On the Shores of the Mediterranean [antikvár]

A Tuscan Vineyard when people in England and America ask about our house in Italy and we tell them that it is in northern Tuscany, their eyes hght up, because Tuscany is one of the parts of Italy that the British and the Americans know about, or think they do. For most of them who have visited it, Tuscany conjures up that rather open-cast country permanently suffused in golden light that forms the background of so many fourteenth-century paintings, country in which Chianti is made. In their mind's eye they even think they know what sort of house it is we live in, though we stress the fact that it is very small and very ungrand. They immediately begin to think of the sort of house that appears with its name against it on a map, or in an architectural guide to Tuscany as a Villa, followed by the name of its past owner, often a hyphenated one, and that of its present owner, preceded by the word or a, meaning 'now'; for example, to invent one. Villa Griinberg-Tiffany, ora Newby, a place with a spacious terrace and lots of statuary, the sort of place at which Sitwells used to, and Harold Acton still might, drop in uninvited to tea. In fact our house is in a part of Tuscany so far to the north of Florence, Pisa and Lucca that it ceases to conjure up the idea of Tuscany at all, either in its countryside or in the quahty of its light. It