The One With Queen Victoria
I live really close to the Library of Congress. Since I am now broke and can't afford another trip to Italy before I sell my book, I've been pressing on with my research from afar, even though I roughly have the arc of Nada's life down on metaphorical paper.
For a while now, I have been itching to get my hands on a 1907 issue of I Diritti della Scuola, a niche education magazine for schoolteachers that ran in Italy until the thirties or forties. Nada published some of her work there for years, and it's been a source of many discoveries about her that I ultimately managed to flesh out and get into the book. But there was one issue where her name was mentioned, in conjunction with a play that she wrote but seems to never have put on, that was only available in Snippet View in Google Books, so I couldn't get any of the context.
It didn't occur to me until very recently to check whether the Library of Congress might have it. To my surprise and delight, they have the full run of the magazine through its last issue, so I requested it online and headed downtown.
What I found in there was not what originally made me get off the couch to go check. Yes, the paragraph about the play was there, but there was no more context beyond what I could already see in Google's Snippet view. Yet another thing on my list of random facts to hunt down.
But! In the same bound volume of the magazine's 1907 issues, I found one of Nada's earliest articles for that publication: a piece called God Save the Queen.
That's not my translation. The title isn't "Salve Regina". It is literally "God Save the Queen," in English. The article itself is written in Italian, but I was very caught off guard by the English title. And by the content.
It was a puff piece about Queen Victoria. And there was a special nugget inside it: a phrase suggests that, at some point, she might have seen her in person.
"Here she is again among us, the Empress-Queen: not like we young ones knew her at the turn of the last century: pale, weary, with her white Nordic visage darkened by widowhood."
The article, written on the occasion of the release of Queen Victoria's first volume of letters in 1907, puzzled me to no end. There are a few threads in my research that suggest that Nada might have been part of the travel staff for a duchess who had a strong connection to Queen Victoria's court. It's a hypothesis I haven't been able to prove, despite having requested documents from the National Archives in Italy that would help me nail down the answer months ago. Because sometimes waiting for the archives is like waiting for Godot.
And here she was, apparently filing copy based on a primary source written in English (did she speak English?), exalting a British monarch despite her stated status as an anarchist, for a magazine that must have believed she had some expertise on the topic. But that's not all. In later issues, I recalled multiple articles signed by Nada, published in the same magazine, that focused on British architecture and culture. I've identified maybe five or six articles in total where she appears to be a sort of connoisseur of Great Britain, despite the fact that, as late as 1899, Nada had never left the country. There is maddeningly little information about Nada's pre-1902 life, which is why I had to resort to L'Eredita di Saffo - which is actually just a big collection of blind items on the sexual transgressions of Italy's rich and famous - in order to figure out what she was doing with her life before she was assigned a teaching post in Castroreale in 1904.
So could she have caught a glimpse of Queen Victoria in person? Perhaps. She wouldn't have had to travel to Britain to do that. She would have had an opportunity much closer to home, in Nice, where Queen Victoria wintered for several consecutive years between 1898 and 1901 - in the precise window where I have no idea what Nada was doing with her life. During these stays on the French Riviera, the Queen occasionally received locals and commoners, along with the usual coterie of nobles that surrounded her. And she was visited there, 1899, by the very same duchess Nada is rumored to have worked for.
But I'll have to finish waiting for Godot before I can put any of this in my book.
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