Comments on: Notes From Italy: Some Old Envoys

By: Don H. Doyle

Don H. Doyle — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 06:02:06 +0000

This is very interesting, well written, and engaging. I have been intrigued with Marsh for some time now, having seen a plaque honoring him at the US Embassy in Rome. His unofficial letters and dispatches from Italy during the Civil War are fascinating. He apparently found diplomatic duties a bit boring and spent most of his time reading in some twenty languages he had mastered. Marsh became famous as a conservationist as well. He played an important role in the little known story of the Garibaldi affair during the Civil War. While they did not enlist Garibaldi in the Union Army as planned (or feared by some), they did enlist him in the Union cause, and to good effect in England and Europe.
I’m glad I found this site, quite by accident incidentally.

By: John R. Guthrie

John R. Guthrie — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 18:37:32 +0000

I found Peter Bridges’s finely written article to be both thought-provoking and informative. The story of George Perkins Marsh is intriguing, as well as that of the “seriously unbalanced” Rogers and the improvident Bailey.
The article also evoked personal memories for me, of service in Italy as a US Marine many years ago. This included a memorable fest on the Italian Cruiser Garibaldi which was at anchor in the Bay of Naples during a conjoint celebration of the 4th of July and Giuseppe Garibaldi’s birthday.
Fine read!

By: Judith Harris

Judith Harris — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 07:58:54 +0000

How delightful to be introduced by Peter Bridges to courageous, sensitive, humanistic and intelligent professional diplomats such as George Perkins Marsh, John Moncure Daniel who wrote the scandalous but delightful ‘garlic letter,’ and Walter Orebaugh, who fought with the partisans in WW II. Since that time the trend has been for the ambassadorship to Rome to be a political plum, but the professionals like Ambassador Frederick Reinhardt, who served in Rome in the Sixties and spent an hour every morning reading Dante in the original, are still remembered with admiration, as is former Minister and Charge’ in Rome Bridges himself (early in his career I was the absolutely most junior of all officers in the American Embassy in Rome).

By: Judith

Judith — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 01:17:57 +0000

I found your article most enlightening, and interesting. I thought that perhaps, in light of the slavery issue that later arose, you might be interested to know that one of the descendants of that early Italian settler, Tagliaferro, was Booker T. Washington. The T stands for his middle name, Tagliaferro and he was Booker Tagliaferro Washington, the result of a slave laiason whose product was the genius.