9

La Foce

… superata tellus

Sidera donat.1

BOETHIUS

 

It was on a stormy October afternoon in 1923, forty-seven years ago, that we first saw the Val d’Orcia and the house that was to be our home. We were soon to be married and had spent many weeks looking at estates for sale, in various parts of Tuscany, but as yet we had found nothing that met our wishes.

We knew what we were looking for: a place with enough work to fill our lifetime, but we also hoped that it might be in a setting of some beauty. Privately I thought that we might perhaps find one of the fourteenth- or fifteenth-century villas which were then almost as much a part of the Tuscan landscape as the hills on which they stood or the long cypress avenues which led up to them: villas with an austere façade broken only by a deep loggia, high vaulted rooms of perfect proportions, great stone fireplaces, perhaps a little courtyard with a well, and a garden with a fountain and an overgrown hedge of box. (Many such houses are empty now, and crumbling to decay.) What I had not realised, until we started our search, was that such places were only likely to be found on land that had already been tilled for centuries, with terraced hillsides planted with olive-trees, and vineyards that were already fruitful and trim in the days of the Decameron. To choose such an estate would mean that we would only have to follow the course of established custom, handing over all the hard work to our fattore, and casting an occasional paternal eye over what was being done, as it always had been done. This was not what we wanted.

The Val d’Orcia

We still had, however, one property upon our list: some 3,500 acres on what we were told was very poor farming-land in the south of the province of Siena, about five miles from a new little watering-place which was just springing up at Chianciano. It was from there that we drove up a stony, winding road, crossed a ford, and then, after skirting some rather unpromising-looking farm buildings, drove yet farther up a hill on a steep track through some oak coppices. From the top, we hoped to obtain a bird’s-eye view of the whole estate. The road was nothing more than a rough cart-track up which we thought no car had surely ever been before; and the woods on either side had been cut down or neglected. Up and up we climbed, our spirits sinking. Then suddenly we were at the top. We stood on a bare, windswept upland, with the whole of the Val d’Orcia at our feet.

The clay hills (crete senesi) of the Val d’Orcia

It is a wide valley, but in those days it offered no green welcome, no promise of fertile fields. The shapeless rambling riverbed held only a trickle of water, across which some mules were picking their way through a desert of stones. Long ridges of low, bare clay hills—the crete senesi—ran down towards the valley, dividing the landscape into a number of steep, dried-up little water-sheds. Treeless and shrubless but for some tufts of broom, these corrugated ridges formed a lunar landscape, pale and inhuman; on that autumn evening it had the bleakness of the desert, and its fascination. To the south, the black boulders and square tower of Radicofani stood up against the sky—a formidable barrier, as many armies had found, to an invader. But it was to the west that our eyes were drawn: to the summit of the great extinct volcano which, like Fujiyama, dominated and dwarfed the whole landscape around it, and which appeared, indeed, to have been created on an entirely vaster, more majestic scale—Monte Amiata.

The history of that region went back very far. There had already been Etruscan villages and burial-grounds and health-giving springs there in the fifth century B.C.; the chestnut-woods of Monte Amiata had supplied timber for the Roman galleys during the second Punic war, while, from the eighth to the eleventh century, both Lombards and Carolingians had left their traces in the great Benedictine abbeys of S. Antimo and Abbadia San Salvatore, in the pieve of S. Quirico d’Orcia and in innumerable minor Romanesque churches and chapels—some still in use, some half-ruined or used as granaries or storehouses—and the winding road we could just see across the valley still followed almost the same track as one of the most famous mediaeval pilgrims’ roads to Rome, the via francigena, linking this desolate valley with the whole of Christian Europe. Then came the period of castle-building, of violent and truculent nobles—in particular, the Aldobrandeschi, Counts of Santa Fiora, who boasted that they could sleep in a different castle of their own on each night in the year—and who left as their legacy to the Val d’Orcia the half-ruined towers, fortresses and battlements that we could see on almost every hilltop. And just across the valley—its skyline barely visible from where we stood—lay one of the most perfect Renaissance cities, the creation of that worldly, caustic man of letters, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Pope Pius II, the first man of taste in Italy to enjoy with equal discrimination the works of art and those of nature, who would summon, in the summer heat, his Cardinals to confer with him in the chestnut woods of Monte Amiata, ‘under one tree or another, by the sweet murmur of the stream’.

But of all this we knew nothing then, and still less could we foresee that, within our lifetime, those same woods on Monte Amiata, as well as those in which we stood, which for centuries had been a hiding-place for the outlawed and the hunted, would again be a refuge for fugitives: this time for anti-Fascist partisans and for Allied prisoners of war. We only knew at once that this vast, lonely, uncompromising landscape fascinated and compelled us. To live in the shadow of that mysterious mountain, to arrest the erosion of those steep ridges, to turn this bare clay into wheat-fields, to rebuild these farms and see prosperity return to their inhabitants, to restore the greenness of these mutilated woods—that, we were sure, was the life that we wanted.

In the next few days, as we examined the situation more closely, we were brought down to earth again. The estate was then of about 3,500 acres, of which the larger part was then woodland (mostly scrub-oak, although there was one fine beech-wood at the top of the hill) or rather poor grass, while only a small part consisted of good land. Even of this, only a fraction was already planted with vineyards or olive-groves, while much of the arable land also still lay fallow. The buildings were not many: besides the villa itself and the central farm-buildings around it, there were twenty-five outlying farms, some very inaccessible and all in a state of great disrepair and, about a mile away, a small castle called Castelluccio Bifolchi. This was originally the site of one of the Etruscan settlements belonging to the great lucomony of Clusium (as is testified by the fine Etruscan vases found in the necropolis close to the castle, and which now lie in the museum of Chiusi), but the first mention of it in the Middle Ages as a ‘fortified place’ dates only from the tenth century, and we then hear no more about it until the sixteenth, when it played a small part in the long drawn-out war between Siena and Florence for the possession of the Sienese territory—a war which gradually reduced the Val d’Orcia to the state of desolation and solitude in which we found it. In this war Siena was supported by the troops of Charles V and Florence by those of François I of France, and Pope Clement VII (who was secretly allied with the French) made his way one day by a secondary road from the Val d’Orcia to Montepulciano and, on arriving at the Castelluccio, expressed a wish to lunch there. But the owner of the castle, a staunch Ghibelline, refused him admittance, ‘so that the Pope was obliged, with much inconvenience and hunger, to ride on to Montepulciano’.2

This castle, which held within its walls our parish church, dedicated to San Bernardino of Siena, and which owned some 2,150 acres, had once formed a single estate with La Foce; when we first saw it it was still inhabited by an old lady who (even if we had had the money) did not wish to sell. It was not until 1934 that we were able to buy it and thus bring the whole property together again.

As for the villa of La Foce itself, it is believed to have served as a post-house on the road up which Papa Clemente passed, but this is unconfirmed, and the only thing certain is that in 1557 its lands, together with those of the Castelluccio, were handed over to the Sienese hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, as is testified by a shield on the villa and on the older farms, bearing this date, with the stone ladder surmounted by a cross which is the hospital’s emblem. The home itself was certainly not the beautiful villa I had hoped for, but merely a medium-sized country house of quite pleasant proportions, adorned by a loggia on the ground floor, with arches of red brick and a façade with windows framed in the same material. Indoors it had no especial character or charm. A steep stone staircase led straight into a dark central room, lit only by red and blue panes of Victorian glass inserted in the doors, and the smaller rooms leading out of it were papered in dingy, faded colours. The doors were of deal or yellow pitch-pine, the floors of unwaxed, half-broken bricks, and there was a general aroma of must, dust, and decay. There was no garden, since the well was only sufficient for drinking-water, and of course no bathroom. There was no electric light, central heating or telephone.

Beneath the house stood deep wine-cellars, with enormous vats of seasoned oak, some of them large enough to hold 2,200 gallons, and a wing connected the villa with the fattoria (the house inhabited by the agent or fattore and his assistants) while just beyond stood the building in which the olives were pressed and the oil made and stored, the granaries and laundry-shed and wood-shed and, a little further off, the carpenter’s shop, the blacksmith’s and the stables. The small, dark room which served for a school stood next to our kitchen; the ox-carts which carried the wheat, wine, and grapes from the various scattered farms were unloaded in the yard. Thus villa and fattoria formed, according to old Tuscan tradition, a single, closely-connected little world.

Old crumbling farmhouse, which was later taken down and rebuilt

When, however, we came to ask the advice of the farming experts of our acquaintance, they were not encouraging. To farm in the Sienese crete, they said, was an arduous and heart-breaking enterprise: we would need patience, energy—and capital. The soilerosion of centuries must first be arrested, and then we would at once have to turn to re-afforestation, road-building, and planting. The woods, as we had already seen, had been ruthlessly cut down, with no attempt to establish a regular rotation; the olive-trees were ill-pruned, the fields ill-ploughed or fallow, the cattle underfed. For thirty years practically nothing had been spent on any farm implements, fertilisers or repairs. In the half-ruined farms the roofs leaked, the stairs were worn away, many windows were boarded up or stuffed with rags, and the poverty-stricken families (often consisting of more than twenty souls) were huddled together in dark, airless little rooms. In one of these, a few months later, we found, in the same bed, an old man dying and a woman giving birth to a child. There was only the single school in the fattoria, and in many cases the distances were so great and the tracks so bad in winter, that only a few children could attend regularly. The only two roads—to Chianciano and Montepulciano—converged at our house (which stood on the watershed between the Val d’Orcia and Val di Chiana, and thence derived its name), and also ended there. The more remote farms could only be reached by rough cart-tracks and, if we wished to attempt intensive farming, their number should at least be doubled. We would need government subsidies, and also the collaboration of our neighbours, in a district where few landowners had either capital to invest, or any wish to adopt newfangled methods, and we would certainly also meet with opposition from the peasants themselves—illiterate, stubborn, suspicious, and rooted, like countrymen all the world over, in their own ways. We had no lack of warnings. Was it courage, ignorance or mere youth that swept them all away? Five days after our first glimpse of the Val d’Orcia, in November 1923, we had signed the deed of purchase of La Foce. In the following March we were married and, immediately after our honeymoon, we returned to the Val d’Orcia to start our new life.

* * *

How can I recapture the flavour of our first year? After a place has become one’s home, one’s freshness of vision becomes dimmed; the dust of daily life, of plans and complications and disappointments, slowly and inexorably clogs the wheels. But sometimes, even now, some sudden trick of light or unexpected sound will wipe out the intervening years and take me back to those first months of expectation and hope, when each day brought with it some new small achievement, and when we were awaiting, too, the birth of our first child.

For the first time, in that year, I learned what every country child knows: what it is to live among people whose life is not regulated by artificial dates, but by the procession of the seasons: the early spring ploughing before sowing the Indian corn and clover; the lambs in March and April and then the making of the delicious sheep’s-milk cheese, pecorino, which is a speciality of this region, partly because the pasture is rich in thyme, called timo sermillo or popolino. (‘Chi vuol buono il caciolino’, goes a popular saying, ‘mandi le pecore al sermolino.’)3 Then came the hay-making in May, and in June the harvest and the threshing; the vintage in October, the autumn ploughing and sowing; and finally, to conclude the farmer’s year, the gathering of the olives in December, and the making of the oil. The weather became something to be considered, not according to one’s own convenience but the farmer’s needs: each rain-cloud eagerly watched in April and May as it scudded across the sky and rarely fell, in the hope of a kindly wet day to swell the wheat and give a second crop of fodder for the cattle before the long summer’s drought. The nip of late frosts in spring became a menace as great as that of the hot, dry summer wind, or, worse, of the summer hail-storm which would lay low the wheat and destroy the grapes. And in the autumn, after the sowing, our prayers were for soft sweet rain. ‘Il gran freddo di gennaio’, said an old proverb, ‘il mal tempo di febbraio, il vento di marzo, le dolci acque di aprile, le guazze di maggio, il buon mietere di giugno, il buon battere di luglio, e le tre acque di agosto, con la buona stagione, valgon più che il tron di Salmone.’4

Making haystacks

Some of the farming methods which we saw in those first years became obsolete in Tuscany a long time ago. Then, the reaping was still done by hand and in the wheat-fields, from dawn to sunset, the long rows of reapers moved slowly forwards, chanting rhythmically to follow the rise and fall of the sickle, while behind the binders and gleaners followed, bending low in a gesture as old as Ruth’s. The wine and water, with which at intervals the men freshened their parched throats, were kept in leather gourds in a shady ditch, and several times in the day, besides, the women brought down baskets of bread and cheese and home-cured ham (these snacks were called spuntini) from the farms, and at midday steaming dishes of pastasciutta and meat. A few weeks ago, one of the oldest contadini still left at La Foce, a man of ninety—laudator temporis acti—was reminiscing with my husband about those days. “We worked from dawn to dusk, and sang as we worked. Now the machines do the work—but who feels like singing?”

