Aunt Nell and Uncle Serge decided to spend the winter in Florence, Italy, one year, and Lily Scherbatoff, their younger daughter, brought her family of an old Aunt, an English nurse and five children to Rome, where we joined them in a quiet hotel.
Uncle Serge began to be more than a figure in the background. I began to realise what a dear old man he was and found a very happy usefulness in going with him to several museums to read for him. He was half-blind and could not read the explanations and names of all the exhibits, which were extremely interesting but too small for his failing eyesight. So, I learned to be grateful for the little Latin I had and a penze book of Myths. All I had ever known of Mythology (two prizes at school), Roman history, Shakespeare and a few other lessons came to life at the museums. I was much interested to see the bust of Mark Antony's daughter as a sunflower. We had two or three little reproductions, because she was very like in her beauty to one of the cousins.
I never got to the Campagna and did not like the crowded and hurried town. What I liked best was the little square with the fountain, Fontana delle Tartarughe. It was not overwhelming, and Aunt Ada's house was near. She asked Mother and me to stay a few days at her country house, on the edge of the Pontine Marshes near Ninfa (the Nymph), just below the imposing Castle of Sermoneta. Gelasio, one of her five sons, was overseeing the work of removing later additions and restoring the original plan of the castle. On our way up the hill, Aunt Ada saw a man repainting the street name as "Via del Castello" and corrected this to the old name of "Via della Fortezza".
It was during this trip that I had a most -- the most -- enjoyable hours of all my travels abroad. Roffredo asked me if I would like a ride, and it was settled for the next morning after breakfast. The Forest Guard waited with two horses at the door, and I mounted, having been lent a long, full skirt. After a little wait (it did not occur to me at the time that he did not want to ride with a cousin and uninteresting girl), Roffredo appeared, apparently just out of bed. I was quite happy to leave him behind and to set off with the Forest Guard, who had a carbine under his right leg and a coil of rope on the left side. His name, I found, was Archangelo (his Father's, Angelo, and his mother's, Colomba). The gun and rope were in case we met with a wild boar, some of which still inhabited the forest, but we had not the luck. For most of the way, we were riding on corduroy roads -- genuine ones of tree trunks and very wet. All the roads in the marshes were real corduroy, King's Way, made of tree trunks laid across the track, often in water. In the open spaces of the trees, I found a patch of wild cyclamen.
We presently enjoyed a visit onto a long, curved beach of sand. I had a grand gallop, of at least a mile, before arriving at a small house dating from the centuries when the coast was constantly attacked by Moors and was a lookout and refuge. This particular one had a special interest, because Prince James Francis Edward Stuart visited it with his younger brother and got away to France, undiscovered, to get to Scotland and start the 15.
Back in Rome, I found that Boris, the eldest of Lily's family, about 12, had set his heart on seeing the Blue Grotto of Capri. I joined his plans, and old Aunt agreed to take us to Naples, where we spent two nights at a small hotel. The next day was stormy, and everyone warned us against trying the crossing to Capri. But I backed Boris' plea, because he was so unhappy, and we set out in a small and top-heavy steamer. We had neither of us considered the result of the high winds. Boris and I were seasick, to a violent degree. Aunt Mania said I looked dead, as I lay on the deck, too ill even to raise my head, and poor Boris did likewise. Only he was worse, because, though I recovered as soon as I landed, he went on feeling miserable and, of course, very much disappointed because no boat would go into the grotto (because of the high waves). Luckily, the return to Naples was a degree less rough. I thought Naples not altered from what it was several centuries ago and had no wish to see it again.
I went to one ball in Rome and found it rather stiff, after the mostly small gatherings at home, but I was thrilled to waltz with the Austrian Attache. He was the smoothest and fastest thing I ever met in a ballroom, but I do believe that I did not disgrace England.
Coming home one morning, I asked Uncle Serge if we might wait five minutes, because Prince Arthur of Connaught would pass us on his way to open the English part of an exhibition, and I would like to see him. Uncle Serge grumbled about the lateness of all royals, but I said English ones were always up to time, and, sure enough, the small deputation came along, and Uncle Serge was dumbfounded, looking at his watch and repeating, "Montre en Main! Montre en Main!"
