The English have always been drawn to Tuscany, so that in the last century the common Italian word for foreigners, no matter from what country they came, was inglesi. One hotel porter in Siena was apparently heard to say, ‘We’ve got six English in tonight: three of them are French, two Germans, and one Russian.’ The fountain of all knowledge about the Brits in Chiantishire was Harold Acton. Was he the original Anthony Blanche, the prickly aesthete in Brideshead Revisited? Admittedly he used to recite The Waste Land through a megaphone while at Oxford. When I visited him he lived in a villa, built by a Medici banker, on the outskirts of Florence. If it always seemed late afternoon indoors, the garden was full of sunshine. It boasted huge statues and a theatre made of lawns and hedges in which the Diaghilev Ballet, marooned in Florence during the 1914 war, once danced for he boy Acton.

(John Mortimer, Murderers and Other Friends.)