Harold Acton

Born on July 5, 1904, at Villa La Pietra near Florence, Harold Acton grew up in an international, highly cultured family and was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. At Oxford he became part of a brilliant literary circle, helped found the avant-garde magazine The Oxford Broom, and later became known as one of the most distinctive figures associated with the Bright Young Things.

Acton wrote across genres, including poetry, fiction, memoir, biography, and history. He spent time in China, where he studied the language, traditional drama, and poetry, and some of his later work drew on that experience. His reputation rests especially on his historical writing, including major studies of the Medici and the Bourbon rulers of Naples, as well as his memoir Memoirs of an Aesthete.

After wartime service as an RAF liaison officer in the Mediterranean, he returned to Florence and devoted great energy to restoring Villa La Pietra, the home where he had been born. He was appointed CBE in 1965 and knighted in 1974. When he died in Florence on February 27, 1994, he left La Pietra to New York University, linking his name permanently with both literary history and a remarkable cultural estate.