In 2009, in the months before we met in person GS and I messaged by text. Somehow in that text environment we quickly became close, so close that I wasn’t sure if and when we actually met in person, the spell between us would break.
During those weeks I returned to my beloved Rome, on a goose chase for a job that -even if it has existed- my ethnicity and nationality prohibited them from offering it to me, as they told me, bluntly to my face.
I had a few days and during one I wandered towards Villa Borghese and went into the gallery there. Soon I stood before the darkly sensual Bernini masterpiece ‘The rape of Proserpina’
The legend of Proserpina (borrowed from Greek mythology) is that Pluto (King of the Underworld) was feeling lonely and on the look out for a squeeze. Ceres hid her daughter Proserpina in Sicily but Pluto popped out of Mont Etna, spotted Proserpina picking wild flowers in a field, snatched her up and dragged to the underworld. Proserpina’s mother Ceres searches the world for her daughter in vain. The sun sank and darkness fell with each footfall creating a desert in Ceres wake.
Meanwhile, Pluto warned Proserpina that if she ate pomegranite seeds she could never go back. None the less tempted, Proserpina couldn’t resist a teeny nibble. (We’ve all be there.) It is supposed that the seeds represent carnal delights and that Proserpina, having tasted of the forbidden fruit, was doing the mythical equivalent of banging on the floor with a sponge whispering ‘help, help’. But with Earth turning into dust Jupiter interceded and negotiated a deal whereby Proserpina would spend half of the year as a Queen of the Underworld, wife of Pluto and half on earth as Goddess of Spring. It was the myth the Romans used to explain the seasons.
I stood in front of Bernini’s Rape of Prosperpina. My life seemed to be split between the light of Italy and the darkness of the salt mines of England. I stared at the imprint of finger on thigh, how can stone cold marble be made flesh?
In the museum shop I found a bookmark postcard of fingers indented into thigh. I sent it to GS inscribed with just two words:
‘Carpe Diem’
When I can’t sleep I look for unique properties bursting with history and character. I love water, moats which makes France a natural destination, but my heart has always been in Italy.
In the summer of 2012, whilst trying to watch Wimbledon on the telly, GS turned me loose to find a house in Italy. His shortlist was that it had to be in a village, but private, close to an airport and sailing for him, for me it had to have history, depth of character and that little touch of sparkling magic.
Many delightful sleepless nights later I had a shortlist.
‘We are NOT buying one’ he said as we set off on the road trip, ‘ just a reconnaisance…’ We drove, and started in the north. We trampled over the ruins of an old mansion in the Italian lakes. A dome had collapsed into heaps of moss covered stones overlooked by the remains of a midnight blue fresco pricked with golden stars. The estate agent added in a Scoobydoo mansion, converted at some point into an institution before being abandoned, the shiny walls albeit screamed and I could not cross the threshold.
There was half of a Medici villa up un the Garfagnana with three honeybee farms, three pools and a helicopter pad and an atrium which had been glazed over – but a builder had dropped something and it had cracked; a perpetual streak of lighting in the light above.
In the fat heart of Tuscany we creaked open heavy doors to be greeted by clouds of bats and realised that medieval monasteries were corridors of cells, not good for family living. The owner wasn’t keen to sell, but the estate agent said they would be around for long.GS imagined them in hospital removing their oxygen mask with clawed old spotted hands to hoarshly croak ‘I ain’t selling…’
In one house, the owner had died the night before so that was that. On another the family were in the middle of a divorce. Her eyes were hollowed dark circles, his strained, a nervous hand raking his hair. He showed us the failed dreams; restaurant, agritourism that had cost them their marriage. Their children radiated hurt hostility daring us to severe the thread that held the family together.
There was a dreamy candidate in Spoleto where the owner, a passionate barefooted chef, left his busy restaurant to show us the family seat and the room Sophia Loren had stayed in. It was a castle at the top of the hill, one side faced the pool and the pretty hills of the Umbria, the other and you stepped through a door into your own hamlet with coffee shop and restaurant. I rather loved that one, but it had earthquakes in lieu of the sea.
There was an artist’s house with expansive views over the Tiber valley. In the studio a wall of glass had been blocked out so that the light could flood in the but the views not distract. We listened as they told us of their resident ghost who sat on the end of visitors’ beds and kissed them good night.
We explored mansions, monasteries, bishoprics, farms, and villas.
One, a little too expensive, but very lovely was GS’s stand out favourite. It was owned by a passionate Opera Director. If we took the Aurelia which I would prefer anyway, it was on the way home and was owned by a couple who ran it as a B&B. We could stay there? The owner was away, his partner our host. We walked to the restaurant in the village, we asked the owners what they thought of the village, the villa. We ambled home.
