A powerful witnessing ... Bridges span the Arno river in Florence. Photograph: Francesco Bellini/AP
Just before Christmas we were lucky enough to spend a few days in Florence and while there, one bright sunny morning, on our way to the Boboli Gardens we passed Casa Guidi, the home of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning from 1847 until the latter's death in 1861.
Casa Guidi stands just south of the river Arno not far from the Ponte Vecchio and those years the Brownings spent there were exciting and dramatic on both a personal and public level. Here their son Pen was born, here Robert wrote Men and Women and Elizabeth wrote the verse novel Aurora Leigh. It was here she produced the remarkable poem Casa Guidi Windows, a stirring response to the Florentine bid for freedom in the late 1840s. Casa Guidi lies on the junction next to the church of San Felice and just around the corner from the Pitti Palace and from its windows the Brownings could witness the swerving political fortunes of their adopted city.
Casa Guidi Windows is a beautifully poised and passionate piece of writing, 1,999 lines in length. One of its most striking features is that it was written in two very distinct parts, the first completed by 1848 and the second by 1851, both published together in the latter year. The first, full of enthusiasm and hope, is a joyful response to the celebrations that filled the streets of Florence on the September 12 1847, when Grand Duke Leopold II restored civil liberties to the citizens. The second, written after the collapse of this venture, centres on a brilliantly bitter description of the Austrian army marching through the city between March 2 and 5, 1849. Both parts of the poem capture the mood and expectations of their very different circumstances.
Throughout the first section there is an infectious and exhilarating optimism:
For the heart of man beat higher That day in Florence, flooding all her streets And piazzas with a tumult and desire.
But this very public poem is also full of an immensely personal symbolism. Elizabeth Barrett Browning repeatedly identifies herself with Italy's attempt at a kind of rebirth. Florence's political hopes mirror the optimism of her marriage and her attempt to cast off the morbid and claustrophobic life she had been living in London. Elizabeth was about to give birth to her son Pen at the age of 42 - an immensely dangerous venture for a Victorian woman - and Italy's fight for independence is continually articulated in terms of her own struggle to regain an authentic hold on life.
And that is why the second part is such a fascinating and moving read. On one level it is a magnificently angry procession, a stirring outcry against political failure. But on another level it is a celebration of personal triumph - her own bid has paid off and the picture of the Austrian army moving through the Florentine streets is preceded by an image of her sleeping son. And it is with the image of her son that the poem draws to a close:
The sun strikes, through the windows, up the floor: Stand out in it, my own young Florentine, Not two years old ...
Above the doorway to Casa Guidi is a plaque, a tribute in Italian to Elizabeth, written by the poet Niccolo Tommaseo and placed there after her death in 1861. Casa Guidi Windows had been immediately translated into Italian and had made her famous in her adopted country. The final words of the plaque describe her verse as "a golden ring wedding Italy and England", an image that strikes at the core of Elizabeth's aims.
Despite its technical faults and occasional verbal clumsiness, what this poem offers to the contemporary reader is its bravery, its ability to allow the writer's personal and political convictions so vigorously and so openly onto the page. What we have here is a powerful witnessing. Robert Browning, her husband, always had problems writing directly about himself; was always much more at home when adopting voices, relishing the distances between his own life and the personas he was constructing. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was frequently at her best when directly articulating her passionate openness to the life she was leading and the world she inhabited: nowhere more so than in Casa Guidi Windows.
