Evening Vespas
LIVING YOUR BEST LIFE hadn’t been invented when I last spent time in Florence but being twenty-one and having Via delle Belle Donne as my address is probably the closest I’ll ever get.
Nominally studying history of art at the British Institute, I seem to remember my main preoccupations being how to dismount elegantly from sitting sidesaddle on a Vespa in a mini skirt and which intense public schoolboy doing oil painting at the Charles Cecil school I liked that week.
The Charles Cecil boys are still in evidence and seeing my daughter off for a night on might have left me a bit wistful; in fact, I was grateful that these days scooter helmets are compulsory and that I could drift off at 10pm on our tiny balcony overlooking Ponte Vecchio. More Charlotte Bartlett than Lucy Honeychurch these days.
