Elisa Bonaparte and Mimì Pecci Blunt in Marlia
Leafing through Milton Gendel’s fine collection of photographs, *All around Fulco* by Verdura, one comes across a portrait of Fulco and Camilla Pecci-Blunt, the former busy designing his jewellery, the latter organising a photo album. The intimacy of the scene speaks volumes about the Pecci-Blunts’ tradition of hospitality, which was, in fact, characteristic of an entire social circle. Now that this way of life is definitively part of ‘The World of Yesterday’, as Stefan Zweig’s famous book was titled, one realises how, like a shattered mirror, each shard contains the complete image of a vanished whole. The life of Anna Laetitia ‘Mimì’ Pecci Blunt (mother of Camilla, pictured in the photograph) is one such fragment: in her biography, a whole civilisation speaks through her.
She was born in Rome in 1885 to the Counts Pecci, a family of the minor nobility which had, however, given Christianity a pope: Leo XIII. This illustrious kinship with the author of the encyclical *Rerum novarum* – which urged the Church to take an interest in the world around it – represented for Mimì more than just a social passport: it was an example. So much so that, as soon as she had the opportunity, she sought to apply to art the very same principles that had inspired her great-uncle’s pontificate. She could have been a mere collector; instead, she became a patron of the arts.
Her education, too, was typical of her social class (“Mimì had all the advantages of being born into a well-connected, cultured family, and in accordance with the high European standards of the time and her social class, she was educated to speak four languages – Spanish, French, German and English, as well as Italian – to play the piano and to paint and draw”, as Milton Gendel wrote of her), culminating in a series of journeys across Europe. It was, however, in Paris that she met her future husband – the wealthy American entrepreneur Cecil Blumenthal – and that her career as a patron of the arts began. Having settled in a residence on Rue de Babylone, the couple soon began hosting receptions attended by the most fascinating minds of the time: the Diaghilevs, Satie, Dalí and the Cocteaus. The balls – notably the famous Le Bal Blanc, for which Man Ray devised a spectacular light show – were no less sophisticated and rivalled those organised by Charles de Noailles and Charles de Beistegui.
Today, there is a wealth of evidence of that world, thanks to the custom at the time of writing letters and keeping diaries (I am thinking of Élisabeth de Gramont’s memoirs, for example), but it is rare to come across documentation on a par with that from which the curators of the exhibition, Elisa Bonaparte and Mimì Pecci-Blunt, have drawn such an insightful selection in Marlia. These are vast archives housed in the royal villa at Marlia near Lucca, which the Pecci-Blunt family purchased in 1923. The residence, which had previously belonged to the Orsetti family – whose coat of arms can be found on some of the Baroque fountains – was subsequently purchased by Elisa Bonaparte, who had extended the grounds to include vast vistas and undulating hills, in keeping with the English garden style that had found inspiration in Europe through the writings of Rousseau. Mimì restored some of the villa’s Empire-style furnishings and had a Moorish garden laid out, offering a stylised and geometric interpretation of those at the Alhambra, as well as a swimming pool where guests could combine work and writing with leisure and trivial pursuits. Looking at the documents on display, we realise there was a capacity—which now seems lost—to create that atmosphere of widespread cultural divertissement that emanates from certain pages of Louise de Vilmorin’s writings. The guest book was as long as the Book of Hours, and for the parties – which would be featured in the leading fashion newspapers – artists of the calibre of Cocteau or Poulenc were commissioned. The symbol of the comet, already present in the Pecci coat of arms, recurs in several places. Mimì used it to name her gallery and her theatre. During the war, this comet faded, and due to the regime’s hostility, the Pecci-Blunts were forced to move to the United States. Upon her return to Italia, Mimì resumed her customary invitations and the comet shone once more for a few decades. But the social circle that frequented it was soon to fade away. We still find echoes of it in the memoirs of a writer such as Alberto Arbasino. These are the final flashes. Today, the archives of Villa Marlia give the impression of the ruins of a vanished Herculaneum.
