At first, Loy and Haweis moved into a villino located in Arcetri, finding themselves in a large expatriate community. In the Spring of 1907 Haweis found a studio on the Costa San Giorgio in Oltrarno.
On 20 July 1907, Loy gave birth to Joella Sinara. A few months before Joella's first birthday Loy was pregnant again, this time with the child of Haweis, and she was to give birth to a son named John Stephen Giles Musgrove Haweis on 1 February 1909.[31]
Joella was late learning to walk, which was later diagnosed as a type of infantile paralysis which caused her muscles to atrophy. Dreading that Joella's condition might be like the meningitis that killed Oda, Loy sought medical and spiritual support. This was one of her earliest, critical encounters with Christian Science as she sought out a practitioner, who prescribed a treatment and told Loy to feed Joella beef broth and donkey's milk. After this succeeded in improving Joella's health, Loy began to attend church regularly.[32]
Around 1909, with the financial support of Loy's father, Loy and Haweis moved into a three-storey home on the Costa San Giorgio.[32] The family had a nurse, Giulia, who helped raise the children and would later spend years being the children's sole support, and her sister Estere, who was the family cook. Once the children were toddlers, Loy spent increasingly less time with them and they were often cared for in the cooler climate of the mountains and Forte de Marmi in the summers. Burke speculates that this may have been a reaction to the overbearing intrusion of her own mother which led her to withdraw.[32]
Loy frequented the social gatherings held by socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan at the Villa Curonia and it was here that she met Gertrude Stein, her brother Leo Stein, and Alice B. Toklas. Loy was drawn to Gertrude and even got the opportunity to dine with her, Dodge, and Andre Gide.[33] Gertrude would later recall that Loy, as well as Haweis, were amongst the few at that time who expressed serious interest in her work (she had not yet been widely recognised for her literary achievement). However, Gertrude recalls an incident where Haweis begged her to add two commas in exchange for a painting, which she did, but then later removed them; contrarily, Gertrude noted that "Mina Loy equally interested was able to understand without the commas. She has always been able to understand."[34]
In daughter Joella (née Sinara) Bayer's memoir, now part of the Mina Loy Estate, she reflected on her parents, saying:
My mother, tall, willowy, extraordinarily beautiful, very talented, undisciplined, a free spirit, with the beginning of too strong an ego; my father, short, dark, a mediocre painter, bad tempered, with charming social manners and endless conversation about the importance of his family.[35]
According to Gillian Hanscombe and Virginia L. Smyers:
During their ten years in Florence, both Mina and Haweis took lovers and developed their separate lives. In 1913 and 1914, though she was coping with motherhood, a soured marriage, lovers, and her own artistic aspirations, Mina found time to notice and take part in the emerging Italian Futurist movement, led by Filippo Marinetti, whom Loy had a brief affair with, and to read Stein's manuscript: The Making of Americans. Loy even showed some of her own art at the first Free Futurist International Exhibition in Rome. She became, also, at this time, a lifelong convert to Christian Science.[22]
In winter 1913, at Caffe Giubbe Rosse (an informal meeting place of those involved in Giovanni Papini's Lacerba) Loy's lodger friend and fellow artist, the American Frances Simpson Stevens, met Florentine artists Carlo Carrà and Ardengo Soffici, who, with Papini, had joined forces with Marinetti's Futurists earlier that year. They soon began visiting Stevens on the Costa San Giorgio and through this connection Stevens and Loy met many other Italian artists.[36] Soffici would later invite Loy and Stevens to exhibit their work in the First Free Futurist International Exhibition, to be held in Rome at the Sprovieri Gallery – Loy was the only artist representing Britain and Stevens the only North American.[37]
From 1914 until her departure for America in 1916, Loy was involved in a complicated love triangle between Papini and Marinetti – which she was to write about extensively in her poetry.[38]
