Every year I use a hardback desk diary for planning and recording writing projects. Instead of buying a brand new one for next year I found an unused one that would be suitable with quotations from Frances Mayes’s book and beautiful accompanying photographs of sun-drenched Italy. A couple of days later my husband was home late from a fishing trip so I watched a film I hadn’t seen before based on that bestselling memoir of la dolce vita. And now I’ve read the book again. It’s an inspirational account of a divorced writer from San Francisco buying an old villa called Bramasole near Cortona and finding a new life there, abundant with pleasures associated with living in Italy.
Frances Mayes writes beautifully; no wonder her book was made into a film.
When I first saw Bramasole, I immediately wanted to hang my summer clothes in an armadio and arrange my books under one of those windows looking out over the valley.
At nine, a slab of sunlight falls into my study from the side window, my favourite window in the house for its framed view over the cypresses, the groves in the valley, and out into the Apennines.
When it rains or when the light changes, the façade of the house turns gold, sienna, ochre; a previous scarlet paint job seeps through in rosy spots like a box of crayons left to melt in the sun.
Poppies have lingered and the fragrance of spiky yellow broom is intense.
I like cut flowers in the house every day. We both love the currents of scents swimming through the garden and how they rise to the house early in the morning.
Magic. I simply fell in love – like you fall in love with a person – and schemed to find a way to stay there.
It is late afternoon, just after a thunderstorm, when the light turns that luminous gold I wish I could bottle and keep.
The Tuscan sun has warmed me to the marrow.
I think this will all keep me going very nicely and keep me writing in the new year ahead.
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