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Excerpt from Life of Frances Power Cobbe, Vol. 2 of 2
I visited Italy six times between the above dates. The reader need not be wearied by reminiscences of such familiar journeyings, which, in my case, were always made quickly through France, (a country which I intensely dislike) and extended pretty evenly over the most beautiful cities of Italy. I spent several seasons in Home and Florence, and a winter in Pisa; and I visited once, twice or three times, Venice, Bologna, Naples, Perugia, Assisi, Verona, Padua, Genoa, Milan and Turin. The only interest which these wanderings can claim belongs to the people with whom they brought me into contact, and these include a somewhat remarkable list: Mr. and Mrs. Browning, Mrs. Somerville, Theodore Parker, Walter Savage Landor, Massimo d' Azeglio, John Gibson, Charlotte Cushman, Count Guido Usedom, Adolphus Trollope and his first wife, Mr. W. W. Story, and Mrs. Beecher Stowe. Of many of these I gave slight sketches in my book. Italics; and must refer to them very briefly here. That book, I may mention, was written principally at Villa Gnecco, a beautiful villa at Nervi on the Riviera di Levante, then rented by my kind friend Count Usedom, the Prussian Ambassador and his English wife. Count Guido Usedom, - now alas! gone over to the majority, - was an extremely cultivated man, who had been at one time Secretary to Bunsen's Embassy in Rome. He was so good as to undertake what I may call my (Italian) Political Education; instructing me not only of the facts orecent history, but of the dessous des cartes of each event as they were known to the initiated.
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