In the seventies Sile and I went to work in The Wife of Bath restaurant in Wye near Canterbury in Kent.
This restaurant was owned and run by a Chef called Michael Waterfield, a man who turned out to be one of my greatest influences in my chosen career as well as a good friend.
While we were in Kent Michael was in the process of editing for Penguin a cookbook which had been published in hardback a few years before. This was Leaves from a Tuscan Kitchen originally published at the end of the 1800s by Michael’s Great Aunt Janet Ross which he had brought up to date in the early seventies.
Little pieces of information trickled down to us in the two years we worked in The Wife of Bath; one was that Michael’s Aunt Janet had lived in a fairly impressive Castle in Fiesole outside Florence called Poggio Gherardo which had featured in Boccaccio’s Decameron and that Michael himself had inherited a castle in Tuscany called Fortezza della Brunella in Aulla also in Tuscany which was in the process of being compulsorily purchased by the Italian government.
As I said Michael continued to be a friend, he is the godfather of our eldest daughter and has stayed with us here in the Languedoc on a few occasions.
Then in 1995 I fell upon a book called A Tuscan Childhood written by Michael’s Aunt; Kinta Beevor (mother of the historian Anthony Beevor) which is a wonderful history of her childhood in the Fortezza and in Poggio Gherardo with her Aunt Janet. She brings these houses beautifully to life as well as evoking her childhood in Tuscany in the 1930’s .
Then just last summer I came across another book about the Waterfield family:
Queen Bee of Tuscany : The Redoubtable Janet Ross written ( and also very well written) by Ben Downing.
This was the final straw that clinched our holiday this year.
At the end of the Autumn we are going to spend two weeks in Italy, one near Aulla and the Fortezza and the other in Fiesole close to Aunt Janet’s old house.