Lunch in the fields

An even greater occasion than the reaping, was the threshing—the crowning feast-day of the farmer’s year. Threshing, until very recently, had been done by hand with wooden flails on the grass or brick threshing-floor beside each farm, but in our time there was already a threshing-machine worked by steam, and all the neighbouring farmers came to lend a hand and to help in the fine art of building the tall straw ricks, so tightly packed that, later on, slices could be cut out of them, as from a piece of cake. The air was heavy with fine gold dust, shimmering in the sunlight, the wine-flasks were passed from mouth to mouth, the children climbed on to the carts and stacks, and at noon, beside the threshing-floor, there was a banquet. First came soup and smokecured hams, then piled-up dishes of spaghetti, then two kinds of meat—one of which was generally a great gander, l’ocio, fattened for weeks beforehand—and then platters of sheep’s-cheese, made by the massaia herself, followed by the dolce, and an abundance of red wine. These were occasions I shall never forget—the handsome country girls bearing in the stacks of yellow pasta and flask upon flask of wine; the banter and the laughter; the hot sun beating down over the pale valley, now despoiled of its riches; the sense of fulfilment after the long year’s toil.

Then came the vintage. The custom of treading the grapes beneath the peasants’ bare feet—often pictured by northern writers, perhaps on the evidence of Etruscan frescoes, as a gay Bacchanalian scene—was already then a thing of the past. At that time, the bunches of grapes were brought by ox-cart to the fattoria in tall wooden tubs (called bigonci) in which they were vigorously squashed with stout wooden poles, and the mixture of stems, pulp and juice was left to ferment in open vats for a couple of weeks, before being put into barrels, to complete the fermentation during the winter. Now, the stems are separated from the grapes by a machine (called a diraspatrice), before the pressing, and then the juice flows directly into the vats, while for the pale white wine called ‘virgin’ the grapes are skinned before the fermentation (since it is the skin that gives the red wine its colour).

Last, in the farmer’s calendar, came the making of the oil. Unlike Greece and Spain, and some parts of southern Italy, where the olives are allowed to ripen until they fall to the ground (thus producing a much fatter and more acid oil) olives in Tuscany are stripped by hand from the boughs as soon as they reach the right degree of ripeness. Then, when the olives have been brought in by ox-cart to the fattoria and placed on long flat trays, so as not to press upon each other, the oil-making takes place with feverish speed, going on all day and night. When first we arrived, we found that the olives were being ground by a large circular millstone, about two metres in diameter, which was worked by a patient blindfold donkey, walking round and round. The pulp which was left over was then placed into rope baskets and put beneath heavy presses, worked by four strong men pushing at a wooden bar. This produced the first oil, of the finest quality. Then again the whole process was repeated, with a second and stronger press, and the oil was then stored in huge earthenware jars, large enough to contain Ali Baba’s thieves, while the pulp (for nothing is wasted on a Tuscan farm) was sold for the ten per cent of oil which it still contained. (During the war, we even used the kernels for fuel.) The men worked day and night, in shifts of eight hours, naked to the waist, glistening with sweat. At night, by the light of oil lamps, the scene—the men’s dark glistening torsos, their taut muscles, the big grey millstone, the toiling beast, the smell of sweat and oil—had a primeval, Michelangelesque grandeur. Now, in a white-tiled room, electric presses and separators do the same work in a tenth of the time, with far greater efficiency and less human labour, and clients bring their olives to us to be pressed from all over the district. One can hardly deplore the change; yet it is perhaps at least worth while to record it.

Maremmano oxen

One other sight, too, has already almost disappeared from the Val d’Orcia: the big grey maremmano oxen, first brought from the Hungarian steppes to northern Italy, according to tradition, by Attila, and thence to the plains of the Maremma. In our first years in the Val d’Orcia, it was they that were used for ploughing the heavy soil, but then the day came when we bought our first tractor. Never shall I forget escorting it down the valley with a little crowd of admirers, Antonio at their head, to watch it plough its first furrow in a field near the river. Deep, deep went the shining blade into the rich black earth, deeper than a plough had ever sunk before. The children ran behind, laughing and shouting; the pigs followed, thrusting their long black snouts deep into the moist earth. It was an exciting day—but it was, for the oxen (and though we could not then foresee it, for a whole way of life) the beginning of a great change. The first tractor was followed by others, then by a reaper-and-binder and a combine, and after the war, by two bulldozers, to bring under cultivation the parts of the property which still lay fallow. Some oxen continued to be used for ploughing the steeper hillsides, but gradually they were interbred with the finer white oxen from the Val di Chiana, the chianini, while after the war Antonio imported, for beef, the brown and white Simmenthal cattle. You may still sometimes meet a pair of chianini—‘gentle as evening moths’—drawing an ox-cart up a road or driving a plough on a steep hillside; but if you wish to see the grey oxen you must go to those remote hills of the Maremma (and very few are left) where tractors have not yet arrived, or to the few plains by the sea on which they still roam in their pristine freedom or stand on summer days in the deep shade of spreading cork-trees. When all those plains, too, have been handed over to the tractors—and this is swiftly happening—we shall have to go to zoos to find the kings of the Maremma.

I was fascinated in those early days by the survival of some pagan ceremonies and customs, often incorporated, as the Church has sometimes wisely done, into Christian rites. Among the most beautiful ceremonies of the year were the services, after a day of fasting, of the quattro tempora, which were held at the beginning of each of the four seasons, and the ‘rogation’ processions, in which the priest, carrying a crucifix and holy relics, followed by the congregation chanting litanies, walked through the fields, imploring a blessing upon the crops—the women, with black veils upon their heads, joining in the responses, the children straggling in and out and picking wild flowers among the wheat. Both these rites dated back to the days of ancient Rome5 and were still being practised during our first years at La Foce, but they have now come to an end as part of the Church ritual, though I am told that some of the older peasants still hold a brief procession in the fields, and leave a rough wooden cross standing among the ripening wheat.

Other customs, too, linking pagan and Christian piety, were still practised during our first years in the Val d’Orcia, and some of them still survive. On St. Anthony’s Day (St. Anthony the Abbot, patron of animals, not his namesake of Padua) the farmers would bring an armful of hay to church to be blessed by the saint, so that for the whole year their beasts might not lack fodder, and a few of the older men still do so today. On Monte Amiata, on the Eve of the Ascension, some women used to put milk on their window-sills which they would drink the next day, in the hope that swallows would come to bless it. This is perhaps somehow connected with the custom still observed on this side of the valley, of not milking any sheep on Ascension Day. And even now, however deeply imbued with Communism a family may be, each one of them will bring a bunch of olive-branches to be blessed by the priest on Palm Sunday.

On Monte Amiata, too, at Abbadia San Salvatore—where chestnuts form a large part of the poor man’s diet—a procession used to walk through the streets on St. Mark’s Day singing:

San Marcu, nostru avvucatu,

fa che nella castagna non c’entri il bacu.

Trippole e lappole, trippole e lappole, ora pro nobis.6

And only a few years ago a peasant of Rocca d’Orcia, after saying the rosary with his family, used to add an Our Father and a Hail Mary to a saint whom you will find in no calendar, called ‘San Fisco Fosco’, a terrible saint who lived in the middle of the sea and hated the poor, and therefore had to be propitiated.7

Some other practices, too, were quite frankly pagan in origin. There are still both witch-doctors and witches in the villages across the valley, and to one of these, a few years ago, two of our workmen took the bristles of some of our swine, which the vet had not been able to cure of swine-fever. The bristles were examined, a ‘little powder’ was strewn over them, and some herbs were given, to be burnt in their sties—after which the pigs did recover. The same was sometimes done for cattle. There was also a very efficient witch at Campiglia d’Orcia (now dead, but I believe she has a successor) to whom one could take a garment or a hair of anyone suffering from some affliction that the doctor had been unable to heal, and which was presumed to be caused by the evil eye, and she—with the help of some card-reading and some potions—would cure him. Sometimes, however, trouble would be caused by her prescriptions, since two of our tenants’ families embarked on a long feud, merely owing to the fact that she had told the daughter of one of them, that one of her neighbours ‘wished her ill’. For all such cures, it was pointed out to me, faith was necessary: those who came to mock went away unhealed.

Divining of the future, too, was done by some of our older peasants. One of them, an old man who is still alive, specialised in foretelling, in winter, the weather for each month of the following year, by placing in twelve onion skins, named for each month of the year, little heaps of salt. These he would then carefully examine: the skins in which the salt had remained, represented the months of drought; those in which it had dissolved, those of rain.

The most interesting of our local superstitious practices, however—and probably the oldest, since it presumably had its origins in a very primitive form of nature-worship—was one that I myself have seen, that of the poccie lattaie (literally, milk-bearing udders). This took place in a secluded cave on our land, halfway up a very steep ravine, surrounded by dry clay cliffs, but in which a hidden spring, oozing down the walls of the cave, had formed something like stalactites, which had the shape of cows’ and goats’ udders or women’s breasts, each gently dripping a few drops of water. Here the farmers would bring their sterile cows and here, too, came nursing mothers who were losing their milk—and always, after they had tasted the water, their wish was granted. They brought with them, as gifts, seven fruits of the earth: a handful of wheat, barley, corn, rye, vetch, dried peas, and sometimes a saucer of milk.

After nearly half a century, distance has perhaps lent enchantment to these memories, but I must honestly admit that I can also recollect moments of great discouragement. I remember one grey autumn afternoon on which, having ridden on a small grey donkey to visit some remote farms (for there was as yet no road to the valley) I waited alone in a hollow, while Antonio and the fattore walked on to another farm. The cone-shaped clay hillocks in the midst of which I sat were so steep, and worn so bare by centuries of erosion, that even now no attempt has been made to grow anything upon them. Seated beside a tuft of broom—the only plant that will grow there—on ground as hard as a bone after the summer’s drought, I was entirely surrounded by these desolate hillocks: no tree, no patch of green, no trace of human habitation, except against the sky a half-ruined watch-tower, standing where perhaps an Etruscan tower had stood before it, and then a Lombard, rebuilt in the Middle Ages to play its part in a series of petty wars, and now inhabited only by a half-witted shepherd who sat at its foot, beside his ragged flock. Below me lay the fields beside the river—land potentially fertile, but then fallow, which would be flooded when the rains came by the encroaching river-bed. Against the sky, behind the black rocks of Radicofani, dark clouds were gathering for a storm, and, as the wind reached the valley, it raised little whirlpools of dust. Suddenly an overwhelming wave of longing came over me for the gentle, trim Florentine landscape of my childhood or for green English fields and big trees—and most of all, for a pretty house and garden to come home to in the evening. I felt the landscape around me to be alien, inhuman—built on a scale fit for demi-gods and giants, but not for us. How could we ever succeed in taming it, I asked myself, and bring fertility to this desert? Would our whole life go by in a struggle against insuperable odds?

Perhaps my early discouragement was also partly caused by the fact that our own house was not yet habitable. During our absence on our honeymoon, under the direction of our architect and old friend Cecil Pinsent, some indispensable work had been done. A skylight had been opened in the ceiling of the central room, to let in some light; another room had been lined with bookshelves; all had been cleaned and distempered and some open fireplaces, with chimneypieces of travertine from the local quarries of Rapolano, had been added in the library and dining-room; there was even a bathroom, although, as yet, in the dry season, very little water. But that was all. The cases and crates containing all our furniture and belongings were piled up in the dining-room, unlabelled, so that when we began to look for such necessities as sheets or cooking-pans, we would come instead upon a dinner-set of fine Sèvres or a large group of bronze buffaloes, sculpted by Antonio’s father. We settled temporarily in a maid’s room upstairs, and set to work. In a few weeks the house was more or less habitable: the red bricks on the floor had been polished and waxed, the furniture was in place (I did not like all of it, but it was what we had), the windows were hung with chintz or linen curtains, the bookshelves were half filled. (This was the only year of my life in which I have had more than enough book-space.) But there was still, of course, no electric light or telephone, and my greatest wish, a garden, was plainly unattainable till we could get some more water, which was far more urgently needed for the farms. We both agreed that any plans for the house and garden must give way, for the present, to the needs of the land and the tenants. Anything that the crops brought in, as well as any gifts from relations, went straight into the land, and I remember that my present to Antonio, on the first anniversary of our wedding-day, was a pair of young oxen which were led under his window, adorned with gilded horns and with silver stars pasted on their flanks. It is sad to have to add that they were such a bad buy that they had to be sold again as soon as possible.

If there was much satisfaction in these efforts, there was also a certain sense of frustration, which was increased (as our advisers had foreseen) by the passive resistance of our contadini to any innovation. Our land was worked on the system which had been almost universal in Tuscany for nearly six centuries, the mezzadria,—a profit-sharing contract by which the landowner built the farmhouses, kept them in repair, and supplied the capital for the purchase of half the live-stock, seed, fertilisers, machinery, etc., while the tenant—called mezzadro, colono or contadino—contributed, with the members of his family, the labour. When the crops were harvested, owner and tenant (the date I am writing about is 1924) shared the profits in equal shares. In bad years, however, it was the landowner who bore the losses and lent the tenant what was needed to buy his share of seed, cattle, and fertilisers, the tenant paying back his loan when a better year came.

In larger estates, such as La Foce, which consisted of a number of farms, there was generally a central home-farm, the fattoria, usually adjoining the landowner’s house, where the estate manager, the fattore, lived with his family and assistants, and from which the whole place was run. It was the owner (or his fattore) who established the rotations, deciding what was to be grown on each farm, what new livestock or machinery should be purchased, and what repairs were necessary, and it was in the fattoria office that the complicated ledgers and account-books were kept, one for each farm, in which the contadino’s share of all profits and expenses were set down, and also the loans made to him, in bad years, by the central administration. It was in the fattoria cellars and granaries that the owner’s share of the produce was stored; it was there that the wine and oil were made, that the peasants came to unload their ox-carts, to go over their accounts, and to air their requests and grievances—and only those who have lived in Tuscany can know what a slow, repetitive business this can be. The fattoria was, in short, the hub of the life of the estate.

