Now known chiefly for her love poetry, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was keenly concerned with social reform, and was regarded in Italy as a heroine of the Risorgimento. The author of a new biography argues that she was driven by moral convictions that were fundamentally religious

I heard last night a little child go singing
’Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church,
O bella libertà, O bella! […]
’Twixt church and palace of a Florence street ...

In 1847, 41-year-old Elizabeth Barrett Browning was living beside the church of San Felice in Florence. All eight ­windows of what was to become her main home for the rest of her life gave on to its old “grey wall” and, she told her sister Arabella, “you may suppose what a pleasure it is […] to walk up and down […] on the balcony listening to the organ and choir”. Today that home, Casa Guidi, has been reconstructed as a museum dedicated to her life with Robert Browning; to visit (in non-pandemic times) is to realise just how much San Felice ­dominated the couple’s daily existence.

So these opening lines of Barrett Browning’s long political poem, Casa Guidi Windows, position their author squarely in that first- floor apartment. Indeed, they position her not only on the map of Florence, but within what that city, and indeed Italy, as a whole, meant to her. She saw the entire country as existing “ ’Twixt church and palace”: full of the history and of the historic, often religious, art that were her twin passions, yet trapped by the dead hand of traditional authority. Even Casa Guidi itself was “a palazzo which belonged to the Guidi who inter-married with Dante’s Ugolino family of Pisa – close to the Pitti [Palace] also, and the Raffaels inside”.