Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
SALT LAKE CITY — She probably spent hours banished in the nursery, where her father, Lord Penrhyn, had forced her to live, pining for the common gardener for whom she had fallen. In desperation, she scratched these words into the window glass, a permanent expression of her teenage love: "essere amato amando," "to be loved while loving."
That's the story that Welsh experts have put together about lady Alice Douglas-Pennant, and the words that have remained on that glass for more than 100 years, still conveying that sense of teenage love and powerlessness that we have all had some experience with.
Only, up until now, no one had any idea what the words meant. Staff at Penrhyn Castle, near Bangor in North Wales, had always known about the etching, but experts thought thought the phrase was simply a jumble of Latin words that conveyed no meaning. Perhaps it was written in some kind of code or an unknown language.
It took a newcomer to the castle's staff to put it together. When Resi Tomat, a native Italian, was hired, she immediately saw that the phrase was in modern Italian. Who wrote the words and why were still up in the air, however.
That's when house steward Clare Turgoose decided to figure out where the graffiti came from. She knew that the young Lady Alice, born in 1863 to a wealthy industrialist, had stayed for some time in the nursery long after she outgrew it.
"So it was fair to assume that the writing was probably hers and we began to dig a little," Turgoose told the Telegraph.
As she looked into things further, she kept coming across a rumor that Lady Alice had fallen for one of the staff at the castle, most probably a gardener. This fact would not have pleased her father, Lord Penrhyn, who was a Conservative MP and spent the first years of the 20th century fighting workers during the Great Penrhyn Strike.
"The story goes that he forced her to stay in the nursery to keep her away from her love," Turgoose said.
Records seem to indicate that the rumors were accurate, and the young Lady Alice was banished to the nursery to keep her from the gardener after the furious Lord Penrhyn found out. About 1880, she etched the words "essere amato amando" into the window in a youthful expression of love.
Lady Alice never married, perhaps because of the unrequited relationship. She eventually became a notable artist and passed away in London in 1939.
The story may be simply a great story, and nothing more. The National Trust, which runs the castle, is digging deeper into diaries of the former residents of the castle in order to try and corroborate the story in some way.
