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.
Denne historien er fra March 24, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra March 24, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