On leaving Rome, we went for some days to Siena, a little walled town squeezed on to the top of a rock, not very far off. It was a complete hill town, for there were no houses round the foot of the great rock on which it was built. The painting on the wall of the town hall was of a man on a horse, with a town in the right hand corner. There were Etruscan tombs at the foot of the Pontine Marshes that were the real joy, overcoming Rome. It was immensely charming, and we had very happy days there.
AUNT NELL
Eleanor Hester Mary Plaoutine, London-born daughter of Lt-Colonel John Henry Pringle & Georgiana Ramsbottom and sister of EV's mother, Edith Blanche.
UNCLE SERGE
Aunt Nell's Russian-born husband, General Sergei Nikolaevich Plaoutine, son of General Nikolai Fedorovich Plaoutine and Severin Iosifovna Kalinowski.
LILY SCHERBATOFF
EV's cousin, Elizaveta Plaoutine, youngest of Aunt Nell and Uncle Serge's four children, married Prince Sergei Borisovich Scherbatoff, making her Princess Scherbatoff.
AN OLD AUNT, PART OF LILY'S HOUSEHOLD
Princess Khovanskaya, a Scherbatoff aunt. One of her nephews left memoirs, in which he claimed that this Aunt was murdered with Lily, at the time of her execution by the Bolsheviks.
FIVE CHILDREN
Boris, Marie or Elizabeth, Irina, Dimitri, and Tatiana, all Scherbatoff princes and princesses. EV's nephew, Charles, left a handwritten family tree that shows Marie married, which means that Elizabeth must have been the one who died young. Other online sources claim to have letters written by Elizabeth. Whichever proves to be true, one of these girls has passed away before the winter of 1909-10.
BUST OF MARK ANTONY'S DAUGHTER
In EV's time, this statue was identified as a likeness of Mark Antony's daughter, Antonia. Art critics, then and now, agree on only two things about this bust: they don't know who it is or when it was made. Ancient or 18th-century, clothed or unclothed . . . they'll never know. We sure would like to know which cousin it resembled. Our vote is for Aunt Ada (Princess Teano and Duchess of Sermoneta), whose photographs show the closest resemblance. EV's small replicas have not belonged to the family in living memory.
AUNT ADA
Whether or not she's the beautiful cousin (cousin to EV's Darling Mother) who looked like the statue, English-born Ada Constance Bootle-Wilbraham married her Italian Prince and lived happily ever after.
AUNT ADA'S HOUSE
The Palazzo Caetani had been the home of the Caetani princes for centuries. In 1883-1890 newspaper clippings, their estate is listed as "Cisterna" on the Campagna.
GELASIO
Gelasio Caetani, son of Onorato Caetani & Ada Bootle-Wilbraham, cousin to EV's mother.
ROFFREDO
Another son of Onorato & Ada, Roffredo Caetani would live to compose beautiful piano music. How appropriate that his Godfather was Franz Liszt.
BORIS
Prince Boris Sergeyevich Scherbatoff, son of Prince Sergei Borisovich Scherbatoff and Elizaveta Sergeyevna Plaoutine, born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1897. He was shot in Archangel, Russia, in 1920. Boris was probably fighting as a soldier in the White Russian Army, but this is just an educated guess.
AUNT MANIA
Most likely Princess Maria Sergeyevna Scherbatoff, daughter of Sergei Alexandrovich Scherbatoff and Praskovia Swiatopolk-Czetwertynski, born in 1859. She was murdered by thr Bolsheviks in 1918, in Smolensk, during the Communist Revolution. (Mania is a nickname for Maria.)
AUSTRIAN ATTACHE
Our beautiful waltzer was none other than Prince Johannes Franz Alfred Maria Caspar Melchior Balthasar of Liechtenstein.
PRINCE ARTHUR OF CONNAUGHT
On May 14, 1910, Queen Victoria's son was the British representative at the opening of the Japan-British Exhibition in London.
ILLUSTRATIONS
1) Serge and Eleanor De Plaoutine at the Chateau St. Laurent
2) Marble Bust of Mark Anthony's Niece as "Sunflower"
3) The Garden of Ninfa
4) A Corduroy Road
5) Illustration of Eleanor's Waltz by Bethany & Olivia Moy
6) Prince Johannes of Liechtenstein (1909)
7) Painted Scene on Siena Town Hall Wall
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