Friday 14th September 2012

Utter recklessness: I’ve booked Venice. One night in Venice. £94 return on British Airways. I’m to attend a book launch at the Doge’s Palace. Massive strings being pulled for me to stay at Peggy’s, or at the very least Pegeen’s.

Il Poggino was the first important villa of the modern Poor-Little-Rich-Gay-villa-with-pool era. Taken by Anthony Mottram, my oldest and closest friend now estranged, in 1995, on the first great flowering of profits from ‘consultancy’ in the old Bloc, the opening up of the Central of Europe after Communism which he at that time was leading.

Poor Little Rich Gays shaped the Bloc and made it what it is today.

All our Poor Little Rich Gay lives since 1976 have been threaded with Tuscan villas. Starting out at £40 a week, there was the Molino di Castagnoli, with stream running through the kitchen but no other running water. Then there was La Primula, the Cortona villa, belonging to the parents of one who became a massive literary figure.

Recently I have struggled with the iconography. What do Poor Little Rich Gays want? Why Tuscany?

What Poor Little Rich Gays want is to be rich but real. Can’t bear Tuscany to be hotel-ified. We must shudder through History, bound in, not mere nail varnish lounging on the millionaire’s white plastic of a Monaco yacht.

So it ended up being Tuscany.

How we loved Il Poggino! For many years, Anthony Mottram had a photograph of it above his desk in the ‘Consultancy’ in Prague. Not coming from money, it meant so much to him to have the money to pay for it. It was the Platonic ideal. We were all there – Rufus Pitman, Bruce MacBain, Robert Nevil, Sebastian Archer (who said, ‘Which of us will get obituaries?’) and Connor Cadoux, of the Australian branch of the Poor Little Rich Gays. The Multis were not known then. They only came in in ’97 and that was before they were Multi.

We couldn’t believe the view up to Brolio from the swimming pool at Il Poggino, which, in memory, had rough grass growing right to the edge and was raised up on a mound. We’d never known the like – a modern luxury item in a sublime natural setting. The house was paradise. The owners had died and left all their things in it, so no Ikea or Villa-issue beds.

So, the other week, staying at the Multis’ second Tuscan villa of the summer, the one said by Captain Blond Multi to resemble a Guildford 4-bed, I went back to Il Poggino. It was only across the valley but impossible to find, all the same. The route quite misremembered. My little wire hire-car wrenched up many a wrong road. But finally, finally, there it was. I’d thought: they’ll be a villa-party, I’ll have to explain and forge through hostility. But it was quite shut up. Rather like Manderley, expect that was burnt down. And dried up too. All the grass around absolutely brown, although someone had been watering some pink geraniums.

I didn’t stay long, fearing the sudden appearance of a caretaker. How small it looked, and rough. And the pool, really rather a mess, in need of grooming and with horrid brick edge that surely wasn’t there before.

Oh dear! Il Poggino must have been in the second rank of Tuscan villas. Really more of a farm outbuilding. Poor Little Rich Gays of today have expanded quite beyond it.

Il Poggino, the First Tuscan Villa of the Modern Tuscan-Villa-with-Pool Era, Taken by Poor Little Rich Gays in 1995

Our Lunch Table at Il Poggino, Still There after 17 Years.

The Kitchen Entrance to Il Poggino: Within the Great Risotto War Took Place Between Rufus Pitman and Bruce MacBain

Il Poggino, Shrunk and Shrivelled through Time: We Were Here in 1995

The Magical Pool at Il Poggino, Not as Remembered

The Treasured View up to Brolio from Il Poggino