Interview/Lecture: Painter Lola Costa and Il Palmerino

Wednesday, November 6, 2024 at the British Institute of Florence

An interview-style 'lecture' with Il Palmerino president Federica Parretti

Lola Costa, 1974, Artichoke Flowers and Eggs, Il Palmerino Cultural Association

Join us at the British Institute of Florence (Lungarno Guicciardini 9) on Wednesday, 6 November at 6pm for a conversation with Federica Parretti, president of the Cultural Association Il Palmerino and manager of its garden-estate. Federica will recount the life and art of twentieth-century English painter Lola Costa, her grandmother and the former owner of Il Palmerino, who immortalised the estate and the people who frequented it, in highly evocative canvases.

In 1935, Lola Costa purchased Il Palmerino, and ‘set up studio’ with her artist husband Federigo Angeli, where they painted ‘in conversation’, interpreting the same models and landscapes on their respective canvases, each with distinctive flair. Lola’s was the less academic hand, and she would ultimately paint with knife plus brush, creating highly emotional pieces that celebrate the seasons of the place, in still-life works and landscapes. In centuries’ past, the Il Palmerino estate was set up to feed the monks of Santa Croce, who lived in downtown Florence. At the turn of the twentieth century and until a few months before Lola moved her family there, it was home to English writer Vernon Lee and haunt to Florence’s ‘English community’ – from Henry James and Oscar Wilde to Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf.

 Lola Costa, 1937, Tulips and Playing Cards, Il Palmerino Cultural Association

An English city girl with a French education, Lola learned to keep the estate alive and continued its vocation as a place for ‘cultural exchange’ through her own art and interest in Vernon Lee scholarship. Lola was the ‘signora’ behind the easel painting her farm labourers, but she would stop mixing colours to help with the harvest. From building pigeon coops in wartime when meat was scarce, to capturing rainwater in a surprisingly ‘ecological system’ Lee had devised, Lola managed the estate for the 70 years she lived there.

Today, Lola’s granddaughter Federica Parretti, strives to uphold the artist’s legacy, together with her family, by preserving Il Palmerino’s house, garden, grove and fields, and by exhibiting and promoting her pictures and poetry. Parretti is currently building the Lola Costa Archive, which, in two years’ time, will become part of the Vernon Lee Library collection at the British Institute of Florence, as a tribute to Lola’s ‘passion project’: facilitating international Vernon Lee scholars, in their connections with Florentine institutions. 

This interview-style “Wednesday Lecture”, featuring Federica Parretti in conversation with author Linda Falcone, is sponsored by Calliope Arts and forms part of a larger 3-year programme: “A Florentine Garden: Early Women Expats and Artists of Today”, organised by Calliope Arts and Il Palmerino Cultural Association, in collaboration with the British Institute of Florence. This event doubles as the ‘downtown’ presentation of A painter’s Florentine Garden: Lola Costa and Il Palmerino, the debut issue of The Curators Quaderno, a new publication created in partnership with Calliope Arts and The Florentine Press.