Philip thought of Italy, and the whole situation was saved. Even I hadn’t realised how deeply I’d been seduced by that one sentence from my choice of senior Cambridge literature in 1969, E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread. At seventeen, the line struck me immediately for the sole reason it had my name in it. I was otherwise totally indifferent to the author’s or the book’s deep, subversive nature. Its impact would only return more meaningfully on my first trip to Italy in the late seventies while travelling with an antiquated rucksack containing a ridge tent, living on bread, cheese and cheap red wine so I could afford just one night in a crumbling villa with stucco walls the colour of roses and a room with a view … of winding terraces of grapes and olives, overlooking the ancient walled-town of Lucca. How could I have imagined I’d be a permanent resident of the same province, growing to love it as one with an ancestral connection might?
