A Farmhouse in Tuscany

I had a farm in Africa, Karen Blixen begins in Out of Africa. I have a farmhouse in Tuscany, I might start, perching on top of the Florentine hills of Chianti – and facing South, so that the two ochre-coloured buildings bathe gold in the morning and almost colourless in the bright midday sun, and loom murder-mystery sinister when silhouetted against the dark evening sky. For five hundred years this place used to be a farm: its vineyards won some national prizes, and its main house enlarged each century with a new section or a room, not to mention that the house is one of the important local casa coloniche, farmhouses, depicted in the frescoes of the nearby Strozzi castle. The last peasants lived here during the decades following the WW II. Afterwards the two houses were abandoned for a long time. The son of this family, a white-haired, soft-spoken Fiat mechanic, is our friend, and at times drops by, bringing cherries or wild asparaguses he’s found in the woods. Never reveal...