Florence in spring – particularly after an interminable cold wet English winter – seems a revelation and a blessing. In the Fens the trees are still bare: in Tuscany they’re in full fresh green leaf, and there’s even the promise of lime blossom in the air. It’s been a cool wet spring in Tuscany too, and the Arno is high and fast-flowing but I arrived with the first properly warm day: the tourists are in shorts, although the locals are still wearing their quilted coats. They’ll go on wearing them until May, whatever the temperatures, for fear of ‘catching a chill’, that mysterious and sinister condition that seems particularly to afflict those who live in balmy climates.
I’m regularly asked if I come back here – on average once a month throughout the year – for inspiration and/or research, and I tend to demur, because it feels as though I come for fun, or something like it: I walk...