* * *

The origins of the mezzadria system are very easy to describe. After the breaking up of the great feudal estates at the end of the twelfth century, most of the impoverished landowners moved to the rising trading cities (Pisa and Siena, Lucca and Florence), exchanging their former castles and lands for a single grim tower in a city street, while their starving serfs, free or half-free, whose fields and houses had been destroyed by an endless succession of petty wars, also fled to the towns, to find work and bread. Many of them joined one of the guilds, and some eventually turned into skilled craftsmen or opened a small shop, or even became notaries or barbers. In a couple of generations they had saved up a small hoard and since, sooner or later, the Tuscan has always been drawn back to the soil, their first instinct was to put it back into the land again. This was not only true of great merchants like the Bardi or Rucellai, but also of small tradesmen and notaries, who, since they could neither afford to pay overseers nor to leave the town themselves, set a labourer—a colono—to work the land for them, drawing up a very simple profit-sharing contract, which gradually, during the second half of the trecento, came into universal use in Tuscany. The great feudal domain thus turned into a number of small profit-sharing farms or poderi, and the serf of feudal days became a mezzadro or colono. So matters remained for five and a half centuries.

The mezzadria contracts—patti colonici—that we found in use at La Foce were almost identical with those of the fourteenth century, even down to the specification of the small customary gifts from each tenant to the landowner of a couple of fowls or a brace of pigeons, or so many dozens of eggs, on certain feast-days.

Life on each farm, for obvious practical reasons, was still in the patriarchal tradition. The family had to be large, to provide enough hands to work the land, and its head, the capoccia, ruled over his sons and daughters, his sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, with a rule of iron. ‘Tristi quelle case’, said a proverb, ‘dove la gallina canta e il gallo tace’.8 The capoccia’s wife, however, the massaia, had plenty of power in her hands, too. Together she and her husband assigned the work to each member of the family, chose their sons’ brides and, as soon as the grandchildren were old enough to stagger into the woods as small shepherds and swineherds, sent them off to do their share. This manner of life, too, was to come to an end during our lifetime but it was in full swing when we first arrived.

In theory, the great point of the mezzadria was that, though landowner and mezzadro might and did differ on many points, their fundamental interests were alike and, indeed, the partnership could only work in so far as this was so. Certainly, in early days, the sacrifices were not all on one side. We read in the Ricordanze of Odorigo di Credi, a small Florentine landowner of the fourteenth century, that in order to buy the seed for the next year’s wheat he had to pawn his own gown. Moreover there has always been a strong Tuscan tradition with regard to a landlord’s responsibilities towards his tenants. ‘Aid and counsel them’, wrote a fourteenth-century Florentine, Giovanni Morelli, in his Ricordi, ‘whenever any insult or injury is done to them, and be not tardy or slothful in doing so.’9 Any good landowner of our own time, too, until a very few years ago, would have felt this to be his duty; and many of them, if obliged to send away one of their peasants because his family could no longer work the land, would have felt pangs of conscience similar to those felt in 1407 by Ser Lapo Mazzei, a notary and small landowner of Prato. ‘He is so solicitous’, he wrote about his farmer, ‘at the plough and such a fine pruner of vines and so ingenious that I know not how to make a change… and my cowardly or compassionate soul (I wonder which it is) does not know how to say to Moco: “Look for another farm.”’10 A conscientious landowner, too, always placed the welfare of his fields before his personal interests: a considerable proportion of each year’s profits went back into the land. If he did this, the tenant, too, profited, and when a hard year came, there was some margin to fall back upon.

Unfortunately, however, then as now, not all landlords were conscientious, and the bad aspect of the system, from the first, was that an idle or self-indulgent landowner, who did not repair and stock his farms, crippled his peasants, too; while, on the other hand, lazy or dishonest contadini could very swiftly ruin a farm. This was, I think, the origin of the mutual suspicion and dislike which, down the centuries, has all too often come to the surface in the relationship between the contadino and his padrone. Indeed, in some ways the relationship had been better—or at least simpler—in the old feudal days. The feudal lord had often been cruel and had made hard demands upon his serfs; but for all that, he had been much more like them than the new city-folk. To the shopkeeper or lawyer the peasant was merely a dumb brute, who often retorted with the weapons of the under-dog: sullen resentment and craft. Many domestic chronicles and books of precepts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries testify to this mutual distrust, in accents so similar to those which I have heard upon the lips of some of their descendants today, as to be positively startling. Paolo da Certaldo, for instance, a Florentine merchant, warned his fellow townsmen never to visit their lands on feast-days, when their peasants were gathered together on the threshing-floor, ‘for they all drink and are heated with wine and have their own arms, and there is no reasoning with them. Each one thinks himself a king and wants to speak, for they spend all the week with no-one to talk to but their beasts. Go rather to their fields when they are at work—and thanks to the plough, hoe or spade, you will find them humble and meek.’11

Another prudent landowner, Giovanni Morelli, gave very similar advice: ‘Go round the farm field by field with your peasant, reprove him for work ill-done, estimate the harvest of wheat, wine, barley, oil and fruit, and compare everything with last year’s crops … Trust him not, keep your eye always upon him, and examine the crops everywhere—in the fields, on the threshing-floor and on the scales. Yield not to him in anything, for he will only think that you were bound to do so … And above all, trust none of them.’12

For the other side of the picture we naturally have less evidence, so long as only the rich were literate, but already by the fifteenth century, some of the colono’s resentment had come to the surface in the following rhyme:

Noi ci stiamo tutto l’anno a lavorare

E lor ci stanno al fresco a meriggiare;

Perchè s’ha da dar loro mezzo ricolto,

Se n’abbiam la fatica tutta noi?13

And here are two other sayings, still in popular use, which reflect the feelings of the mezzadro only too plainly:

Ombra di noce e ombra di padrone

sono due ombre buggerone!14

and

Il bene dei padroni è come il vino del fiasco,

che la sera è buono e la mattina è guasto.15

All this hardly suggests an agreeable or stable human relationship, and it has often seemed to me extraordinary that it should have lasted without a break for nearly six centuries. One explanation is apparent if one looks at the Tuscan landscape: the system has produced a highly prosperous agriculture. Those terraced hills with their vineyards and olive-groves, those rich wheat-fields and orchards and vegetable-plots, speak for themselves: they show land as intensively cultivated and fertile as any in the world. But this prosperity is the result of centuries of unremitting hard work. Wherever the Tuscan countryman has been allotted a steep, stony patch of hillside, he has laboriously cleared away the tangled roots of ilex or scrub-oak, the bushes of juniper or myrtle, and dug up the heavy soil, the unwieldy stones and boulders; with the stones he has built, on even the steepest hillsides, little walls to support the terraces on which he could plant his olives and his vines. Selva del mi’ nonno, ulivi del mi’ babbo e vigna mia,16 so the saying runs. In three generations a bare hillside can become a garden.

In addition to this obvious explanation, I think that the duration of the mezzadria has a deeper psychological one. Its strength has lain in an unquestioning conviction on both sides (even with a good deal of grumbling) that the system was, on the whole, fair and equitable; it was this conviction that, for six centuries, made it work. A distinguished Tuscan economist of our own time—Jacopo Mazzei, who himself belonged to a family with a long tradition of responsible land-ownership—justly observed some years ago that the point was not the actual fairness or otherwise of the system itself, but ‘the conviction of its fairness’, which had given it ‘a stability and serenity unequalled in history’.17 On the day that this conviction began to be shaken, he said, the whole system would break down.

* * *

No such thoughts, however, crossed our mind when first we arrived at La Foce. We set to work, untroubled, within the familiar framework. Everything cried out to be done and, had it been possible, everything at once. Re-reading a paper which my husband read to a Florentine agricultural association, I Georgofili, I have found a summary of the work which, on his first arrival, he considered essential and immediate. Its main points were:

(1) To set up, on each farm, an eight-year rotation.18

(2) To start ditching, draining, and the building of dykes and dams on the steep clay hills, and of banks in the river-bed in the valley, so as to be able to cultivate land at present either flooded or water-logged.

(3) To increase further the arable land by arresting erosion on the hillsides, and by extirpating rocks and boulders in the fallow land.

(4) To rebuild and modernise the existing farms, as well as rebuilding the granaries, cellars, store-rooms and machine-sheds of the fattoria, and to renew the whole machinery for making oil.

(5) To increase the acreage of olive-groves and vineyards.

(6) To build new roads.

(7) To build new farms.

(8) To increase the number, and improve the quality of the cattle, sheep, and pigs and, for this purpose, to increase the acreage of alfalfa and clover.

(9) To suspend all cutting down of trees for at least eight years, and then to establish a regular rotation of twelve years’ growth.

(10) To increase facilities for education and medical care.

The programme was a sound one, but its execution was slowed down not only by lack of experience, but of capital. Every penny we had, had been spent on the purchase of the estate, so that all that was left to work with was the allowance of $5,000 a year given me by Grandmamma. On this we started.

I still felt myself, however, very much a stranger in this new world and was not very good at fitting into it. The solid, tradition-bound group of people living in the fattoria—the fattore and his wife and children, his three assistants and the fattoressa (who was never, according to custom, the fattore’s wife, but a woman who cooked and did the baking and the housekeeping and looked after the barn-yard) so deeply rooted in the customs laid down centuries ago, so certain that nothing could or should be changed—made me feel as shy and foreign as the peasant-women who, on certain feast-days, came from their farms on foot or by ox-cart, to place in my hands a couple of squawking fowls, a brace of pigeons or a dozen eggs—and often, too, a flow of grievances, tales of all the family illnesses, or requests for advice and help. But what advice could I give them, when I knew so little myself? Nothing that I had learned at Villa Medici or I Tatti was of any use to me now; I doubt whether any young married woman has started upon her new life more ill-equipped for the particular job she had to do. I did not even know, though Antonio told me that it was my business to concern myself with the fattoria linen-cupboard and the barn-yard, that the sheets, to be durable, should be made of a mixture of cotton and hemp, however scratchy, and that a part of our wool should be laid aside each year, after washing and bleaching, to make new mattresses; I could not distinguish a Leghorn hen from a Rhode Island Red. Nor did I succeed, for a long time, in being as easily cordial as Antonio with everyone we met, nor realise the fine hierarchical distinctions between the fattore and his assistants, the keepers and the foreman, the contadini and the day-labourers. I learned day by day, but never fast enough, always hampered by self-consciousness and shyness, seeming most aloof when I most wished to be friendly. I would walk or ride with Antonio from farm to farm and, while he was busy in the fields or stables, would go into the house and try to make friends with the women and children. It was uphill work. The women were polite—and wary. They offered me fresh raw eggs to drink, or a little glass of sweet home-made liqueur; they showed me the sheep-cheese that they had made, their furniture and their children. But I did not know the right questions to ask; I felt it an impertinence to comment on the way they kept their house, as Antonio said was expected of me; I could not tell one cheese from another; I had no idea whether the baby had measles or chicken-pox, and on the only occasion on which I attempted to give an injection to an old woman with asthma, I broke the syringe. I did better with the children and, when the new schools were opened, I spent a lot of time there—playing with the children during recess, looking at their copy-books, providing them with a small library, admiring their little vegetable- or wheat-plots and giving prizes at the end of the school year—and through the children I gradually got to know the women a little better. It was always a very one-sided relationship though, and hampered by the whole framework of the fattoria between us. If a woman came to ask for her sink to be repaired or for her child to be taken to hospital it had to be referred to the fattore, and sometimes I found that incautious promises I had made had not been carried out. I think, now, that one of the fundamental evils of the mezzadria system was the presence and influence of these middlemen—tougher with the contadini than any landowner, because conscious of being only one step above them, and often shielding the padrone from what they thought it was inconvenient or undesirable for him to know. In our particular case, Antonio was fortunate, particularly in later years, in being surrounded by a group of loyal and devoted collaborators, who have become his close friends, but I still think that the system was a bad one, though perhaps an inevitable consequence of the whole structure of the mezzadria. Always, too, I was distressed by a sense of injustice, by the worn, tired faces of women only a little older than myself, and by the contrast—though certainly at that time we did not live in great luxury—between their life and my own. It is now one of my greatest regrets that inexperience, shyness, and my own other interests so often led me to take the path of least resistance and to leave things as they were.

