Welcome to Litsy!

Firstly, the blurb on this book feels a little misleading. D. H. Lawrence and other writers and painters are hardly a part of this story.

Secondly, this feels like a love letter to the employees her family had and their farmers. To the Italian food. The way they make olive oil and wine.

Kinta came to live in her parents castle when she was 5 and it was after WWI. And we follow what happens over the next couple of decades well into the 50s.

John Sparrow, the Warden of All Souls, would bring reading parties from Oxford. Vittorio, who had a profound reverence for learning, was intrigued to know what books these great intellectuals had brought with them to read. So one day, on the roof-garden after lunch, he discreetly peered over their shoulders as he served them coffee. He returned to the kitchen, his illusions shattered. ‘Just imagine‘, he told Maria. ‘They were all reading Agatha

The kitchen took up most of the north side of the house, with the square tower above used mainly as a storeroom. Kitchens were traditionally installed upstairs in Florentine villas so that the smell of cooking did not enter the reception rooms and main bedrooms on the ground floor.

(A picture of Fortezza della Brunella which is where the family of I have understood it correctly)

Church bells, […] Their chime was so much more cheerful than the mournful Protestant tolling of the north. Yet many of them originally came from England, either sold off following Henry VIII‘s dissolution of monasteries, or exported. English bell foundries were regarded as the best in Europe. So prized were they that towards the end of Queen Elizabeth‘s reign the Corsini family managed to extract the capital of their bank in the City of London by

I came back from Luca late last night. The main event was to hear Andrea Botticelli in Teatro del Silenzio in his hometown, Lajatica. That doesn‘t mean that we didn‘t have time for other things as well.

We visited Etta‘s Bookshop, in independent English bookstore. And off course I bought some books and a book sleeve.

I preparation for an upcoming trip to Rome, Tuscany, and Naples, Italy, I thought this would be a good read... we shall see. I will post a review soon.