Writing

Gli abbandonati, Tuscany

Lining the hillside, connected by terrazzo and terracotta filled pathways lie ‘gli abbandonati’. Abandoned farmhouses, stables, and estate houses who unobtrusively pepper the landscape in varying states of decay.

A la Ronde, devon

Sat overlooking the Exe estuary, A la Ronde, a 16-sided house is an unusual home of eccentricity, decoration, ingenuity and intrigue. Filled with two women’s curiosities from their travels of Europe.

VENICE, ITALY

I wondered if they travelled here just to be rendered speechless. To lose the ability to truly find words weighty or worthy enough to pronounce her beauty, her seduction and her remoteness. Perhaps they used to. Do they travel here now knowing that time, on its eternal forward march, isn’t on her side. 

Duomo di Siena, Italy

Moving through archways and high rising, solid facades of palazzi, there is a sense that as Hisham Matar wrote in his reflective ‘A Month in Siena’ one is ‘entering a living organism’.

Blickling Hall, Norfolk

Charles Harper, a leisure traveller in 1904 said of Blickling, ‘There it stands, like some proud, conscious beauty, isolated… It might be some enchanted palace, not waked to life and love’. 

The Florence Baptistery

Thought to be the oldest structure in the city, and beloved of Dante who called it ‘my beautiful San Giovanni’, it has stood at the centre of Florentine life from around the 4th century.

The Southwester Paper

Letter to a Friend

Do you remember when we first arrived? In the combe below the swaying pines in a February storm…..