Antonio, however—simpler, warmer and tougher, and living in a world which he took for granted—went steadily ahead, and it was our good fortune that this was just the period in which the new laws passed by the Fascist government to reclaim the undeveloped regions of Italy were coming into action. The programme—that of the bonifica agraria—included the enforced development, which sometimes led to confiscation, of many large estates in the South, i latifondi, neglected by absentee landlords (who used sometimes to forbid their wretched labourers even to put up any dwelling-place more permanent than a reed hut, for fear that they might acquire ‘squatter’s rights’); the financing of public works on a large scale to stop land erosion; the encouragement of drainage and irrigation; the building of new roads and schools and, subsequently, large State subsidies or loans at low rates of interest to enable active landowners to intensify production and improve the standard of life of their tenants. This ‘battle of the wheat’—which was also accompanied by a good deal of rhetoric, since it formed part of the policy of ‘autarchy’ which was Mussolini’s retort to sanctions—began with the draining of the Pontine Marshes, the cultivation of the plains of the Tuscan Maremma (in which small plots were assigned to war veterans, i combattenti, in the manner of ancient Rome) and a campaign against malaria in Sardinia.19

In some regions, such as ours, where confiscation was unnecessary, landowners’ associations—consorzi di bonifica—were formed, assisted by State subsidies; and it was after Antonio had succeeded in forming (in spite of the opposition of some of his neighbours) one of these consorzi in the Val d’Orcia that we came to work with some men who represented what was best in the Fascist regime: the main initiator of the leggi di bonifica, Professor Arrigo Serpieri (a man of outstanding ability and charm) as well as some able technical experts, who were inspired by an uncritical acceptance of the Fascist slogans, but also by a deep enthusiasm for their work. In the Val d’Orcia, the consorzio was founded in 1930 and Antonio remained its president and moving spirit for over thirty years. An office was opened at Montepulciano, an efficient engineer was engaged, plans were drawn up for government approval, which included work in areas all over the valley from S. Quirico to Radicofani. The state contributions varied from 20% to 100%, according to their nature, while the landowners contributed to the rest in proportion to their acreage and goodwill.20

One of the most urgent tasks was to arrest the erosion on the steep clay hills, and for this purpose Antonio built some twenty-five dams of stone or earth in creeks or gullies as reinforcements against the danger of landslides. Simultaneously, by the building of groynes in the river-bed (consisting of broad walls of masonry jutting out into the stream) the course of the Orcia was controlled, to prevent it from flooding the surrounding fields; and water from the hills above was channelled towards the fallow valley-land and allowed to lie there for four or five years, so that a rich stratum of top-soil gradually raised its level, bringing under cultivation some 150 more acres. Artesian wells were also sunk, under the guidance of water-diviners whose forked willow-twigs often enabled them to forecast not only where water was to be found but at what depth and in what quantity. (This is a much more common gift than is generally believed, and I was delighted to find that I, too, could feel the willow-twig quivering in my hands, as we passed over a water-course.)

An equally urgent problem was that of re-afforestation. Here the government’s Department of Forestry gave us both technical advice and help; two large nurseries of young plants were started, and some 545 acres of hillsides or of ravines were planted with seedlings or young trees (mostly oak, pine and cypress). Now most of these areas are covered by green woods.

Then came the roads. When we first arrived, the only good road ended at our house, and many of the more remote farms could only be reached by rough tracks, almost impassable in bad weather. (I vividly remember, in our first year, the local doctor—an old man—attempting to reach a child stricken with diphtheria in the ox-cart which had been sent to fetch him, sitting bolt upright in his dark town suit on a kitchen chair, while the oxen ploughed on in the deep mud and the distracted father urged them on.) First the old roads were improved or prolonged, and then—on the additional land obtained by the purchase of the Castelluccio—new ones had to be built to link up the isolated farms.

Drilling for water

It is difficult to convey the excitement of this whole enterprise, but perhaps the photographs reproduced here may give some idea of it. Here soil was being turned up that had lain fallow for centuries and, before putting hand to the plough, it was necessary to extirpate and remove enormous boulders, as well as the roots of old trees, and to hold the land up with steep gullies by the building of some more small dykes and dams. This was the work of many months, but when we saw a stretch of new road lying before us, and the tractor could at last begin to turn over the great clods of untilled, shining dark earth, we felt some of the deep satisfaction and fulfilment that must have been felt, far more intensely, by pioneers in new countries, when they saw a desert beginning to turn into a land of promise. By 1940, that is, just before the war, some fifteen miles of new roads had been built on our land, as well as the twenty-five miles of main roads built in the same district by the consorzio di bonifica—each shaded by poplars in the valley or by pines or cypresses higher up—and every farmer was able to bring his produce to market, each child to go to school.

Clearing the land of stones

Next, the farm-houses. I have already described their state on our arrival. Some had to be torn down and entirely rebuilt, others to be repaired, enlarged, provided with modern stables, pig-styes, silos and dung-heaps built on a concrete foundation; wells were sunk or roof-cisterns built for drinking water and ponds made for watering sheep and cattle. Soon, too, modern cooking-stoves stood beside the old hearths with their enormous chimneys, beneath which il nonno used to sit to warm his bones on a winter evening, sometimes beside a broody hen in a basket; a bathroom was installed as well as a modern lavatory and, gradually, each farm was also provided with electric light, and then acquired a radio or television set. The first and most important change, however, was in the actual acreage of the land of each farm, which (after we had increased their number from 25 to 57), came to be of between 75 and 100 acres, instead of over 200, thus rendering intensive cultivation possible. A large part of the newly-cultivated land was sown with wheat, maize and various types of clover, some 6,200 young olive-trees were planted, the vineyards were increased to cover about 200 acres, and the quality of the wine, both white and red, was greatly improved.

New farmhouse

The need for schools was also very urgent since, when we first arrived, eighty per cent of the population could neither read nor write. We had at once organised some evening-classes for adults and moved the school-children into a better room, but now the consorzio built three new schools, one at La Foce and two in the valley. These were run at first along the progressive lines of the country schools around Rome in the agro romano, each school having its own experimental field and garden, so that the children’s lessons bore a close relation to their future life on the land. Later on, however, they were taken over by the State, and are now like any other school. The children’s pride in their new schoolrooms was delightful to witness. I remember that, when the one at La Foce was opened (its walls painted in gay colours and adorned with pictures and maps) we found the pupils, of their own accord, taking off their muddy boots before coming in, so as not to sully the shining floors. (We then provided them with warm slippers to wear indoors.) We also built three small nursery-schools with playgrounds, two in villages across the valley, where many of the women went out to work all day, and one at La Foce, which later turned into the Home for children bombed out of their homes in Genoa and Turin, the Casa dei Bambini described in War in Val d’Orcia21.

The schools were followed by a men’s club with a bowling-green and a general shop beside it and, in 1933, in memory of our son Gianni—who had died the year before—we built what we had come to feel was one of the most urgent needs of the region: a small dispensary or ambulatorio, with an operating-room, a steriliser, four beds for emergency cases, a small stock of infant foods and indispensable medicines, and a flat upstairs for a resident district nurse. The panel doctor from Chianciano (five miles away) came twice a week, and soon his waiting-room was crowded. The nurse also supervised the school-children’s health, but perhaps the most useful of her tasks was her visits to the farms—often forestalling, by timely advice, the outbreak of an epidemic—giving injections, sometimes (but not often) opening windows, persuading young mothers to move their babies from the centre of their double beds into small wicker cribs or baskets, and often, when the midwife or doctor arrived too late, helping a difficult delivery or bringing what relief she could to a deathbed. The ambulatorio beds, too, were often filled—by accident cases, expectant mothers, or convalescent children—and, in addition, the nurse held elementary courses in hygiene for girls and young mothers. Later on, during the war (but this, of course, we did not then foresee) the ambulatorio also fulfilled another purpose: a wounded partisan had a bullet extracted there, another with tuberculosis was nursed during the last weeks of his life and, when an epidemic of virus pneumonia broke out among the partisans hidden in the hill-farms, Signorina Guidetti went secretly at night to nurse them.

The new school at La Foce, with the Casa dei Bambini in the background

By the time that all these buildings were completed, in 1934, we had been at La Foce for ten years: it had become our home. During those years our financial position had been suddenly changed by the death of a distant American cousin, whom I had never seen and of whom I had only heard as an eccentric elderly miser, who, having gone to live abroad ‘to disoblige his family’, had spent his last years in a yacht off the coast of the Isle of Wight, amusing himself (so the legend said) by throwing red-hot coppers into the boat of such solicitous relations as attempted to visit him. He did, however, go to London twice a year to visit his broker—and to some purpose, since the sum which was eventually divided among his surviving cousins was extremely substantial, and enabled us to carry out all the work I have described above much more speedily and thoroughly than would otherwise have been possible.

I shall, however, always be glad that this money did not come to us at once, and that we were obliged, in the first years of our marriage, to count every penny and make some personal sacrifice. Not only did this save us from many mistakes, but it gave a certain basic reality to our efforts. We felt this even at the time—indeed, on the evening on which the news of our change of fortune reached us, Antonio and I were walking up and down the pergola at the end of the day’s work, discussing whether or not his birthday present to me should be a handsome but expensive umbrella which we had seen in a Florentine shop. I pointed out that it would be a great extravagance, since I would certainly lose it; he retorted that I might learn to be more careful—the discussion being only brought to an end by the cable’s arrival. When we had read it and had assimilated its contents, it was with real regret in his voice that Antonio said: ‘I don’t suppose we shall ever argue about buying an umbrella again!’

* * *

Meanwhile—for I have now reached the years between 1935 and 1940—the clouds were gathering all over Europe, and even in our secluded life at La Foce it became impossible not to observe, read, listen and speculate. I read Mein Kampf; I read (as well as hearing) Mussolini’s speeches; I read Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks22 (at that time a very enlightening book to me) and, later on, Fromm’s Escape from Freedom.23 I began at last to read the daily papers and to join the wide captive audience, all the world over, listening to confused, discordant voices coming out of a little box. Not enough has been said, I think, in accounts of our times (since one is always apt to disregard what has come to be taken for granted) about the psychological changes brought about in uninformed civilians by the mere existence of the radio. Never before in history had so many ears been battered by so many voices. Gradually, as I sat before our radio in the library at La Foce, trying to reconcile their messages and sift the small kernel of truth, these voices became for me the true echo of our times. Previously, non-combatants had been, for the most part, only aware of what the Press of their own country told them, or what they saw with their own eyes. Now, we were all constantly exposed to these confusing, overwhelming waves, from friends and enemies alike. Far more than the whistle and crash of falling shells later on, or the dull roar of bomber formations overhead, this cacophony represents my personal nightmare of the years before and during the war. Hitler’s voice with its hysterical screams and the roars of applause that greeted them; Dollfuss’s voice, shortly before his assassination, followed by the promise of his personal friend Mussolini, to support the independence of Austria24 and then, two years later, at the time of the Anschluss, that same friend’s exclamation: “What obligations have we towards Austria? None!”25 Anthony Eden’s voice, urging the League of Nations, if Italy invaded Abyssinia, to a policy of sanctions, and Mussolini’s retort, “L’Italia farà da se!”26 A voice from France, announcing the murder of the Rosselli brothers. Churchill’s voice, declaring that “it is not only Czechoslovakia which is menaced, but also the freedom of the democracy of all nations”—and, only a few weeks later, Neville Chamberlain proclaiming “Peace with honour … peace in our time.”27 Starace’s voice, announcing the decision of the Fascist Grand Council to leave the League of Nations. The voices of soldiers and children, singing the songs of the time:

Dell’Italia nei confini

Son rinati gli Italiani

Li ha rifatti Mussolini

Per la guerra di domani

and

Duce, Duce, chi non saprà morir?28

It is difficult to convey the cumulative impact of these voices, as we sat alone in the library of our isolated country house day after day, and the increasing sense that they brought of inevitable, imminent catastrophe, of the Juggernaut approach of war.

During those years I was still paying frequent visits to England, and there I naturally met, both some ardent supporters of the pacifist movement, in particular its leader, Max Plowman, a man of such transparent goodness and good faith as almost—but not entirely—to convert me to his views, and the writers and journalists who had volunteered to fight in Spain against Franco, and had returned with varying degrees of disillusionment. (I still think George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia the best account of that confused and disturbing time.) I also, through Lilian Bowes Lyon and some Quaker friends, was able to share the efforts of some people who, already then, were devoting their energies to enabling a few Jewish scholars, old people and children, to make their escape from Germany before it was too late. In particular, there was a little school in Kent—largely run by means of Quaker contributions—in which Jewish refugee children from Germany (and soon also from Austria and Czechoslovakia) were brought up in a new-found security and serenity, as citizens of the United Europe of the future.29 Some of them, I remember, gave a highly spirited performance of The Magic Flute in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral.

A good many of these children—especially those living as guests in well-meaning but wholly alien, ultra-British families—were almost ill with homesickness and, among the older ones, with anxiety for their parents and their brothers and sisters who had not come with them. I have never been able to forget the description given to me by one of the Quaker workers in Germany of the agony of mind of the parents obliged to make a choice, when they were told (as was sometimes necessary) that only one child from each family could go. Should it be the most brilliant or the most vulnerable? the one most fitted, or least likely, to survive? Which, if it were one’s own child, would one choose?

