Read Flirting in Italian for Free Online Page B

out in equally perfect rows, cascading down green slopes in a patchwork of delicate colors: rich green grass, the darker emerald of the vine leaves, fluffy gray-green puffball-topped olive trees, gray stone buildings. Tiny cars, bright flashes of color, wind their way up narrow little roads lined with cypress trees, clouds of white dust trailing in their wake like jet streams behind airplanes. Occasionally, there’s a vivid chemical flash of blue, a perfect rectangle of tiled swimming pool.
    My fingers are itching to pick up a pencil, crayons, a stick of charcoal, and start sketching. My friend Milly is really into photography, but that’s never been my thing; I’ve always liked to see the picture I’m making grow slowly on the sketch pad or canvas even though I don’t have much experience in art.
    But now, my eyes wide as I take in one spectacular panorama after another, I wish, with all my heart, that I’d been to a school that maybe did proper art O- and A-levels, not just a few art classes. Because the small drawing ability that I have is not going to be able to do justice to the amazing views that I’m dying to get on paper.
    “I feel sick!” Paige whines beside me, snapping me out of my reverie. “I’m getting totally carsick! These roads are
way
too bendy!”
    “Open the window and put your head out,” Catia snaps, driving, if anything, even faster.
    “Ugh! My hair’ll get all messed up!” Grumpily, Paige buzzes down the window and pokes her nose out, holding her hair flat with both hands clamped to the sides of her head. She gulps in deep breaths of air as the vehicle lurches along.
    “She looks like a dog,” Kelly mutters to me. “You know, when they stick their heads out of car windows?”
    “A golden Labrador,” I mumble back. “Big and shiny, but no brains at all.”
    Paige is definitely built on a large scale; she’s not at all fat, just big-boned, sturdy, like a lacrosse player, which she probably is; she glows with health, and her golden tan isenviable. The more I think about the Labrador comparison, the better it is.
    “Any better?” Kendra twists around in her seat to look at Paige. “Do you want to swap places?”
    Now, Kendra
, I think,
is a greyhound. Lean and elegant, not a hair out of place
.
    “We’re nearly there,” Catia snaps as the jeep turns sharply onto a side road, jouncing and bumping on the dirt surface. Paige sensibly ducks back in before her head gets severed by a particularly enthusiastic bounce. We’re traveling up a steep avenue lined with cypresses, as so many of the roads seem to be; the pale dust from the road surface has already coated the bases of the trees and the tangle of undergrowth on either side. The road drops away, to oohs and aahs from all of us as we see the valley below, a village in a bowl of green to our left, rows of vines flowing in straight lines down the hillside on our right. I notice bunches of tiny dark purple grapes growing on the vines, half hidden by the clustering leaves; and bright red roses planted along the edges, climbing up the stakes, twining around them lovingly.
    It’s so beautiful. I’ve seen wonderful landscapes before; my mum likes to travel, and of course we go to Norway every year. I’ve seen Scottish mountains, French chateaux, even the Sydney Harbor Bridge when we went to Australia two years ago. But there’s something about Tuscany that stirs up my heart like nowhere else. I want to paint every inch of it. I can’t wait to start the art lessons.
    It feels like coming home.
    All the girls are squealing now as the jeep crunchesover ruts and potholes, throwing us against our seat belts. We’re turning through high gateposts, down an even narrower road, almost a track; and then white gleams through the trees and Catia is swinging the jeep to a halt, wheels crunching on gravel, in front of a wide cream-stuccoed villa, pale mauve wisteria climbing up its sides and softening its square lines.
    “Welcome to Villa