VICTORIA THAYER STARR (“Vicki”) of Hingham, MA, Chinon, France and Rome, Italy, daughter of attorney Donald C. Starr and noted painter Polly Thayer Starr and survived by her sister Dinah Starr, died peacefully Monday evening March 25 at her home on Weir River Farm. Born in 1940 (“a golden dragon” as she sometimes reminded her friends), she attended Woodward and Winsor schools in Boston before finding her academic home at Westtown School, Westtown, PA. After graduating from Bryn Mawr College and receiving her MAT from Yale University, she taught Latin at Moorestown Friends’ School in Moorestown, NJ from 1962 to1970, spending most of her summers in Italy, which allowed her to follow closely the excavations at Cosa and in the Roman Forum of one of her teachers at Yale, Frank Brown, who had returned to the American Academy in Rome. In 1970 she moved to Rome, where she purchased an apartment on the Gianicolo and taught English at St. Stephen’s School from 1974 to 1976.
During her Roman years Vicki traveled widely, once making a list of 28 countries she had visited, including Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Lebanon as well as most European nations. She was passionately involved with stone in all its forms, and studied stone carving with Peter Rockwell, spending time at the quarries in Carrara, Italy, documenting the process of working in stone from the beginning. Photography was another love, in which she achieved maximum control over her beautiful photographs of nature and its creatures by developing them in her own darkroom.
Her love of Romanesque architecture drew her with increasing frequency to France, and in 1977 she succumbed to the temptation of a semi-ruined stone house constructed in the 14th-16th centuries against walls of the castle in Chinon, France, and spent the next two decades restoring its extraordinary multi-level character complete with gardens and courtyards, discovering unsuspected frescoes in the process and receiving official recognition as an honored citizen for her contribution to the preservation of the city’s patrimony.
In 2001, recognizing that a totally vertical structure was perhaps not the ideal place to be aging, she moved back to the Thayer/Starr homestead at Weir River Farm in Hingham, Massachusetts, now a property of the Trustees of Reservations, whose carriage barn she converted to a unique and dramatic living space. She was devoted to her cats and her gardens, read widely, experienced life with gusto and imagination, and enjoyed her many friendships to the full.
While maintaining a strong affinity with the Quaker faith in which she was raised, Vicki was a devoted member of the Parish of St. John the Evangelist in Hingham, where her funeral will be held on Thursday, April 4 at 2 PM. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be sent to The Weir River Farm Reservation, Trustees of Reservations, 227 East St., Hingham, MA 02043.