The passage from the world of friends concerned with such activities and ideas, and the atmosphere still prevailing in Italy became, whenever I came home, increasingly confusing and distressing. I have a disproportionately vivid memory of a telephone conversation with a woman whom I scarcely knew. She and I had been asked to send a nominal invitation to an old Czechoslovak professor and his wife, which would enable them to get a transit visa through Italy and thus escape from Prague and rejoin their sons in England. “I suppose you’ve done nothing about this preposterous request?” she asked. “Did you have a telegram, too?” I said I had. “I can’t think what came over the woman! She’s my husband’s cousin, not mine; I don’t know her and never want to. Why, she might have got us into trouble!” I said that I thought that was hardly likely, and that it really was a hard case: the professor and his wife were old and ill, longing to join their sons, their only chance, but that, in any case, she need take no further trouble over it. “Trouble! I should think not, indeed! I sent back a pretty firm wire. I have no sympathy with such people. Why didn’t they get out months ago, when their sons ran away? And I don’t believe they’re really Catholics: the name doesn’t sound like it!” An unpleasant undertone in her voice made me cautious. “Well, anyway, I won’t lift a finger to help such people. Those are the cases that get taken up by interfering, hysterical Englishwomen, like that woman who says she’s a friend of yours.” I said that Lilian Bowes Lyon was one of my greatest friends, and rang off. But a few minutes later the telephone rang again; this time the woman’s voice was sharp with curiosity. “You didn’t say what you are doing about it! Now remember, this isn’t a neutral country. You’ve no right to risk getting your husband into trouble. Why, it’s the sort of thing one would hardly do for a member of one’s own family!” Swallowing my anger—which was the sharper for being mixed with a mean little twinge of uneasiness—I hedged, and then, having rung off, sat on the edge of my bed, trembling. The ugly trivial conversation seemed to have a disproportionate importance: it seemed to symbolise all the cowardly, self-protective, arrogant cruelty of the world—our world.

In August, 1939, I drove up with Antonio to Switzerland, for what proved to be our last trip abroad for six years, in order to attend the concerts conducted by Bruno Walter and Toscanini in Lucerne. The day of our arrival was over-shadowed by a typical tragedy of our times. Bruno Walter’s daughter, who had married a young Bavarian Nazi some years before, had moved to Switzerland after the intensification of the Jewish persecution, and was visited there occasionally by her husband. Gradually they had drifted apart, but on the preceding day, he had flown down to Zürich to meet her, and to make a last effort to persuade her to return to Germany with him. When she refused (her sister was in a concentration camp, and many others of her relations and friends were dead or imprisoned) he shot her with his revolver, and then himself.

On that evening the concert was conducted, in Bruno Walter’s stead, by Toscanini, and the programme concluded with Götterdämmerung. The audience filed out in a grim, sad silence, and when we got back to the hotel the late evening news announced the Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and Russia. We all realised its implications.

The next morning, the hotel emptied swiftly—the guests leaving hurriedly for their respective countries. I put through a last telephone call to England, then climbed into the car and drove off with Antonio towards the Italian frontier. My diary30 brings back very vividly my feelings on that day as, after driving up the green, trim little Swiss valleys and lunching on truite au bleu at Martigny, we climbed up the Simplon pass and crossed the frontier. There, sitting beside the customs office, we watched an Italian car which had driven up a few minutes before, being turned back and sent home again.

“No more Italians jaunting abroad now!” said the carabiniere with a friendly grin, as he handed back our passports. “Come in, and stay in!”

The pole of the barrier swung slowly back behind us. I realised that I had made my choice.

But even after this, it was curiously difficult to persuade the Italian man-in-the-street that war, real war, was coming. “You’ll see,” said a taxi-driver, “the Duce will stop at the last moment. He has never made a mistake yet.” We spent a few days in Florence, hanging about waiting for news, and hearing nothing but wild rumours—that an Italian division had been sent from Bologna to Nüremberg—why Nüremberg? That the Duce had had a stroke—that the mysterious passenger that landed in England was Mussolini himself, no, Beck, no, Grandi. There was not even the faintest pretence of martial ardour. ‘It is,’ as a young officer of our acquaintance wrote to his mother, ‘a nonchalant and cold vigil.’

When we got home, we found that two of the fattoria employees had been called up, and several of the farmers’ sons. They were all very upset, but still did not realise that it was anything worse than Abyssinia or Spain. “We’ve had enough of this,” was the refrain, “ora basta. We only ask to be left alone.” We walked from farm to farm on a still, lovely summer’s evening; the grapes ripening, the oxen ploughing. Still blindly they believed: ‘It won’t come to a real war: the Duce will get us out of it somehow.’

Two days later we went round the farms again. Everywhere the older people came hurrying out to meet us, everywhere the same question: “What do you say, sor padrone? Will there be war?” From each family, by now, at least one man had been called up: “My Cecco went yesterday; Assunta’s Beppe had his card this morning. Madonnina bona, what’s going to happen? Who’s going to work the farm?”

On September 3, Antonio and I drove up to visit some friends in a village in the Apennines, and in the villages on the way we saw little groups of recruits and women in tears. Then, as we reached our friends’ house, one of the sons came down to meet us: “Chamberlain’s speech is just over. War is declared.” An hour later the speech was repeated, and all the evening we sat beside the radio, listening to one country after another: Europe moving towards war. I found myself remembering, as many people of my generation must have remembered in England, Grey’s famous phrase in 1914, ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe.’ When would they be lit again?

After the invasion of Poland—overcome by an almost unbearable sense of frustration at my own inaction and uselessness—I went to Rome to see whether there was any organisation whatever in which I could do some form of war work. But I found all doors securely closed. ‘The country’s delicate position—the Vatican’s delicate position …’ I did meet the head of the Polish Institute in Rome, who had been in his youth one of Pilsudski’s legionaries, a tragic and embittered figure, but there was nothing I could do in Italy to help his compatriots, and when an American Relief Mission—headed by Senator Walcott, who had worked with President Hoover on a similar mission some twenty years before—came to the American Embassy in Rome, on their way to Warsaw, I implored the Ambassador31 to ask them to take me with them in any capacity whatsoever. In the same week I discovered that, after seven years of childlessness, I was pregnant. Reluctantly, and feeling more and more useless and cut off, I went back to La Foce.

During the next months—until on June 10, 1940, German pressure caused Italy, too, to enter the war—I found much comfort in seeing, at Montepulciano, the small group of anti-Fascists who gathered together in the house of our friend and neighbour, Margherita Bracci. Her husband was an old friend and brother-officer of my husband’s, and Margherita herself—the daughter of the historian and writer, Francesco Papafava—belonged to an old Paduan family which had always preserved a fine tradition of Liberal thought and feeling. Many of their friends, in the early years of Fascism, had been imprisoned or sent into exile, while most of those who were still in Italy had retired from public life or (often at great personal sacrifice) had resigned from their jobs, and were living in a closed, semi-conspiratorial circle, seeing only the small group of people who shared their opinions and hopes, often embittered and factious, but firmly clinging to their principles and determined to come to no compromise with any aspect of the regime they hated and despised, and which, they were convinced, would lead their country to destruction.

It was with these friends, and with a few others like them in Rome, that I could speak most freely; and yet I remember sometimes coming away from an evening in their company, during which the conversation had the heightened intensity peculiar to minorities under authoritarian governments, with a sense of discouragement. ‘One feels,’ I wrote after one of these occasions, ‘yes, these are enlightened, high-principled, courageous people, but they are not, as yet, of any importance. It is not through them that any change will come.’

I think now that I was mistaken. If I felt a certain sense of unreality in these conversations, it was of course not because this handful of people was not yet able to change the course of events: it was rather because many of them, in their allegiance to an already old-fashioned form of Liberalism, did not see the Fascism they rejected as the glorification of the bourgeoisie which it had already become, but rather naïvely took it at its own face value as a true revolutionary movement, and were also still cut off from the other new political trends in the country which, after the Liberation, swiftly took on a definite shape. All the same, the conversations that then seemed to me unrealistic or sterile were a token that all over Italy there were still men and women whom Fascism had not numbed into conformity. It was they who kept alive the clandestine anti-Fascist press, who kept in touch with foreign books and (when possible) foreign friends, and who fostered the increasing pressure of public opinion which paved the way for the fall of Fascism. Some of them, later on, played an active part in the Resistance movement, others exerted an influence in Court circles at the time of the first negotiations with the Allies, and yet others—when Mussolini had formed the ‘Republic of Salò’ in the north—made their way to the south and joined the Allied forces or formed part of the temporary government in the south or the Committees of Liberation in their respective cities. But I now think that their most important action was in those early, unrewarding years, when many of them lay in prison in Lipari or were confined to remote mountain villages, but still kept alive an incorruptible, unswerving vision of freedom.

Meanwhile, day by day, it was becoming clearer that Italy’s entry into the conflict could not be delayed much longer. After the Brenner meeting between Hitler and Mussolini, the invasion of Norway and that of Belgium and Holland, Italy’s solidarity with the Axis was no longer a matter of choice. I succeeded, with some difficulty, in obtaining visas for Switzerland for my mother and step-father, and was entrusted with the valuables and belongings of some other English people who were leaving or who feared to be sent to concentration camps. On June 7, 1940, the first outer sign of war reached the Val d’Orcia: a formation of 35 Allied bombers flew over us, heading south. On the 10th, we woke to the news that the Germans were within 40 miles of Paris. At midday an order came from the Fascio of Chianciano to summon all our farmers at five that evening to listen to a speech by the Duce. We installed our radio in the loggia in front of the house, which gives on to the garden, and they all slowly filed in. By five o’clock we were all there: Antonio and myself and Schwester Marie Blaser, the children’s Swiss nurse, Flavia and Gogo della Gherardesca, who were staying with us, the fattore and all his employees, the school-teachers, the household, and about eighty contadini and workmen. “Attenzione!” brayed the loud-speaker, “Attenzione!” I looked at the listening faces, grave, expectant, anxious. “At six o’clock the Duce will speak to the assembled Italian people from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia.” Then the Marcia Reale, and the Fascist song, Giovinezza. Nearly an hour more to wait. The tense faces relaxed, the crowd broke up into little groups. The older men stood under the ilex tree, talking in low voices; some settled down on the loggia steps: some had brought a loaf of bread or a flask of wine and passed it round; one group sat in a circle on the gravel, playing cards. Antonio and the keepers talked about the young partridges and the twin calves born that morning. I joined the school-teachers, to discuss how many evacuated children we could put up, if necessary, in the schools. I went indoors again: a bowl of delphiniums and lupins took me back for a moment to an English garden. A whiff of jasmine blew in through the window. It was all curiously unreal. Then again: “Attenzione, attenzione!” The men got to their feet, coming closer. We heard the shouts of the crowd in Piazza Venezia, the cheering and the bands and then (presumably because the scene was also being relayed to a German station) a harsh, guttural voice speaking German. At the foreign, unpopular sound the men’s faces became blank and faintly hostile. Antonio made a joke (I couldn’t hear what) and they all laughed. Then deafening cheers from the radio, presumably as Mussolini appeared on the balcony—and then his unmistakable voice: “Combattenti di terra, di mare, dell’aria, Blackshirts of the Revolution and of the Legions, men and women of Italy, of the Empire and of Albania, listen. An hour marked by destiny is crossing our country’s sky: the hour of an irrevocable decision. The Italian declaration of war has already been handed to the ambassadors of Great Britain and France … People of Italy, hasten to arms and show your tenacity, your courage and your valour.”

I glanced again at the listening faces. They wore the closed, blank look that is the last defence of those who cannot argue or oppose. Impossible to tell how much they had taken in or what they felt—except that it was not enthusiasm. The speech went on, touching the same old themes: Italy’s imprisonment in the Mediterranean, sanctions, the war of the poor against the rich, of the young against the decadent. Mussolini affirmed, too, that Italy had done “all that was possible to avert the storm”. But somehow none of it carried. The speaker’s voice was loud, strained; the applause, even from Piazza Venezia, sounded forced, very different from that which had greeted recent speeches about Abyssinia or even at the time of Munich. Then at last it was over; there was a silence. Antonio said, “Saluto al Re! Viva l’Italia!” The men reacted automatically, limply. We heard their feet crunching on the gravel as they left, in silence, and we went back into the house and stood looking at each other. “Well, it’s come,” said Antonio. “I’m going out to look at the wheat.” But who will be there for the harvest?

It was really only then, I think, that I fully faced the problem of divided loyalties which confronts every woman whose marriage has placed her in a country at war with her own. (In my case, within two months, the countries of both my parents.) As to behaviour, of course, the matter is very simple: she should obey the laws of her husband’s country and keep quiet. But in feelings and principles? In a land which was itself swayed by so many different currents of opinion, was it indeed necessary to identify oneself with the majority? I decided that, for the time being, all that was demanded of me was to try to keep as steady as possible, to close my ears to alarming rumours and my heart to nostalgia and dismay. ‘If England is invaded tomorrow’, I wrote then, ‘I shall certainly not know how much of what I hear is true. All that I can try to do is to foster within myself something that is not merely fear, resentment or bewilderment. Perhaps it might be useful to try to clear my mind by setting down, as truthfully and simply as I can, the tiny facet of the world’s events which I myself, in the months ahead, shall encounter at first hand. It will not be, I know, an unprejudiced account; and my prejudices will probably have many causes that I cannot at present even foresee; but at least it may help me to preserve a thread of serenity and hope.’

This was the starting-point of a detailed diary which I kept during the next few months (until my work in Rome left me no free time), and then began again in 1943–44, when the war came to La Foce, and of which the latter part was published later on, entitled War in Val d’Orcia.

