When I was about to start a weekend colour supplement for the Independent in 1988, I got a note from the poet James Fenton containing a list of ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ about what to put in it. The one that has stuck in my mind was to include no articles about Tuscany. This was very good advice, but far from easy to act upon.
Those parts of the media concerned with ‘lifestyle’ were then obsessed with Tuscany, having recently invented the ghastly word ‘Chiantishire’ to embrace the idea that the area between Florence and Siena had become a sort of English upper-class preserve. This was strange, because the British were very thin on the ground there. But it was an idea that took such root that the British media could not be deterred from publishing endless articles about it. Tuscany was vying with Provence, about to be celebrated in the best-selling books of Peter Mayle, as the principal dream destination for anyone fed up with life in Britain.
Tuscany, of course, has a great deal to commend it, as the British have known for centuries. Many have always resided in Florence. But the British presence in Chianti was something that started in the 1960s, when discerning Britons of slender means saw an opportunity to snap up farmhouses in idyllic settings and enjoy the kind of pastoral tranquillity that they could not aspire to at home. Such houses were then incredibly cheap. Many hundreds had been left abandoned by peasants migrating to the cities in search of work. There was such poverty in the countryside that, according to Bill Thomson, the chairman of Knight Frank in Italy, there was no lavatory paper on sale in the now rich little town of Radda-in-Chianti until 1964 (they used brown wrapping paper instead).
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