3381. Frances Anne Kemble to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 20, 177–178.
[Rome]
[ca. 6 April 1854] [1]
Dear Mrs. Browning how are you to day? I hope not the worse for having endured my society yesterday evening– We are going on an expedition to the country house of the Chigi’s by the new villa on Saturday [2] —a lovely place to which we often make pilgrimages—if the sun shines as it does to day cannot you venture to come with us[?] If you & Mr Browning will go with me I will promise to bring you home early before the air grows chilly—
your affectionate
Fanny Kemble.
Address, on integral page: Mrs Browning.
Publication: George S. Hellman, “Some Unpublished Papers of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 132 (March 1916), 532.
Manuscript: Scripps College.
1. Dating suggested by Fanny Kemble’s proposal for an “expedition to the country house of the Chigi’s” (i.e., Castel Fusano). In letter 3387, EBB writes that she has been to Castel Fusano. Her first excursion into the Roman Campagna probably occurred on 4 April (see the fifth to last paragraph in letter 3378), which leaves 8 and 15 April as the two possible dates for the “expedition.” We place this letter before the earlier date, given the Brownings’ many engagements on Easter weekend, 14–17 April.
2. Fanny Kemble doubtless refers to the family’s casino at Castel Fusano. Built in the seventeenth century by the Marquis Sacchetti, it was “prettily situated in the midst of a pine plantation,” close to the sea (Murray’s A Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy, 1853, part II, p. 303). The Chigi, a noble family of Rome of Sienese origin, acquired the property in the eighteenth century. The family sold it to the city of Rome in the 1930’s, and it is now an urban park.
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