It was the first months that were the hardest. A few weeks after Italy’s entry into the war, having been seized by premature labour pains, I went down to our nearest station, Chiusi, to catch the first train to Rome. The trains were all, of course, overflowing with troops, but the kind owner of the station bar, an old friend, tried to reassure me by pointing out that the next one passing through still had a dining-car: “If necessary, the baby can be born there.” I was not much attracted by this prospect, but agreed that it would be preferable to standing in the passage. My baby, however, was so considerate as to delay its arrival, and when at last we reached Rome, we were whisked off, in almost embarrassing comfort and splendour, in the American Embassy’s car to the beautiful house and solicitous care of my godfather who, though his wife and staff had already gone home, was still waiting for orders from Washington to leave himself. I ended, indeed, by considerably overstaying my welcome, since the baby delayed for three more weeks, and the Ambassador was obliged to leave before I had moved to the nursing-home in which, on August 1, my daughter Benedetta was born.

It was a strange period of waiting, knowing that one was about to bring a new life into such a very unstable world. The Roman summer, with the streets half-empty and the black-out at night, was more beautiful than I had ever seen it, and we would dine out at night under the ilex trees of the Villa Taverna, shimmering with fireflies, sometimes hearing the sirens and distant bursts of gunfire of the, as yet, most unalarming air-raids, and wondering each evening what the next day would bring. On July 8 the return of seven hundred Italians from London, headed by the Italian Ambassador Bastianini, in the Monarch of Bermuda (a ship described by the travellers as both filthy and ill-equipped) gave rise to a fresh wave of anti-English feeling. At a lunch party a few days later I heard, in impotent exasperation and disbelief, Bastianini describing the decadence and softness which had overtaken the English people (as exemplified by il weekend inglese). They had lost, he declared, any capacity for patriotism and self-sacrifice (this had been Ribbentrop’s mistake, too) and would never be able to stand up against a German attack. “Non vi sono più rimaste che le qualità che non rendono.”32 “But surely they still have some courage?” one guest enquired. “Anche il coraggio, da sola, è una qualità che non rende.”33 At the end our hostess rose, saying brightly, “Yes, you must be right, England is done for.”

Had I trusted myself to speak, I could have supplied at least one small piece of evidence that did not point in the same direction. In the preceding weeks, when it was becoming plain that the invasion was a real danger and the radio had said that some English children were being sent away from danger areas to stay with friends in America, I asked my relations there whether they, too, would find a temporary home for some children of close English friends. They at once sent the warmest of invitations; but when I transmitted it, the parents, in each case, refused. ‘It is not a reasoned refusal, perhaps,’ wrote one father, ‘but the feeling that we can’t leave this country even vicariously proceeds out of some mysterious depths and is beyond the reach of reason. Though there are cogent reasons for removing children from any sort of danger of coming into contact with war, it must also be admitted that we think we are going to win.’ And in a later letter he added, ‘I know you entirely understand that our refusal has nothing to do with the very happy life that I know they would lead there, and I think it would be selfish merely to fear separation. It comes nearer, perhaps, to being an act of faith.’

A good many other people, I think, felt as he did, and, as the menace of invasion receded and the long years of war dragged on, I do not think there was one parent who regretted his choice; while I have often seen, after the return of the children who did go—happy as they were with their American hosts and deeply as they remained devoted to them—that they yet felt as if they had somehow been cheated of something more important than even security or happiness.

During my week in the nursing-home I listened to the news of the Battle of Britain on the little radio concealed under my pillow, and read and re-read the last letters from England which still reached me. (‘We have been’, wrote my aunt from London, ‘like Brünnhilde, in a circle of fire, but nothing to upset one.’) Then I went back to La Foce and, within a few months, was so fortunate as to find, in spite of my Anglo-American origins and my non-adherence to the Fascist party, a job in the Prisoners of War office of the Italian Red Cross in Rome, where I worked for the next two years.

This office, which came to perform a large and important role, operated within an extremely cumbersome and complicated framework. Its President was an old Italian general, Generale Clerici; its Secretary-General was Elsa Dallolio, the founder of the Italian Branch of the International Social Service, whose work was amalgamated with that for prisoners of war; and its staff consisted, on the one hand, of Red Cross military personnel, rightly considered unfit for active service, and on the other of an awkward mixture of civilian volunteers and regular employees. The volunteers, of whom I was one, were well-meaning, untrained, and very unevenly efficient; the professional secretaries and typists knew their jobs but (with a few notable exceptions) kept strictly to their regular office hours; the military staff had no knowledge of any language but their own, and were unaccustomed to any form of office work. That this strange amalgam of human beings should have managed to do any work at all; that, roughly speaking, the organisation of the camps of the Allied prisoners of war in Italy did work; that the men received their mail and their parcels and that, on the other hand, news of the Italian troops in Allied hands did reach their families, was a tribute to the devoted work of the heads of the various sections, and of a few people who worked immediately with them, particularly of Conte Umberto Morra, the head of the section for Allied POWs who was also the Italian representative on the Commission of the International Red Cross which inspected the Allied prisoners’ camps in Italy, and of Elsa Dallolio herself. Umberto’s tact and humour were as useful in these tasks as his thorough knowledge of the English language and of the English character, while it was Elsa who, without ever moving from the big table weighed down with files in her little office, somehow managed to keep the whole creaking machinery in constant motion, with the minimum of friction, strain or fuss. Permanently overworked, harassed by a hundred major and minor problems, torn by an intense personal compassion for the human suffering involved, she yet managed to preserve an atmosphere of quiet, humorous serenity, which steadied everyone who saw her; and whenever there was a disagreeable or painful task to be done, it was she—at an inner cost which she kept to herself—who took it on. What she said to the weeping, hysterical women who, after days or weeks of waiting, were at last called up to her office to receive some news—sometimes the worst, sometimes merely the announcement that they must go on waiting—I have never known. But day after day, I have seen them come out again, sometimes weeping still, but no longer despairing.

The building in which we worked—a sequestrated school—was ill-furnished, unheated, and very unsuited to its new purpose. The working hours were from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., but most of the heads of sections and some of the volunteers would come back again for the afternoon, to sort and censor the mail, and to go on deciphering and translating the interminable lists of Italian dead, wounded or missing which would arrive after any major Allied advance, such as that in North Africa. I can still see the wide entrance halls packed with the silent, anxious mob of wives and mothers, waiting for the news that we were feverishly deciphering upstairs. Names and birthplaces dictated by illiterate Sardinian or Calabrian peasant-boys to overworked Allied officials with only a slight knowledge of Italian, or none, often arrived in so incomprehensible a form that we had to ask for them to be repeated. And when, on the same list, some thirty Luigi Rossis (the Italian equivalent of John Smith) appeared—some dead, some missing and some captured—it was not until the most careful checking of their birthplaces, dates of birth and parents’ names, that any news whatever could be given out.

At one time, I was working in the section for the Italian dead and wounded in which, in addition to the lists, our main task was the reading and translating of the hospital chaplains’ letters which accompanied the meagre little parcels of personal effects returned with his identity disk to a dead soldier’s family: the children’s photographs, the wedding group, the first Communion medal; sometimes a creased letter to ‘mio amato sposo’ or ‘mio caro papà’; a postcard of his home town, a rosary, a good-luck charm. The chaplains’ letters were then translated and the little parcel was sent off, with a brief letter of condolence, to the soldier’s family. Never could I get accustomed to writing those stereotyped letters; never could I teach myself not to imagine the faces of those who would read them.

I worked in this office (with brief week-ends at La Foce, when possible) for nearly two years until, in the autumn of 1942, I was again pregnant and had to go back to La Foce. There, to my surprise, I found plenty to do, but I do not propose to describe this period in any detail here, since I have already done so in War in Val d’Orcia.

When I got home, I realised that there was scarcely a farm on the place which had not got some of its men fighting, in Africa, Russia or Greece, or else interned in some remote prisoners’ camp. Their wives and mothers hurried to meet me, asking why those who had been sent to Russia had never written, or those stranded in Greece and deported to Germany were always asking for food. What could I tell them? I helped them to fill in the post-card forms for their replies, or the requests for news through the International Red Cross in Geneva and to address their pathetic parcels of home-baked biscuits, cheese and ham, well knowing how unlikely it was that any answer would come back. I tried to give an encouraging answer to their question, “But when will it all come to an end?” Then we settled down, like many others, to listen to the radio, to surmise, and to wait.

One good thing that this period brought about was unforeseen: a closer relationship with our tenants and our neighbours. The men of the Val d’Orcia had paid lip-service to Fascism in so far as its laws were favourable to agriculture; and when, in spite of their conviction that the Duce would somehow keep them out of the war, they discovered that they, too, were to be involved, their surprise was very soon coloured by an indignation which turned into a more positive, active resentment, embracing both the Fascists and the Germans, and producing a kind of local solidarity, a drawing together to meet common dangers and common needs.

After the fall of Mussolini in 1943, the country people enjoyed a few hours of hope for peace, but it soon became clear that the Fascists had only left us in the hands of harder and tougher masters, the Germans. It was then that at La Foce (as, I expect, in many other country places) we drew together into a tight little community, like a small rural society in time of war in the Middle Ages. For food we were almost entirely self-supporting (not only for ourselves, but for the twenty-three refugee children from Turin and Genoa who had come to live in the Casa dei Bambini); for fuel we used, besides the small rations of lignite, our own wood and the kernels of our olives. We made our own soap, spun our own wool, and occasionally, in secret, killed a calf and had its hide tanned for leather. We ran our car, until the Germans took it away, on charcoal from our woods. Then, after the armistice of September 8, when the Val d’Orcia was suddenly filled with liberated Allied prisoners of war who were trying to avoid the Germans and rejoin their own armies, as well as with Italian soldiers from disbanded regiments who were making their way back to their own homes, innumerable problems brought us all still closer together. It was the inhabitants in the more remote farms (our house was too close to the main road and too frequently inspected by the Germans, to be a safe hiding-place) who housed and fed the Allied prisoners on the run, with a courage and generosity beyond all praise. When, later on, groups of partisans, including some Allied prisoners of war, came to live in our woods and in some of the farms up the hill, they were joined by local young men who wished to avoid being called up to fight on the German side. It was our ox-carts which took up wheat and wine to them; it was the local cobbler who (without asking any questions) re-soled the boots of the Allied soldiers on their way south; it was one of our foremen who, when the Germans came in a lorry to capture some Allied ex-prisoners working in a field, gave them the pre-arranged signal to scatter and escape; it was the partisans living in one of our farms on the edge of a beech-wood at the top of the hill who, when a threatening article in a local paper pointed me out by name as a person who should be deported to Germany, suggested that I should go into hiding with them. For several months, I slept with a small suitcase beside my bed, ready to start, and a back-door open towards the woods.

So, at last, the old barriers of tradition and class were broken down, and we were held together by the same difficulties, fears, expectations and hopes. ‘Together’, as I then wrote in my diary ‘we planned how to hide the oil, the hams and the cheeses, so that the Germans should not find them; together we found shelter for the fugitives who knocked at our door—whether Italians, Allies or Jews, soldiers or civilians—together we watched the first bombs fall on the bridges of the Val d’Orcia, and listened hopefully for the rumours of landings in Tuscany which never came.’ And together—when the Germans had turned us out of the cellar which had become our air-raid shelter and had obliged us to walk to Montepulciano with all the refugee children and our own, as well as three new-born babies—we came home, after the Allies’ arrival, to bury the corpses in the woods and farms, to reap the harvest, to remove the mines still concealed in the woods and fields and in our own front garden, and to rebuild the shattered farms.

It was on that day that we found in our front hall, which lay open, like the rest of the house, to the winds and, still worse, to the flies, a welcome and moving surprise which at the time, perhaps because it seemed too personal, I did not write about in my diary. We had expected, when we left, to find our house destroyed by shell-fire, but instead found no more serious damage than a few large holes in the roof, the cutting-off of water and of light (this lasted for many months), the removal or destruction of any window-pane or door, a few bullet-holes in books and pictures, and an all-pervading stench of excrement and refuse. But on the hall-table, intact but for a few mud-stains, lay a copy of the book which, after the death of our son Gianni, I had written as a private record of his short life, illustrated by many photographs, and of which a few copies had been printed for relations and close friends. On the flyleaf a pencilled note told me that this book had been found in the woods (left there by the Moroccan troops with the Fifth Army, the Goums, who had ransacked everything they could lay hands on) by an English soldier, who ‘realising that it must be of great sentimental value’ had obtained permission to walk back many miles with it, so that we might find it when we came home. This piece of imaginative kindness, at such a moment, was so consoling as to outweigh every other loss. If, by any chance, this page should ever meet the eyes of this friend, I should like it to take him my belated, but undimmed, gratitude.

On the day of our return, Antonio, by request of the Comitato di Liberazione (a committee set up in most Italian cities by members of the Resistance before the arrival of the Allies, as a provisional local government), became the Mayor of Chianciano and, in collaboration with the representatives of the Allied Military Government, dealt with the local problems there: the refugees from the south who clamoured to be sent home at once, the lack of light, water, sugar, salt, soap, medical supplies, Diesel oil, petrol transportation. Of our own farmhouses, two were a heap of ruins, and in many others only one or two rooms had still got a roof. In one of them thirteen people were sleeping in two beds; in another the whole family slept on the stable floor. All had lost their dearly-prized furniture, their linen, their blankets, their clothes, and above all their cooking-pots, since the Goums had looted everything that the Germans had not already taken away. Everywhere the most urgent problem, as soon as the harvest was in, was to get a roof on to at least part of each farm before the winter, and this was achieved. The other most urgent problem was health, since, owing to the number of unburied corpses, both of men and beasts, and the multitude of flies, an epidemic of gastro-enteritis and dysentery had broken out, especially among the children. There was little water and no light (this lasted for the whole following winter) and the woods and fields were still strewn with mines. Yet our prevailing feeling was one of gratitude and hope. ‘Destruction and death have visited us,’ I wrote on the last page of my diary, ‘but now, there is hope in the air.’

