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notes, olives and vineyards ‘were replaced with lawns and deciduous shade trees, herbaceous borders were planted with irises, crocuses, peonies and daffodils, woods and scrub were cleared, and steep dry-stone-walled terraces were covered with roses: Banksias, “Irene Watts” and “Madame Metral” ’.
    According to James Lord, when Harold Acton’s father, Arthur, bought Villa La Pietra (named for a stone pillar indicating a distance of one mile from the old city gate), the first task he undertook was the restoration of the gardens, which had been Anglicized in the nineteenthcentury. Like Edith Wharton (who coined the phrase), Acton Senior disdained ‘flower-loveliness’, preferring gardens that reinterpreted the Renaissance tradition. The Italian Renaissance garden was a narrative, the elements of which – fountains, hedges and statuary – worked together to elaborate a theme: the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, for example, described the labors of Hercules, while the Villa Lante at Bagnaia, built for Cardinal Gambara, Bishop of Viterbo, made a play on the similarity of his name to the word for crayfish (gambero) by incorporating crayfish motifs into its design. Giochi d’acqua – secret squirting fountains that doused the legs of unsuspecting visitors – were a common feature in these gardens, as were downhill water chains, musical water organs, ‘water tables’ on which the plates were floated during meals served al fresco, and statues of fantastic monsters, such as Giambologna’s famous Appennino statue at the Villa Demidoff in Pratolino, above Florence. The very ethos of the Renaissance garden put it into a different category from the English garden, the creator of which, in Florence, had to battle not onlyItalian tradition but a climate and soil that could hardly have been more resistant to British imports. Georgina Grahame’s 1902 memoir In a Tuscan Garden smacks of just the sort of jingoistic amateurism that sent McCarthy (and Wharton) over the edge. Such memoirs reek of colonialism – camphorated oil through which the ineradicable perfume of garlic, basil and tomatoes, set in a bowl of olive oil to sweat on a summer afternoon, persistently cuts.
    Food was no less a problem for the Anglo-Florentines. Curiously enough, many of the English who moved to Florence at the turn of the last century distrusted and disdained Italian cuisine. Spaghetti – Forster’s ‘delicious slippery worms’ – terrified them, because it defied years of training in how to eat politely. Although Ross’s Leaves from our Tuscan Kitchen seems quaintly old-fashioned today, its very emphasis on fresh vegetables made it, in the meaty England of the late nineteenth century, an almost subversive text. As early as 1614, Giacomo Castelvetro, a Venetian exiled in England, had complained of a certain English coarseness when it came to preparingsalads: ‘You English are even worse [than “the Germans and other uncouth nations”],’ he wrote;
after washing the salad heaven knows how, you put the vinegar in the dish first, and enough of that for a footbath for Morgante, and serve it up, unstirred, with neither oil nor salt, which you are supposed to add at table. By this time some of the leaves are so saturated with vinegar that they cannot take the oil, while the rest are quite naked and fit only for chicken food.
    By contrast, the Tuscans have always been great consumers of vegetables: eggplant, zucchini, legumes, spinach, borage, arugula and the famous Tuscan ‘black cabbage’ that is the basis of the Florentine soup known as ribollita. According to Castelvetro, the centrality of vegetables to the Italian diet owes in part to the fact that ‘Italy, though beautiful, is not as plentifully endowed as France or this fertile island with meat, so we make it our business to devise other ways of feeding our excessive population.’ The other reason he gives is that ‘the heat, which persists for almost ninemonths of the year, has the