Ralph Brewster Author

Ralph Brewster (1904-51) was born in Italy into a family of mixed American and German ancestry. The milieu in which he grew up, in a house in Florence belonging to his grandfather, the sculptor Adolf Hildebrand, was multilingual and artistic, described by his brother Harry Brewster in A Cosmopolite's Journey. Both his mother and sister were painters; Ralph was a talented musician, photographer and writer. He proudly regarded himself as American, a descendant of William Brewster, one of the Plymouth pilgrims who sailed to America on the Mayflower. Shortly after WWI, however, his father had relinquished his American citizenship and adopted Italian nationality for himself and his family. It is to this decision that Ralph owed his 'wrong passport'. Frustrated by the narrowness of Florentine expatriate society, he embarked on the life of a wanderer. His 6,000 Beards of Athos was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1935. The early 1940s saw him in Hungary, on the run from Italian conscription, as described in Wrong Passport. His fight to regain American citizenship was ultimately unsuccessful. He died in Florence in 1951. Annabel Barber, co-author of Blue Guide Rome, is the Blue Guides editor-in-chief.