* * *

Many questions have since been asked me about those years—some of which I have been able to answer, at least to myself. One of them is, was I much afraid? The answer is no, except for one single moment of panic. This is odd, for I have generally been quite easily frightened. As a child, I had all the usual childish fears; of strangers, of other children, of the unfamiliar and of the dark: when expecting my first baby, I incurred the contempt of Antonio’s family doctor (a bluff, kindly man who expected me to be overjoyed) by my ill-concealed dread of labour pains, which eventually I found much less bad than I had expected; after my uncle’s death in an air-crash, I was for several years terrified of flying. But during the last months before our liberation, we were really too busy, and too much interested, to be afraid. This was partly owing to the continuousness and variety of the demands upon our resourcefulness. Twenty-three refugee children, in the last months, moved into our own house and had to be fed, clothed, instructed and amused; hiding-places and food had to be found, not only for partisans and escaped POWs but also for Jews who had fled from the larger cities; German officers who came to sequestrate cars, tyres, horses and houses, etc. had to be dealt with (this was Antonio’s job, sometimes at the same moment as I was giving a map, a compass or a pair of socks to a fugitive Allied soldier on the other side of the house, or up the hill). Later on, as the front came closer, we moved down to the cottage hospital, from the farmhouse where he had been in hiding, a young partisan who was so obviously dying that we felt the risk of his discovery by the Germans to be a secondary consideration. And in the last weeks, after the food situation in Rome had become serious, there was a constant stream of people who had got lifts on army lorries to beg in the country for a little flour, oil or a sack of potatoes for hungry children or sick relatives in town. There were appeals for help from the families of men who had been taken as hostages by the Germans, or who had been condemned to be shot because their villages had sheltered or helped the partisans, or from refugee families from south of Rome, or from mothers whose sons had been taken off to Germany for Arbeitsdienst. Our problems then, as I wrote in my diary at the time, ‘arose from a continual necessity to weigh in the balance not courage and cowardice, or right and wrong, but conflicting duties and responsibilities equally urgent … Moreover these were problems which, since the local situation was often fluctuating according to changes in the military situation and the arrival of different officials, could never be solved once for all: every day each incident had to be met on its own merits. At the end of each day prudence inquired, “Have I done too much?” and enthusiasm or compassion, “Might I not, perhaps, have done more?”’

With regard to my own children, I was not unduly anxious, having a blind confidence that (if Antonio or I should be shot or deported) Schwester Marie would somehow see them through. But I did have, in connection with the younger one, Donata, one instant of blind panic. This was when, after having been turned out of our cellar and having trudged through the mined woods, with all the children and some old people, towards Montepulciano, we came to some open fields which were being shelled, and Antonio, who was carrying Donata (aged eighteen months) on his shoulders, walked ahead, to a part of the field which seemed to me to be more exposed. I ran across to him, blind with fear, saying furiously, “What are you doing with that child? Give her back to me!” He merely smiled indulgently, saying, “We’re just as safe here as anywhere else,” and walked on, while I recovered my senses. Except in hospitals, before operations, I have never been afraid since.

I have also been asked what, after twenty-five years, is my most vivid and painful memory of that time. This is a more complicated question to answer, but I think that my predominant memory of the war years, for myself and others, can be summed up in a single word: parting. Bombs, shell-fire, mines, the unpleasantness, after Mussolini’s fall, of being in an ‘Occupied’ country, the long periods of waiting, the sense of isolation—all these have left no painful mark: they were just immediate, and sometimes exciting, problems. But the parting of people who love each other and are separated, whether endured oneself or witnessed in others—mothers and sons, husbands and wives, lovers, friends—without news or only with uncertain news, with alternating fears and hopes, this belongs to the category of pain that is never wiped out, that leaves a permanent scar. ‘Ayez pitié de ceux qui s’aimaient et ont été séparés’—this was the first supplication in the prayer composed by the Abbé Perreyve and which Madame Jean de Marmol, who died in a German concentration camp, used to recite every evening with her fellow-prisoners. ‘Ayez pitié.’

These were the memories that began to haunt me, as soon as the need for immediate action came to an end and the Allied armies moved on towards Florence. By then news from English relations and friends was beginning to reach me, through Allied officers passing through Tuscany, but we were still cut off from all news of friends in Northern Italy, and when I went for the first time after our liberation to Florence (in an Allied jeep) I found my mother’s house at Fiesole, Villa Medici, very thoroughly equipped with booby-traps before the Germans had left it, while our own smaller house in the garden was still in flames. (I fell through a charred hole from the first floor on to a stone floor on the one below, but mercifully did not break my neck, and was given first aid by the young Irish officer in charge of the mine-detecting squad.)

After this, I began to work with the American Red Cross, taking medicine and clothing to villages just behind the lines, to be distributed (not without much friction) by the local Committees of Liberation. The need indeed was very great: I remember one village above Arezzo, suspected of having helped the partisans, in which no male creature between the ages of seven and seventy had been left alive: they had all been lined up one Sunday morning in the little piazza after Sunday Mass and shot. In the following year I drove up to Bologna, immediately behind the Allied troops, with the President of the Italian Red Cross, Umberto Zanotti Bianco, to act as his interpreter in the task of reorganising the local Red Cross. We found hospitals without doctors or nurses—the Fascist ones having fled and the anti-Fascist ones not yet returned. In Bologna I found, to my infinite relief, Elsa Dallolio and her ninety-two-year-old father, still alive. They had been forced to leave their country house, between the main road and the main railway of the Gothic Line, before it was totally destroyed by shells.

In those months I was forced to become aware of what, in the wave of euphoria immediately after our liberation, I had not foreseen: the mutual misunderstandings (sometimes comic but often painful) between the liberators and the liberated, in which the members of all the countries concerned demonstrated their less endearing qualities, the swift end of the temporary mutual solidarity and union produced by times of crisis, and the rise of party struggle and class hatred, the disappointments and resentments which follow upon excessive hopes. One of the ugliest features of this period—the working off of individual grudges on political pretexts—was much less evident in a country district like ours than in the towns, and we were also entirely spared such bloodshed as took place immediately after the liberation in, for instance, Bologna, where the A.M.G. was able to do little to control the mock trials and summary executions of former Fascist officials and sympathisers by Communist partisans. In the country, on the other hand, it was particularly easy to foment social discontent, since it is not difficult to inculcate new hopes in times in which any change seems possible. And once changes began, they came, all over the country, with great speed. Even while rebuilding and re-planting were still going on, Communist cells were being formed at La Foce, under the direction of the provincial Communist centre in Siena, and very soon almost all our farmers were converted to the new doctrine which promised that, if they obeyed orders, they would swiftly come to own the land upon which they worked. The first step was, as elsewhere, the formation of a commission of their representatives, le commissioni interne, to represent in each fattoria the farmers’ point of view and their requirements, of which the most immediate was the increase of the proportion of wheat allotted to the contadino from the traditional 50% to first 53% and then 57%. This was opposed by landowners’ associations all over the country on the grounds that it would not leave a sufficient margin to keep up and improve the estates—in short, that the mezzadria would no longer work. I do not propose to dwell at length on the rights and wrongs of this controversy, which raged for three or four years; it is no longer relevant; what is certain is that Mazzei’s forecast, that the mezzadria would break down on the day on which ‘the conviction of its fairness’ ceased, now proved to be true. Strikes were organised at the most crucial moments of the farmer’s year, especially during the harvest; tenants who had received notice refused to leave; and ill-feeling ran so high for several years that, if we met two or three of our contadini together, they would refuse even to greet us. We had become ‘the Enemies of the People’, the abusers of the poor. The church was no longer attended, and in the school the children’s essays stated, a little puzzled, that now all the padroni had become ‘bad’. Even the women, when they wished to consult me about their children’s health or schooling (for this they still did) would do so furtively, without telling their husbands or meeting mine. It was a painful, distressing period, in which all the evils—economic and social—that had been latent in the whole system of the mezzadria for so many centuries, came to the surface.

Often I wondered whether the root of all this dissension did not lie (as I had instinctively felt, when I first came here in my youth) in a failure in direct human communication: whether it would not have been possible, casting off the barriers of our respective inheritances of custom and class, to speak to each other more openly and simply, as we had done during the war, airing our respective grievances and opinions. But the habit of this should have been established long before; the old mutual reserve and mistrust had already sunk far too deep and were now deliberately fomented by those who wished to break up the old order. Now, when any new controversial question arose, it was merely the mouthpieces of two opposing orders, of two contrasting ways of life, who addressed each other: it was too late for individual understanding or compromise.

Moreover, though the actual question of the farmers’ percentage was eventually settled by law, the real forces at work were far more deep-seated and complex. Plans were brought forward by the Left Wing of the government for the expropriation of all large estates, which were to be converted into small holdings, purchasable by the men who lived and worked upon them—la terra ai contadini was the slogan—but the scheme did not take into account that in the regions where large private properties had been most neglected, a great deal of preliminary basic work (draining, re-afforestation, road-building, etc.) would have to be done, whether by the State or with private capital, before such holdings could produce even a bare living for their new owners, and eventually—with the exception of the remarkable work done by the Cassa del Mezzogiorno in the South—these projects, for purely economic reasons, became a dead letter. For it was becoming evident that the new trend in Italian agriculture was only one aspect of far more complex changes, not only in Italy, but in the whole economic system of the Western world. The industrial boom in the North, as well as the increasing discontent in the country (partly caused by the absence of any government measures to protect the farmer by stabilising the cost of staple food-stuffs) all contributed to an exodus from the country to the city, only comparable with that which took place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The old patriarchal life, for good or ill, was over. No young man could find a bride to take back to his father’s farm, since what girl would submit herself to the absolute rule of her mother-in-law, or cut herself for ever from the new, free life that the television had shown her? Above all, who was willing to give up independence? So one farm after another came to stand empty. Their inhabitants, in our region, did not often move (like the peasants of the South or of Sicily) to the large industrial cities of the North, but rather to Chianciano, the prosperous little watering-place nearby—where their savings sufficed to put up a small concrete house and open another pensione for summer visitors—or else to the towns with small factories in the Val di Chiana. Now, as I write (and the whole process has not taken more than ten years), only six out of our fifty-seven farms are still inhabited by their old tenants and are run a mezzadria; a few are lived in by skilled workmen, who can use the new machines: the others are slowly falling to pieces.

As far as the actual farming of the land was concerned, however, Antonio, with great resilience, swiftly readjusted to the new conditions, and at once started to reorganise the estate on an entirely different basis, making use of much more machinery and, necessarily, of much less labour. The property has been divided into three parts, of which he only attempts to cultivate the one containing the best land. Here three artificial lakes have been built, with a total capacity of 460 thousand cubic metres, and with this water more than seven hundred additional acres of land are irrigated. The fodder thus acquired has enabled him greatly to increase the stock of cattle, from which both the grey maremmano and the white chianino have been eliminated, giving place to the red and white Simmenthal, grown only for beef, not ploughing or dairy-farming. These are no longer scattered in various farms, as they used to be, but collected in three large farms with stabling in open sheds—some four hundred head in all, with four bulls. The pigs, too, have been increased, though their price, like that of beef, is of course dependent upon the fluctuations of the Common Market. In addition to the new machinery that has been purchased, tractors are hired from small local firms. The vineyards and olive-groves have been increased, and the quality of the wine and oil greatly improved. Of the rest of the property, about a third is woodland; the rest is used for grazing or lies fallow.

But meanwhile, inexorably and steadily, the population continues to decrease. The Foce school, which once had ninety pupils, now has fifteen; the church is nearly empty. On Monte Amiata some villages consist entirely of old people and small children (who will join their parents, they hope, as soon as these have got good new jobs in town). It is possible that, within a generation, the woods will again spread down towards the Orcia, as they did ten centuries ago—and already, just across the valley, a large colony of Sardinian shepherds are grazing their sheep on what used to be cultivated fields.

Le vostre cose tutte hanno lor morte

Sì come voi…34

Sometimes, looking back upon all these changes and on the destruction or reversal of so many things that we have spent our lives in building up, we have been tempted to wonder whether all that time and energy was wasted, whether it has all been a mistake. I do not really think so. Paternalism has now practically become a dirty word, but I doubt whether, in the Val d’Orcia of 1925, a modicum of prosperity could have been restored without the employment of some private capital and the enthusiasm and direction of a few enlightened landowners. While the consorzio di bonifica was active, all the basic work that I have described was carried out: the erosion arrested, the woods re-planted, the roads, schools and houses built. Production did increase. The valley’s inhabitants did gradually come to lead, as we had hoped, a less hard and poverty-stricken life. Workmen, who used to trudge many miles on foot before and after their day’s work, were able to buy bicycles, then Vespas and motor-bicycles, and now mostly have their own cars. Buses took the children, when their first five years of local schooling were over, to secondary schools in Chianciano or Montepulciano. Every farm had its radio or television, every girl could buy some pretty clothes. If all this led to a further step—the desire for independence and city life—this was surely an inevitable and logical consequence, one aspect of a general evolution. We are not yet detached enough to appraise it, nor to see clearly where it will lead.