The garden from the street to the door was formal, a line of pencil cypresses, a parterre carved beds. The garden was untended left to sprawl like a romantic poem. Olive trees stood in pots covered in fairy lights. The fountains were dry. empty candle torches rusted on the side of the villa. Roses bent under the weight of their flowers, unkempt lavender spilled over the pathways. We walked via a bridge to a flat terrace before terraces stretched up the hill. Its lawn was full of moss and bees, over grown trees colonnaded the lost paths, an iron structure once a trellised walkway now covered in ivy.
We sat at a table, looking for shooting stars in dark sky listening to an owl and the sounds of the night. Our host brought us Prosecco, one bottle after another slipping down easily in a spangle of fizz and ‘what if’s?’
Beyond the Alps France was flat. We parked a little away from the port amongst the sun dunes. The sea ahead was moody, a slate and mid grey churn under a similar sky.
A price had been agreed.
‘The only thing is we have to complete before the New Year’ GS told the owner, ‘Pia is superstituous’
‘What shall we call the villa?’ The owner had lent it his name, but we couldn’t have a stately grand villa named after a dog biscuit.
‘We can only be here half the year, the rest of the time we will have to still work’
‘Then we should call it Villa Prosperina’
The first neighbour we met was the village barber (poet, historian, horn player and font of local knowledge, advanced Italian required)
‘We have decided upon a name!’ we announced
‘You aren’t going to name it after yourselves?’ Awkward as GS and I are not married and do not share a surname
‘No, we are calling it Villa Proserpina’
The blood drained from his face
‘Proserpina, Queen of the Underworld? – you are calling the villa the House of the Devil’s wife?’
And so the Villa’s formal long name is Villa Proserpina in Primavera, or Villa Pip after the Goddess of Spring.
So for half the year we are in the UK, and half the year we are in the sunshine of Italy.
Post 2016 GS discovered ancient Gaelic roots and has snaffled an Irish passport. With Mac moving in with his girlfriend, BB in Rome and Archie in Newcastle GS and I have been hatching a plan to perhaps eventually move full time to Italy. To do this we needed to downsize to a smaller base in the UK. The obvious candidate was my little cottage, Stone House, in the Surrey Hills. We weren’t sure what to expect- the tenants had been secretive to the point that we wondered if they were in a cult.
We flew back to Italy for a couple of nights in Worthing as GS and his rowing mates were on the Annual Pub Crawl. The night before we ensured that Nigel at Anchored in Worthing was still the perveyor of the highest standard of Sussex beers, ales and ciders.
The next day GS had a savage sore throat he was convinced was Covid and a banging headache. With trepidation we took a load of furniture to the house to start The Great Unpack.
My poor house.
The two sweaty operatives doing a professional end of tenancy clean looked harassed and said they had never seen anything like it. Even after their best efforts the windows were opaque with dirt, the walls not spotted with mould, but black, black as a smoker’s lungs. As the florid detergent from the carpet cleaner wore off so the odur of dog excrement arose.
We started to move things from the three stores we had crushed with the contents of our house. Soon, having made barely in indentation on it, the rooms were full, the courtyard outside was full and we were having to put tarpaulin over furniture that hadn’t made it in and crates (thank God for Really Useful Boxes) Just then Storm Ciaran started to blow in.
Within hours the boiler was leaking into a bucket, water was smashing in through the bathroom window where the guttering above had been blocked, ditto dripping through the brickwork into the kitchen, more towels that in a Victorian midwifery unit.
Like deer caught in the glare of an ongoing truck we tried to formulate a plan. I would paint the walls and floors in Little Greene as fast as I could so we could get furniture in. Meanwhile we would call in the all the trades that have worked on our houses and beg them for help. We set to work…
We didn’t think it could get any worse but storm Cairan’s parting gift was to blow-up the water works so then there was ‘water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink’ Luckily however we had a solution – the buckets collecting the leaks could be used to flush the loo! Hurrah!
Three weeks later, the house falling down around our ears, but with a plan, the rooms rammed with crates to the ceiling, the water beginning to dribble once more, at least downstairs, with no heating, and three lots of leaks, we took the cat to his babysitters (three stops to fling catpooh out of the window) and we were once more, thank fully boarding for Pisa, back to the light. Back to Villa Proserpina, hot water, electricity, space and organic wine – oh and Archie’s posh 21st dinner house party. What could possibly go wrong
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