Daphne Phelps (1911–2005)

Daphne Phelps was born to English parents. She attended St. Felix School, Southwold, Suffolk, studied at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, and became a psychiatric social worker. She went to New York City in 1939, but was blocked from returning to the UK by the outbreak of World War II. Back in London in 1941, she joined Sir Solly Zuckerman's team researching the effects of the Blitz. She worked at the London Hospital before joining the West Sussex child guidance service. At age 34, in 1948, she went to Sicily to restore Casa Cuseni, a fine house in Taormina near Mount Etna built by her uncle, the artist Robert H. Kitson, which she had inherited. Although weary from her work during the war, speaking barely any Italian, and with very little money, she plunged into the project in this fascinating new milieu. To help overcome her financial problems, for many years she ran Casa Cuseni as a modest pensione and played host to writers and intellectual such as Roald Dahl, Tennessee Williams, and Bertrand Russell. Her memoir, A House in Sicily, was published in 1999. Casa Cuseni was officially declared a site of "cultural and historic importance" by the Italians.