Here I Am!

This is the view from my window at the lovely Hotel Giotto in Assisi. I come here every summer to teach with Art Workshop International. The view never changes. I never, ever get tired of it.

In a strange way, it seems like home.

Did I live here in another life?

A Poor Clare, perhaps. Explaining my lifelong fascination with nuns.

Probably, it’s just the kind of feeling of home that comes being with people of like mind for two weeks, where you can be the writer you are, see and think what writers see and think—and everybody gets it.

In truth, I’ve fallen in love with Italy generally. So I thought I’d share a few novels that bring Italy alive so vividly you’ll feel like you’re actually there. .

Next year, though, consider coming to write, draw, or paint in Assisi.

You won’t regret it.

I’d love to know the number of women, young and old, who read this book and made up their minds they were going to go to Italy, no matter what.

Me, for one.

It tells the story of four British women who respond to an advertisement in the London Times addressed “To Those Who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine” and find themselves sharing the rental of a small medieval castle in Portofino one April shortly after WW1.

(I love that: small medieval castle.)

They couldn’t be more different. Dowdy, downtrodden Mrs. Wilkins; sweet, sad Mrs. Arbuthnot; formidable, widowed Mrs. Fisher and the gorgeous socialite Lady Caroline Dester.

“As each, in turn, blossoms in the warmth of the Italian spring and finds their spirits stirring, quite unexpected changes occur.”

Kip, an Indian sapper searching for hidden bombs in a ravaged Tuscan landscape, Caravaggio, an Italian thief with maimed hands who no longer knows who he is, and Hana, an exhausted Canadian army nurse tending to a mute soldier burned beyond recognition they call the English Patient, spend the last months of WW2 in an abandoned villa, a world of their own where they begin to heal. Meanwhile, the English Patient relives in his memory the love, suffering, rescue and betrayal that brought him to this place.

Definitely not a light story. But gorgeous and compelling. And there’s a middle-of-the-night scene, in which Kip takes Hana to Arezzo and rigs up a swing so Hana can see Piero’s frescos in the cathedral up close that is to die for.

See the clip from the (fabulous) movie here.

Clara, the beautiful daughter of Margaret Anderson, a wealthy woman from the deep South, falls in love with Fabizio, a young Italian man, when she and her mother visit Florence together. Neither speaks the other’s language, but—love, right? Who needs words?

The thing is, a childhood injury left Clara with the mental age of ten, but Fabizio is so smitten he doesn’t notice.

Will Margaret tell him or allow Clara to marry him—and leave her behind?  

I love a good comedy of manners and A Room with a View is absolute perfection.

Florence, the early 1900s: Miss Lucy Honeychurch, chaperoned by her spinster cousin Miss Charlotte Bartlett arrive at the Pensione Bertolini disappointed to discover that their rooms do not overlook the Arno, as promised but a drab courtyard.

When the eccentric (very unsuitable) Mr. Emerson and his son George insist on swapping rooms, an unlikely, often hilarious alliance with them finds Lucy increasingly torn between the world she knows and is meant to inhabit and the passionate yearnings of her heart.

Maybe my favorite thing in the book is the moment when, under the influence of George, whom she’s falling in love with in spite of herself, Lucy tosses her Baedecker and “...the pernicious charm of Italy worked on her, and, instead of acquiring information, she began to be happy.”

Such a fabulous book—and movie, with nineteen-year-old Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy.