Sir Harold Acton

Flashback

The wealth of Sir Harold Acton, who died in February at 89, came mainly from his American mother, but on his father's side he was a descendant of a dynasty of Neapolitan statesmen, and he was born where he died, at La Pietra, his magnificent Florentine villa. Educated at Oxford in the 1920s, he was the undisputed king of the aesthetes; his college friend Evelyn Waugh based a type of character on him in his novels which he called the "aesthetic bugger." In the 30s he lived in Peking, where he adopted Chinese dress and smoked opium, and then in the 40s he settled at La Pietra to reign amid his art treasures and to write books, including Memoirs of an Aesthete. There he received visitors with elaborate formality, beguiling them with his memories. He had wanted to leave La Pietra to his old Oxford college, but Christ Church was too poor or parsimonious to take it on, so he turned instead to N.Y.U. And if students strolling their new 57-acre Florence campus should encounter an immaculate old gentleman with a raised hat, bowing his head, they will know that they have seen Sir Harold's ghost.

ALEXANDER CHANCELLOR