Women were a conspicuous presence among the English expatriates, many supporting or justifying their expatriation and Italian lives by cultivating careers as writers, and they did produce a large array of essays and books on Renaissance art, literature and history, on Florentine palaces, gardens and walks, books of ‘Glimpses’, ‘Views’ and ‘Sketches’, as well as translations and memoirs. Their number included the highly learned and gifted Vernon Lee, and the Australian writer Louise Mack, who edited one of the local English language newspapers at the beginning of the twentieth century. Women were also conspicuous as social leaders and arbiters in this bickering and feuding expatriate community. On her arrival in Florence to escape her marriage and to live with Bernard Berenson, Mary Costelloe wrote of the ‘3 or 4 dreadful old ladies’ who held court in their villas looking down on Florence. One of the ‘dreadful old ladies’ was Mary’s neighbour and future close friend, Janet Ross, the subject of Sarah Benjamin’s beautifully produced, richly illustrated and very readable biography, A Castle in Tuscany. Ross was well known enough as a famous foreigner to have her name carved alongside that of Mark Twain on a plaque at Ponte Mensola, commemorating notable former residents of the hills between Settignano and Fiesole.

A formidable feuder, the well-born Ross was a remarkably independent and strong-minded woman, forthright, direct, eccentric. Henry James described her as ‘awfully handsome, in a utilitarian kind of way – an odd mixture of the British female and a dangerous woman – a Bohemian with rules and accounts’. Ross was in Florence because her much older banker husband had lost most of his money, but what remained was sufficient for the eventual purchase of Poggio Gherardo, a castle in the hills just above Settignano, often identified as the setting for Boccaccio’s Decameron. But Ross, whose energy appears truly prodigious, did not leave the means to producing their livelihood solely in her husband’s hands. She developed an informed and practical interest in Tuscan agriculture, took an active interest in farming and oversaw the production of her own vermouth, which she marketed through the Army and Navy Stores in London. To make money, Janet Ross, whose mother and grandmother were writers and translators, and who was a close friend of writers including George Meredith and John Addington Symonds, wrote many articles and books, publishing on a wide range of subjects and in a number of genres: travel writing, essays on Italy past and present, auto biography, translation, history.

Almost all her work is now forgotten, but two books remain of interest. Teachers and students of Florentine history for more than a hundred years have been indebted to Ross for her edition and translation of a selection of the private correspondence of the fifteenth-century Medici, still the only body of Medici letters available in English. While it is easy to dismiss Janet Ross as an amateur and dilettante, her Medici letters is a reminder that she worked in the libraries and archives of Florence, and on the primary sources.

Sarah Benjamin, as the author of a postgraduate thesis on an influential nun in Renaissance Florence, is familiar with the Medici letters, but it is Ross’s other surviving work, her 1899 cookbook, Leaves From a Tuscan Kitchen, that is at the centre of her biography: a cookbook that attracted favourable notice from Elizabeth David and that was reprinted again last year. In her preface, Benjamin writes of her own abiding enjoyment in reading cookbooks, particularly those which transport her back in time to the households that used them. She describes the comfort she finds in the details of place and time, and in the rituals that were the daily routine of a different epoch. This is precisely what Benjamin does for her reader in evoking the kitchen and meals, and the making of the cookbook at Poggio Gherardo. As Benjamin points out, Leaves from a Tuscan Kitchen belongs to the same era as Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), but differed radically from contemporary English cookery books in its emphasis on vegetables, recipes for artichokes and aubergines, as well as in giving a further taste of Italy in recipes for dishes such as tortellini and gnocchi. As Benjamin argues, Ross may have been among the first to introduce the British housewife to the possibilities of Italian cooking. The book ends with a selection of recipes from Poggio Gherardo.