La Pietra – the milestone gardens
As part of today’s garden tour we visited La Pietra, originally home to the Medici Banking support team, the Sassetti, latterly home to Hortense and Arthur Acton and, up until he died in 1994, their son celebrated aesthete author Harold
This impressive villa was purchased for the young Acton couple using the money inherited by Banker’s daughter Hortense Mitchell – not a penny came from Arthur’s own bank account.
This certified fact has saved the University of New York a lot of time, money and heartache after the property had been left to them by childless Harold Acton, and the bequest was challenged by Liana Beacci, who claimed – and proved herself to be through DNA testing, the natural daughter of Arthur Acton and former governess at La Pietra , Ersilia Beacci.
This part of the story is not mentioned by the tour guide at La Pietra – nor is the reason why Harold Acton had no heirs – but it is no longer important – few people worry about children born on the wrong side of the blanket and still fewer care about homosexuality!
The guest list at La Pietra reads like an entry from Who’s Who, partly because Harold’s contemporaries at Eton included Eric Blair (the writer George Orwell), Cyril Connolly, Robert Byron, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Ian Fleming, Brian Howard, Oliver Messel, Anthony Powell, Henry Yorke (the novelist Henry Green), Princess Margaret, Charles and Diana, Somerset Maughan, Evelyn Waugh, the Sitwells, Bernard Berenson and most of this elite crew came to visit – together with his Oxford contempories – including Nancy Mitford – whose biography he authored.
Harold Acton was famously portrayed in Evelyn Waugh‘s novel Brideshead Revisited as Anthony Blanche.
and although Acton refuted the claim, that this outrageous character was based on him he did admit to reciting TS Elliott’s The Waste Land -through a megaphone -across the college gardens – a famous scene portrayed in the early part of the book.
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