Window on the world
ITALIAN is my first language. My mother partly grew up in Florence and went to school at Poggio Imperiale, where she learned this wonderful, outmoded Italian speech from the heyday of Tuscan cultural life, between the wars. My parents chose to speak Italian to me and I learned English from their summer guests.
Growing up outside Siena in the 1970s, at a time when the countryside was changing and agriculture was becoming industrialised, was paradise. It was isolated and
