Window on the world

Ceramic artist Saskia Spender reflects on a life of rich experiences across borders

ITALIAN is my first language. My mother partly grew up in Florence and went to school at Poggio Imperiale, where she learned this wonderful, outmoded Italian speech from the heyday of Tuscan cultural life, between the wars. My parents chose to speak Italian to me and I learned English from their summer guests.

Growing up outside Siena in the 1970s, at a time when the countryside was changing and agriculture was becoming industrialised, was paradise. It was isolated and bucolic: I spent all my life drawing and outdoors, in the fields and woods. I was into social insects and we kept bees. There was a village a couple of miles away, with lots of characters, such as Emanuele, a sweet child and great baker, with whom I used to play at washing waterweeds at the outdoor wash house. Sandrina, the diminutive shopkeeper, was so slow at everything, even slicing bread, that you fell into a trance watching her chide the crumbs for falling and waiting for her classic pronouncement: ‘With haste, nowt is done.’ Some of my friends were the first in their family to go to school until the age of 14—their parents had stopped at eight. Lots of different perspectives co-existed in Chianti at the time.