the political whims of the moment.

Being Irish she was neutral and the Hotel was one of the very few not confiscated by the German authorities during the war. The Nazi flag hung in my bedroom for years as a young teen ager (it fulfilled my spirit of contradiction I guess…) to be soon substituted by the “make love not war sign” of the sixties…

Well nothing of this has to do with your original diary (sorry for this) but my next tel call to my brother will be a very interesting one! I have not read all of the web pages, but I will contact you if I feel there might be some additional information which you may find useful.

If you come across a DVD film called “Tea with Mussolini”… do rent it

Is the story of several English ladies who were living in Florence in the late 30s. Then the War broke out and they were kept in a convent with minimal security in San Giminiano until freed by the Allies ( the Scots really..)

Franco Zeffirelli was the director and the film is autobiographic. The cast includes Judy Dench, Maggie Smith Joan Ploughright and Chers (who plays the American lady also stuck in Italy and  so much disliked by the rest of the “proper ladies”.)

The film conveys quite well the feel of the era just before WWII  when the gentile English ladies were living in Florence among the quaint local natives ( the Florentines..)  Fascism was slowly eroding this charming idyllic place of art history and culture into a brutish police state. It is a comedy nevertheless and light-hearted  at times.

Among the extras (and always in the background from the main actresses) you will notice a lady in a wheelchair in her early 80s who was part of these British ladies. You can spot her in the very opening of the film, (as the Ladies are walking in a group down Via Tornabuoni) and later in a few scenes. She was my mother ( Kitty Doyle).

Since my mother went back to England only weeks before the onset of WWII (September of 1939)  she must have been living in the hotel when your parents were there in 1938.

The film did not include scenes of the Piazza Santissima Annunziata. But if you remember ” A room with a view” with the actress Helena Bohnam-Carter there are scenes where you see the Hotel entrance. The film takes place a little earlier in the late 1800, but the Piazza has not changed and I hope it will never change.

Take care for now. Nice writing to you! and sorry if I chat too much  🙂

Good luck with your detective work,
Piero