9th April 2011

According to my newspaper, David Cameron recently took a Ryan Air flight from Stansted for a weekend away with Mrs Cameron.

I really hope that they enjoyed their flight and their weekend away from the pressures of Downing Street, the NHS, Education, Libya, Inflation and the financial crisis.

Getting away from it all, like the big society, is not a new idea.

In the C18th Century many well to do British people travelled extensively in Europe and had ambitions to develop both their knowledge and their citizenship beyond the narrow confines of the British Isles.

Two well known 'names' are associated with Genova which is also now  a Ryan Air destination

James Smithson was born in Paris, France in 1765, lived in England, travelled widely in Europe. He died and was buried in Genoa in 1829 and is memorialised in the English Church, The Chiesa Anglicana.

James Smithson was a chemist and mineralogist, he was both a European and an Internationalist. He travelled extensively throughout Europe collecting specimans and even wrote a paper on how to brew a better cup of coffee.

Smithson was the illegitimate son of landed Gentry, he was obviously both industrious and a wise investor and after his death left his considerable fortune to America to found the Smithsonian Museum to encourage scientific research.

His body was eventually disinterred and removed to America.

No one knows why he left his money to America and not Britain but it could be that he had a sense that in time America would become a bigger society than Britain.

The second visitor to Genova is Oscar Wilde. He wrote a sonnet called 

Holy Week at Genoa

  

I wandered through Scoglietto's far retreat,
The oranges on each o'erhanging spray
Burned as bright lamps of gold to shame the day;
Some startled bird with fluttering wings and fleet
Made snow of all the blossoms; at my feet
Like silver moons the pale narcissi lay:
And the curved waves that streaked the great green bay
Laughed i' the sun, and life seemed very sweet.
Outside the young boy-priest passed singing clear,
'Jesus the son of Mary has been slain,
O come and fill His sepulchre with flowers.'
Ah, God! Ah, God! those dear Hellenic hours
Had drowned all memory of Thy bitter pain,
The Cross, the Crown, the Soldiers and the Spear.

The sonnet form is written in what is called 'iambic pentameter' and this particular sonnet form is  sometimes called the 'Italian' sonnet possibly adopted by Wilde because he was writing in Genoa.                                                   

Scoglietto, is a park around Villa Rosazza, near the Di Negro Metro Station. Today the oranges hanging from the trees are still a  feature of Genoa in Via Negro or in Piazza Marsala outside the English Church.

The imagery of the oranges as lamps their brightness shaming the day is powerful. The flower blossoms, disturbed by the birds fluttering, fall as snow, an unusual feature of the Genoese climate but not uncommon as we found when we were here in January.           

The sweetness o f life here is underlined with the imagery of the sea and the Narcissi and contrasted by the announcement of the death of Jesus by the boy-priest, an image that reminds us possibly of Wilde’s own troubled sexuality. The snows of the fifth line become flowers again to fill the sepulchre a common practice as Christians decorate the Church for Easter.  
     

Oscar Wilde’s tomb is in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris whilst his wife Constance was buried here in Genoa in the Cimitero Staglieno.

Both James Smithson and Oscar Wilde were citizens of a big society, men with large and spiritual visions of what was possible, they will both be remembered at services during our time in Genoa ..........