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€ 6.000 - 8.000
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€ 2.688
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Information
Extensive personal archive of Baroness Haldon, Constance Mary Palk (née Barrington), which includes: two rich travel photo albums, one focusing on Egypt (circa 1880), one relating to a trip to the Mediterranean (1882) starting from Gibraltar, with stops in Tangier, Florence, Venice and above all Naples and the Amalfi and Sorrento coasts; nuclei of correspondences, the most substantial with Elena of France (wife of Emanuele Filiberto I of Savoy-Aosta); a binder with various diaries, notepads and diary notebooks, including a collection of Poems and a short illustrated report of the approach to Gibraltar; musical scores, including a rare score from the time of O sole mio; family accounting; family photo album; various texts in English, including Palk's Donna Agnese ; some maps and maps; heraldry documentation and court relations.
Specialist Notes
The nineteenth century was the golden age of foreign travelers in Italy, on the long wave of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, a journey with fixed stops that included the return home ... but sometimes not. This is the case of Baroness Haldon, who falls madly in love with Italy (and perhaps with Italians) and decides to spend the rest of her life in Naples, between Palazzo Capomazza at Arco Mirelli and Villa Manffedi in Torre del Greco. We do not know exactly when you arrive in Naples, certainly after 1882, we know for sure that she will remain there until her death in 1926. A woman of ample financial resources, as can be inferred from the accounting at home, but also endowed with that exquisite English sensitivity that makes it receptive to Neapolitan vitality. A sensibility that transpires from the pages of his lucky little volume, Donna Agnese, whose eloquent subtitle already illustrates the subject: Stories of the neapolitan underworld. And already because the Neapolitan underground world is the one that fascinates Mary Palk the most, who in any case frequents the slums like the palaces of power with equal ease: and there is ample evidence of this in the substantial correspondence with Elena di Francia, married to Savoy, another foreigner illustrious who decides to spend most of his life in Capodimonte. The Palk is very active in charitable works, as per the Anglo-Saxon tradition, as well as in the Red Cross, of which there is evidence in a folder of documents. The passion for travel materializes in the two large photo albums: above all the first, contains 120 albumin prints of various sizes, with credit from the photographers from negative (P. Sebah and especially H. Béchard); the second album, in blue canvas engraved in gold with the name of Palk and the date 1882, testifies to the long journey to the Mediterranean, with 87 albumin prints, mostly in large format (some by Naya and Sommer).