Iris Origo

Dame Iris Margaret Origo, Marchesa Origo, DBE (née Cutting; 15 August 1902 – 28 June 1988) was an English-born biographer and writer. She lived in Italy and devoted much of her life to improving the Tuscan estate at La Foce, near Montepulciano, which she bought with her husband in the 1920s. During the Second World War, she persistently sheltered refugee children and helped many escaped Allied prisoners of war and partisans, in defiance of Italy's fascist regime and Nazi occupation forces. Origins and upbringing Origo was born as Iris Margaret Cutting at Beechwood Cottage, Birdlip, Gloucestershire, England, to the American diplomat William Bayard Cutting Jr. and Lady Sybil Marjorie Cuffe (daughter of Lord Desart, an Irish peer). The Cutting family was a known, wealthy and philanthropic New York family – Origo was a granddaughter of William Bayard Cutting and a niece of New Mexico progressive Senator Bronson M. Cutting. Her parents travelled widely after their marriage, particularly in Italy, where her father contracted tuberculosis. He then travelled the world in search of relief from the symptoms of the disease, which killed him in 1910 at the age of 29. Before he died, William wrote to his wife that he wanted their young daughter to grow up in Italy, "free from all this national feeling which makes people so unhappy. Bring her up somewhere where she does not belong, so she cannot have it." Iris and her mother settled in Italy, buying Villa Medici in Fiesole, one of Florence's most spectacular villas. There they became close friends with Bernard Berenson, who lived at nearby I Tatti. Iris was briefly enrolled at a London school, but mainly taught at home by Professor Solone Monti and a series of French and German governesses. In April 1918 her mother remarried, to the architectural historian Geoffrey Scott, also of the Berensonian circle. She divorced him in 1926 and took a third husband, the essayist Percy Lubbock.