by VT | Aug 15, 2019 | history, Italy
I first went to Italy when sharecropping had been only abolished a few years earlier and contracts still had to run their legal course. It was a way of cultivating the countryside, I was told, that had lasted unbroken since Roman times, so for nearly twenty-one...
by VT | Aug 6, 2019 | art, General interest, Italy
Behind the ruin, which is now the house where I am writing this, were the usual weeds and a few bushes. It was a hot August day, and most were wilting, but on one side I noticed a light purple flower with yellow stamens. Ah, I thought, this is an attractive weed, and...
by Valerie | Jul 24, 2019 | art, General interest, history, Italy, museums, people
As I write, history is palpably being made, so I take refuge in the past. I have been asked how over 600 drawings and sketches by Leonardo da Vinci came into the possession of the Queen of the British Isles. No pictures survive from Antiquity, so no depictions...
by Valerie | Jun 12, 2019 | 1950s, art, book reviews, childhood, Fifties, General interest, history, Italy, people, poetry, reading groups, travel, writing a novel
Soon tennis will start at Wimbledon, rain permitting! The world-famous championships are about to begin in the prosperous, leafy suburb of London. It’s the season of long, languid summer evenings around the midsummer day on the 21 June, the longest day in the northern...
by VT | May 2, 2019 | art, history, Italy
500 years ago Leonardo died in France. In 1452 he was born to a peasant girl in the village of Vinci not far from Florence. His father, a Florentine lawyer, had no legitimate male heir, so decided to adopt him. He probably always felt he was an outsider, so it would...
by VT | Apr 25, 2019 | Italy
My early enchantment with Tuscany must have been influenced by EM Forster’s ‘A Room with a View’ which took place at this time of year. The month of May caught the last of the nightingales and the very first fireflies that dance over the meadows...
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