English Cemetery, Florence

Although its origins date to its foundation in 1827 by the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church, the name "English Cemetery" results from the majority of its burials being Protestants from the British and American communities of Florence, and who gave the largest sum of money for the purchase of its land.

The cemetery also holds the bodies of non-English speaking expatriates who died in Florence, among them Swiss and Scandinavians, as well as Eastern Orthodox Christians, among them Russians and Greeks.

The cemetery is still owned by the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church, and is open for the interment of cremated ashes, now of all Christian denominations, but no longer for burials.

In 1827 the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church acquired land outside the medieval wall and gate of Porta a' Pinti from Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany for an international and ecumenical cemetery, Russian and Greek Orthodox burials joining the Protestant ones.

Many famous people are buried in the graveyard: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (in a tomb designed by Frederic, Lord Leighton), Walter Savage Landor, Arthur Hugh Clough, Francesca Trollope, Fanny Trollope and her daughter-in-law Theodosia Trollope and three other family members, Isa Blagden, Thomas Southwood Smith, Hiram Powers, Joel Tanner Hart, Theodore Parker, Mary Farhill, Fanny, the wife of William Holman Hunt in a tomb he himself sculpted, Mary, the daughter of John Roddam Spencer Stanhope in a tomb he himself sculpted, Sir David Dumbreck, Doctor Bartolomeo Odicini, Louise, sister to Henry Adams, whose dying he describes in his 'Chaos' chapter in The Education of Henry Adams, two children of the Greek painter George Mignaty, whom Robert had paint Casa Guidi as it was when Elizabeth Barrett Browning died there; Nadezhda De Santis, a black Nubian slave brought to Florence at fourteen from Jean-François Champollion's 1827 expedition to Egypt and Nubia, while the French Royalist exile Félicie de Fauveau sculpted two tombs here.

Giovan Pietro Vieusseux, Swiss, the founder of the Gabinetto Vieusseux (where John Ruskin, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, Sarah Parker Remond, and Robert Browning were readers), is also buried here; and likewise the Swiss historian Jacques Augustin Galiffe [d], who with Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi pioneered genealogical, archival research, and his wife Emilie, daughter of Charles Pictet.