Friday 21^st October 2011

The Gay Mother and I are just back from Fiesole (driven up by a private Italian), trying to find where Cousin Paquita’s grandparents lived in 1911 on the hills somewhere below. They were Battenclaus of New York. All their things were taken by the Germans in 1944, save a silk Persian rug. What became of them, we don’t know.

What a test for Poor Little Rich Gays were all our things to be taken by the enemy! But we would begin again and reweave better than many, I feel sure.

Oh the view on this day so clear all shapes spring into another dimension of strange incontrovertible stillness! None of the smudgy haze of high summer. I’ve spoken before of the ancient Tuscan landscape, anchored through art, consisting only of olive trees, umbrella pines, cypresses and vines, grey and green. Looking down from Fiesole, we saw farms and villas, a rural idyll with the thundering civilisation of Florence beyond. Later, descending, in a tiny country lane lined with high stone walls where the Battenclaus might have lived, we saw again Lucy Honeychurch and the Edwardian foreigner’s vision of rus in urbe at Florence. Further down, the lane opened out and merged with the modern town.

In the Spring I visited Rome and was dismayed by the boil-washed tourist masses. I wanted the old picturesque run-down Rome back as I knew it first in the 1970s. Rome, Florence and especially Tuscany have saved Poor Little Rich Gays from sheer idiocy. My God! We could have been at Portofino or a like resort preferred by second-rate, merely rich Gays such as Robin Smallmeal, head of landfill in that country or whatever.

Poor Little Rich Gays have got love of Tuscany. It’s a minefield, so difficult to get right. There’s a book of more than usually revolting sentimentality called La Bella Tuscany written by a woman from San Francisco about doing up a house at Cortona.

We can’t have that. Tuscany preciousness.

When first known by me in 1974, Tuscany was rare, rural, secluded, poor, top-quality and important: its landscape is not a bit as nature left it, utterly lovely and an ideal. All other country districts are a poor substitute. Unfortunately neither Botticelli nor Piero della Francesco penetrated Gloucestershire.

Now, we don’t want it changing but we can’t be harping on the past either. If Poor Little Rich Gays are not in the vanguard of renewal and revolution, then who is?

Mercifully they’ve got Florence just right. I’ve not stayed here overnight for twenty years and was convinced it was utterly gone, a heritage pen seething with tour groups. Well, it isn’t. We’re in a flat just off Via Tornabuoni, right in the centre. There are excellent local shops, schoolchildren, well-dressed passers-by with attack. Only the Uffizi we’ve had to jettison. A milling mass, horrible barn-like room, new in the last thirty years, where they show the Botticellis. But much else remains: we’ve paid many calming, lovely visits, with only a few distinguished other visitors. Come back later to hear.

The View from Fiesole

Where Cousin Paquita's Parents Might have Lived in 1911: Via Boccaccio, Going up to Fiesole