From a purely agricultural point of view, besides, the situation is even more complex. We cannot yet tell what part agriculture will play in the new industrialised Italy, nor indeed in the general economy of Europe. We may hope that, whatever form it may take, some of the basic work done in the last forty-five years, and recently brought up-to-date by mechanisation, will not have been wholly wasted, but we can be sure that, whatever developments there may be, they will take place within a new, perhaps a better, social pattern.

As for ourselves, we have been singularly fortunate. For forty-six years we have had the work we wanted, in the value of which we believed, and in a setting which has become more and more dear to us. And if we cannot foresee the future—what right have we to expect to do so, in this rapidly changing world?

* * *

Two other aspects of our personal life at La Foce have not yet been described: the making of a garden, which began as soon as we had any water, and the foundation of a permanent children’s home in what used to be the nursery-school. During the war, as I have said, we used this for refugee children from Genoa and Turin and, when we had returned them all to their families, safe and sound, we felt that we should like to keep the home going for a similar purpose. Like every other country through which the War had passed, Italy at that time had a large number of orphaned, abandoned, illegitimate or under-nourished children—and it was for these, or for the children of refugees in concentration camps, that the home was then used. My intention was to keep it small enough to be as much like a family and as little like an institution as possible, and for this reason I have never accepted more than twenty children—both boys and girls, between the ages of four and twelve. But I soon realised that, whatever we might do to make it homelike and welcoming, the greatest need of most of the children was for parents of their own. Many of them came from broken homes; some from sanatoria for tuberculosis (clinically cured but in need of a long time of convalescence) others from large, impersonal institutions where they had never had quite enough of anything: space, food, toys, instruction or love. (Some of the smaller ones, when first they arrived, shrank away from a kiss, expecting instead a blow.) Many showed the obvious symptoms of insecurity and instability that are the fruits of ‘institutionalisation’: nightmares, bed-wetting, backwardness, fits of temper or of fear; all had a deep craving for affection. Some took several years to become normal children again; others, under the wise guidance of the home’s directress, Signorina Vera Berrettini (who was already in charge of the home during the war) recovered with remarkable speed. As soon as they were ready, I tried to find adoptive homes for them—at first in the U.S.A., through the International Social Service, with which I had already worked for several years, and recently, owing to a change in Italian adoption laws and also in the attitude to adoption in this country, in Italy. This, indeed, has now become the chief purpose of the Casa dei Bambini, which has now existed for twenty-six years.

Lower garden, 1939

Of the children who are not adopted, the boys go on to boarding-schools when they are over twelve and, later on, are prepared for some profession or trade, but return here for their holidays and consider this their home—and often come back at Christmas and Easter, long after they are grown up, sometimes bringing with them their fiancées or their wives. Some have branched out into the world: one, after a successful career in the hotel business, is now helping to run some galleries of modern art; one is a prosperous business-man in America; two are working in the Fiat works in Turin; others have become accountants or clerks or, according to their ability, have learned various trades. One—half Chinese by origin—cannot bear any job in which he is not entirely independent, and so runs (very successfully) merry-go-rounds at fairs, but comes back to La Foce every year, to celebrate his birthday. “Where else would I celebrate it?” he says. Only one—the son of an alcoholic, sub-normal father—has failed to keep a job or make a life for himself. Of the girls, two have had their weddings at La Foce, others have become teachers or trained in the hotel-school at Chianciano, or have got other jobs in Florence. The greater part have married, and sometimes bring their babies to La Foce. But the happiest stories are those of the children who, while they were still quite small, found adoptive families of their own. Looking back, I remember—among many others—Pietro, a little half-blind foundling from southern Italy, who, at the age of five, could not even talk, and who is now the happy, independent fourteenth son of a large American family. I remember Jean, who came to us from Tunisia, unable to speak any language but French, and who is now also happily adopted in America; Paolo, a little boy of seven, whom the large institution in which he lived had described as ‘a-social and un-adoptable’, and who, after two years at La Foce, is now settled and happy with Italian parents in northern Italy. I remember Andrea, the son of an alcoholic mother who arrived here so frightened and dazed that he could hardly speak, and who is now completely reassured and secure after being adopted into a warm, extrovert, cheerful large Florentine family. I remember Giovanni, a bigger boy, so emotionally crippled by his mother’s total rejection of him that for years he refused to consider attaching himself to any other family, but who has now found one in which he is taking the place of their own only son, killed in an accident. This long procession of children, renewing itself as surely as the succession of each year’s crops, has perhaps been the most rewarding of all the gifts that La Foce has brought us.

Antonio, Benedetta and Donata

One other enduring pleasure, throughout the years, has been the making of our garden. In the year after our marriage, my American grandmother—somewhat startled to find herself, in mid-summer, in a house in which there was so little water, even in the baby’s bathroom—presented us with the wonderful gift of a pipe-line which, leading from a spring in the beech-wood at the top of our hill (some six miles away) brought us our first abundant water-supply. It then became possible to plan, not only new bathrooms, but a kitchen-garden and flower-garden, which gradually grew, year by year, in proportion to our means and to the water available. First, at the back of the house, I made a small enclosed Italian garden: a stone fountain with two dolphins and a small lawn around it, and a few flower-beds edged with box. A couple of years later, we made another larger terrace, passing through two pillars of travertine with ornamental vases into a less formal flower-garden, with wide borders of flowering shrubs, herbaceous plants and annuals, big lemon-pots on stone bases, a shady bower of wisteria and banksia roses, and a paved terrace with a balustrade, looking down over the valley, on which we would dine on summer nights when, just before the harvest, the whole garden would be alight with fireflies and the air heavy with nicotiana and jasmine. On the walls, in the spring, grow great clumps of aubretia and alyssum and, later on, rhyncospernum and climbing roses, and the grass is edged with daffodils and irises. Some steps—for the whole garden is on a fairly steep hillside—lead up to an avenue of cypresses and a rose-garden, while a wide pergola winds round the hill-side towards the woods. Finally, just before the war, we made another enclosed formal garden—designed, like the first, by our friend and architect Cecil Pinsent, with hedges of cypress and box and big trees of magnolia grandiflora, while the rest of the hill above has been gradually transformed into a half-wild garden with Japanese fruit-trees and Judas-trees, forsythia, philadelphus, pomegranates and single roses, long hedges of lavender and banks fragrant with thyme, mint and assynth, and great clumps of broom. Gradually, by experiment and failure, I learned what would or would not stand the cold winters and the hot, dry summer winds. I gave up any attempt, in my borders, at growing delphiniums, lupins or phlox, as well as many other herbaceous plants; and I learned, too, to put our lemon-trees, plumbago and jasmine under shelter before the winter. But roses flourish in the heavy clay soil, and so do peonies and lilies, while the dry hillside is where lavender thrives—a blue sea in June, buzzing with the bees whose honey is flavoured with its pungent taste, which also, in the winter, not only scents our linen but kindles our fires. Every year, the garden grows more beautiful; even the war brought no greater destruction than the shelling of a few cypress trees. The woods were already carpeted, according to the season, with wild violets, crocuses, cyclamen, anemone alpina, and autumn colchicum, and among these I also managed to naturalise some other kinds of anemones, daffodils and a few scillas. But bluebells I have failed with, and the exquisite scarlet and gold tulips which grow in the fields round San Quirico, just across the valley, still stubbornly refuse to flower here.

The garden today

A path through the woods leads to a little chapel of travertine, with a churchyard round it, which we built in 1933, when our only son Gianni died, and here he is buried. At the time of his death in Fiesole—since the greater part of the eight happy years of his childhood had been spent at La Foce, and every inch of the house and garden, every field and tree, seemed full of his presence—I felt that I could not bear to come back. But we did return, almost at once, and I have always been glad that we did so. We have, of course, never ceased to miss our son—perhaps even more bitterly in old age than in youth. We have had many ups and downs and have made many mistakes. We have had periods of discouragement, in which we wondered if we had not taken on a task beyond our strength. There have even been moments in which, driving up the old winding road from Rome and catching a first glimpse of the grim towers of Radicofani, we have felt as if we hated the whole place and everything connected with it. But I do not think that either of us has seriously wished that we had chosen to live somewhere else, nor to lead another sort of life. The fascination of the Val d’Orcia held—and still holds.

Now we are both growing old and La Foce is too cold for us in winter. But it is still our home; we live there when we can. Antonio still takes an active part in managing the farm, and I still enjoy the children and the garden.

A friend, who has stayed with us in recent years, once wrote to me: ‘I sometimes think that your garden is like an allegory of life itself: one passes from the warm, sheltered house into the formal garden, with its fountain and flowers and intricate box hedges, then coasts the hillside under the pergola of vines. The view opens out on to tilled fields, the flowers become rarer; one passes into the path through the woods. Here it is darker; the wind stirs in the branches. A few steps more, walking uphill in the shade, and one has reached the still chapel, with those four stone walls around it.’

Up that path, when the time comes, we both hope to go.

The winding road today

1 Earth overcome gives the stars.

2 Verdiani Bandi, I Castelli della Val d’Orcia, p. 120, quoting the chronicler Malavolti. Subsequently the castle was occupied in turn by the troops of the Emperor and of the French and after the fall of Montalcino passed, like all the rest of this territory, into the hands of Cosimo de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.

3 ‘The man who wants good cheese, will feed his sheep on thyme.’

4 ‘Great cold in January, bad weather in February, March winds, sweet rain in April, showers in May, good reaping in June, good threshing in July, and the three rains of August—all with good weather—these are worth more than Solomon’s throne.’

5 These ‘rogations’ were divided into major and minor, the major being held on April 25, the date at which there is a danger of the wheat being invaded by rust; the minor (which corresponded to the Roman Ambarvalia) on the three days before Ascension Day, when the wheat is beginning to ripen. Virgil describes them in the Georgics, and Cato, in his De Agricoltura, quotes the prayer recited by the garlanded peasants. The prayers at the quattro tempora were incorporated into the Christian ritual in the third century by St. Calistus.

6 ‘St. Mark, our advocate, see that no worm enters our chestnuts, and that each kernel bears three nuts; pray for us.’

7 This story, with several other local sayings, I owe to an old neighbour of ours, Clemente Bologna, who took a great interest in local customs, and who also, in his lands in the Maremma, had become a friend of the famous brigand Tiburzi.

8 ‘Sad is the house, where the hen clucks and the cock is silent.’

9 Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli, Ricordi, p. 230.

10 Ser Lapo Mazzei, Lettere di un notaio a un mercante, October 27, 1407.

11 Paolo di Messer Pace da Certaldo: Il libro di buoni costumi, paras. 102–3.

12 Giovanni de Pagolo Morelli, Ricordi (1393–1421), pp. 235–6.

13 ‘We work all the year round, They rest and doze in the shade—Why should we give them half the crops, When all the toil is ours?’ (Quoted by N. Tamassia, La famiglia italiana nei secoli XV e XVI.)

14 ‘A nut-tree’s shade [under which nothing grows] and a master’s shadow, Are two buggering shadows.’

15 ‘The Master’s affection is like new wine in the flask:
Good for one evening, and sour the next day.’

16 ‘My grandfather’s wood, my father’s olive-grove, and my own vineyard’.

17 Jacopo Mazzei: Firenze rurale, ed. Jolanda de Blasis, p. 643.

18 The sowing, in the first year, of barley and oats interspersed with lupins and alfalfa; in the second and third years, of only lupins and alfalfa; in the fourth, of wheat. In the fifth the soil was to lie fallow, while in the sixth we would sow white and red clover, in the seventh clover only; in the eighth, wheat again.

19 In some areas, the results of the bonifica agraria were wholly good. In others, where each family was assigned far too small a plot of land, and far too flimsily-built a house, it soon became evident that the farmers could hardly extract a bare living from the land assigned to them. Many attacks, some justified, were consequently made upon these projects, yet—looking back upon them fifty years later—I think it can hardly be denied that the basic work was valuable. Not only through drainage, irrigation, and the extirpation of malaria was all this land turned into farmland, but the work, however imperfectly done, did imply a social advance.

20 The state subsidies were highest for re-afforestation and the prevention of land erosion.

21 War in Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary 1943–1944, reissued by Pushkin Press, 2017

22 Hitler Speaks, a record of political conversations with Hitler in 1933 and 34, by Hermann Rauschning (author of Germany’s Revolution of Destruction), London, 1939.

23 Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm, New York, 1941.

24 Milan, November 1, 1936.

25 March 6, 1938

26 May 7, 1936.

27 September 30, 1938.

28 ‘Within the frontiers of Italy, the Italians are born anew, Mussolini has created them for the war of tomorrow’ and ‘Duce, Duce, who will not know how to die?’

29 This was New Herrlingen School, at Bunce Court, Faversham, in Kent, of which the creator was Miss Anne Essinger.

30 A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary 1939–1940, published by Pushkin Press, 2017

31 The American Ambassador in Rome, William Phillips, had been my father’s closest friend and was my godfather.

32 “The only qualities left to them are those that don’t pay.”

33 “Even courage, by itself, is a quality that doesn’t pay.”

34 ‘All your possessions will meet their death,
Even as you will …’

DANTE: Inferno, XVI, 20.