“The Etruscans, as everyone knows, were the people who occupied the middle of Italy in early Roman days and whom the Romans, in their usual neighbourly fashion, wiped out entirely to make room for Rome with a very big R.” This is the opening sentence of D.H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places (1932). I’d decided to cite …
Nearly all Learn Italy trips to Venice have been in mid-winter. A special moment for me has always been a visit to the church of San Zaccaria, just inland from the Riva degli Schiavoni, a couple of hundred yards from the Doges’ Palace. In the afternoon it doesn’t open till after four, so we have …
In the dry spring of last year, like nearly everyone, we tried out new walks in our neighbourhood. On one such walk we came across a field completely and gorgeously yellow with buttercups. So this year we set off at the right kind of time to repeat the experience, and certainly we found the same …
I’m pleased to report that no potatoes have recently leapt inappropriately into breakfast-time exchanges, though sometimes the air is thick with whatsisname and thingummyjig as names drift in and out of availability while the brain-box starts to fire up. Someone ingeniously suggested that ‘potato’ was nearly an anagram of ‘teaspoon’, but perhaps that person spends …
17 March 2021 Breakfast time. I am battling with some under-set marmalade (made by me) that slurps everywhere; I am using a tea-spoon. Katie is having similar trouble with honey. When bought in Siena, it had looked non-runny, denso in Italian, but on opening months later it turned out to be sloppy. So I ask …
(December 2020) The Bird of Time has but a little way To fly — and lo! The Bird is on the Wing The colours of autumn were at first brilliant on the trees and then for a couple of days just as bright on the ground, till they turned dark brown and dry. Now those …
Newsletter 46: Can it really be Thursday already? Read More »
Crack! I wake in a drench of adrenalin and fear. What was that? Something dropped from a plane? But apart from wind in the trees it is darkly silent outside. No plane is manoeuvring over Cumnor Hill on its way to Brize Norton, common enough at three-ish in the morning hereabouts. There is a more …
Newsletter 44 (14 June 2020) In our bathroom, at about 8:30 in the morning, the sun streams in the roof window, hits the bevelled edges of a mirror, and showers small rainbows over the white tiles and the bath. Not exactly rainbows, as they are all straight, but if there is a word for these …
Newsletter 43 (17 April 2020) This morning on the short walk to my office there was a beer bottle on the grass verge (interestingly it was an Italian beer called Moretti). I picked it up. I carried the bottle carefully in my left hand, put it in the green bin at the back of the …
Newsletter 42 (7 January 2020) The angry red clock on the oven tells me that it’s 3 am. Sipping a glass of water I look out on the garden. It is bathed in steely grey moonlight. The roof opposite, usually black, is white with frost. I think of Coleridge’s lines: ‘The Frost performs its secret …
With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies Read More »
