Robin Chanter

Librarian at the British Institute of Florence

John Roberts Chanter, librarian and conservationist: born Folkestone, Kent 15 August 1929; married 1980 Laura Buchan (four daughters, and one son deceased); died Gajan, France 16 January 2004.

Robin Chanter was a brilliant and dissolute figure in the Florence of the 1960s and 1970s. Though he was scorned by the best Anglo-Italian society as a man who had let a fine mind go to waste, Chanter's contempt for convention and his sumptuous liberality captivated a wide circle of acquaintance.

In particular, for young men and women coming to the British Institute at Florence from straitlaced households and boarding schools in England and Scotland, Chanter's company was intoxicating. An outstanding linguist, and popular with Italians of all degrees, he promised a path into the heart of Italy that bypassed the main rooms of the Uffizi. A handsome and untidy man, shambling through the lanes of Santo Spirito to Angiolino's, or padding in blazing sunshine down to the Faro in Anacapri, he embodied friendship without limit and happiness without consequence.

All mere illusions, of course. Chanter's later years were disrupted by family loss and bad health, but he was sustained by a devoted wife and four daughters. In reality, far from throwing away his life, Robin Chanter did much to cheat the demons that leered over his cradle.

John Roberts Chanter, always known as Robin, was born in 1929 in Folkestone, Kent. The Chanters had been solicitors in Barnstaple in Devon, had invested prudently in new residential districts, and supplied a Lord Mayor. Robin's father, the Lord Mayor's son Jack, a naval officer turned publicist, was a drunkard of legendary savagery who hated his only son, spoke to him only through his mother, and finally disinherited him.

With the unswerving rigidity of raffish families, Robin Chanter was delivered up to the hell of a middle-class British education. In September 1938, Picture Post ran a full-page picture of a despondent Robin on his way to Summer Fields prep school being comforted by his mother on Paddington station: "Another boy sets out into the world." Behind the saccharine was the authentic misery of a sensitive and mistreated child. Chanter left Wellington College with relief at 16, studied at the Lycée Français in Kensington, and won a scholarship to read French and Spanish at Queen's College, Oxford. Before he went up to Oxford, he did National Service in the Pay Corps and learned accountancy, a skill of which he was proud.

At Oxford, Chanter found it hard to concentrate and managed only a second class degree. In 1954, he travelled to Italy where he met Ian Greenlees. The heir, ominously, of a Scotch whisky fortune, Greenlees had taught at Rome University before the war, befriended the anti-Fascist philosopher Benedetto Croce in Naples and, after the Allied landings in 1943, established a broadcasting station on the Italian mainland at Bari. In 1958, he was appointed Director of the British Institute of Florence, a teaching institution that had been founded by Italian scholars and the leading Anglo-Florentines in 1917. After a spell studying history of art at the Courtauld Institute, Chanter joined Greenlees as librarian at the Palazzo Antinori. At the same time, he taught English literature at Florence University.

In 1969, the two men bought a house in Bagni di Lucca, the faded summer resort of the grand-dukes of Lucca that had been home, at one time or other, to Montaigne, Byron, Heine, Ouida and Montale. Casa Mansi was a handsome, uncomfortable, old-fashioned house with a vaulted basement that could support the weight of their combined libraries of 28,000 books. The winters they spent at the beautiful Villa Fraita in Anacapri, which Greenlees had bought from the writer Francis Brett Young in 1949.

This was never to be some precious expatriate idyll. In the early Seventies, Chanter fell in love with a young student at the institute, Laura Buchan. They set up home together in the Via Michele di Lando in 1975 while spending weekends with Greenlees at Bagni di Lucca. Their son, Bacchus, was born the following year.

At Bagni di Lucca, at the turn of the Seventies, Chanter staged three congresses for a pioneering Italian conservation group, La Lega Italiana per la Protezione degli Uccelli. This was implausible work for such a shy man, but, with his horror of any cruelty, he was disgusted by the wholesale slaughter of migratory songbirds by Italian hunters. During Chanter's period as Secretary-General, La Lipu grew from a few dozen members to 30,000 and secured in 1977 the first victory in the hard trudge of Italian conservation: Law N. 968 which, among other measures, outlawed the persecution of birds of prey.

In 1980, Bacchus was killed in a motor accident on the Lucca-Florence autostrada. In the depths of misery, the Chanters were married. Soon afterwards, Greenlees left the British Institute and the three retrenched to Bagni di Lucca. Four daughters were born and named after Greek goddesses, and their education did something to restore Chanter's optimism. Athene, Artemis, Aphrodite and Demeter Chanter grew up in a household where a profusion of clocks ran on different times, their chimes piercing the damp gloom like the peals of engulfed cathedrals.

In 1988, Greenlees died. Chanter had always wanted his daughters to do their secondary education in France. Casa Mansi was sold, the great library donated to the Commune, and a small house bought near the old Roman town of Nîmes in southern France. For a while, the family spent the winters near Vienna, so that the girls should add German to their French, Italian and English. If Chanter missed the profound good nature of small-town Italy, he never said so.

Towards the end of 1999, he suffered a series of massive strokes, which eventually robbed him of speech. He died quite peacefully at the house last month, his wife and four daughters beside his bed.

James Buchan