Parco delle Cascine

This guide to Parco delle Cascine in Florence begins in late November eighteen seventy, when Rajaram Chhatrapati, the young Maharajah of Kolhapur, fell suddenly ill in a hotel by the Arno after visiting Queen Victoria in London. It follows the dilemma his courtiers faced, Hindu funeral rites required cremation, which Florence had never permitted, and how they won permission from the Italian government to carry it out at dawn on the first of December, on the bank where the Cascine meets the Mugnone stream. Crowds of Florentines gathered at the water's edge that morning, astonished by what they saw.