Anatomy of Restlessness Read Online Free PDF Page A

brought to our house. Within minutes we were all old friends: within months I was a regular visitor to Donnini.
    The house is a casa colonica : the colonists in question being settlers from the Arno Valley who fanned out in waves over the Tuscan countryside from the fourteenth century onwards. Its solid architecture, of stone and tile, is unchanged since that of classical antiquity. Indeed, until about thirty years ago, what Horace had to say of his Tuscan farm could also be said of the life in any casa colonica.
    At nights the thirty-odd members of an extended family would curl up to sleep under the rafters. By day they would tend their sheep or their beehives, vines and olives. They ploughed the narrow terraced fields with white oxen and lived, austerely, on a diet of bread and beans, cakes of chestnut flour, and meat or pigeon maybe once a month. Then, in the postwar industrial boom, the farmers went to work in the factories, leaving thousands of farms untenanted.
    Grisha Rezzori, by temperament and upbringing, is a ‘mover’: it would be impossible for any biographer to trace his zigzagging course through Europe and America. The Rezzoris were Sicilian noblemen who Austrianised themselves and ended up in the Bukovina, the farthest-flung province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now swallowed into the Soviet Union.
    A marginal man, cast adrift as a civilian in wartime Germany, he fastened his ironic stare on the fall of the Nazis and its aftermath, and with his prodigious gift for storytelling settled down (more or less!) at Donnini and wove these stories into his monumental novel The Death of My Brother Abel .
    In summer he would work in a converted hay barn; in winter in a cavernous and book-stacked library where, among his rescued souvenirs, there is a faded sepia photo of the rambling manor, now presumably a collective farm, which was once his family house. Yet to watch Il Barone (as his Tuscan neighbours call him) reemerging from a snowstorm in a greatcoat after a night walk alone in the woods or to see him strolling through the olive groves with his dogs (or the two tame wild boars Inky and Pinkie) was to realise that he had recovered, or reinvented, the ‘lost domain’ of his boyhood.
    I associate visits to Donnini with hoots of belly laughter. The Rezzoris have a knack of attracting farcical situations. Their immediate neighbours are a well-known German film director and his wife. This couple had friends among the European Far Left. Their guests included Daniel Cohn-Bendit, better known as Danny le Rouge; and somehow the Italian carabinieri got it into its collective head that they might be harbouring Brigate Rosse . They also got the wrong house and with helicopters and Jeeps staged an ‘attack’ on the Rezzoris, calling them with loudhailers to come out, unarmed, with their hands up.
    The Tower stands a short way from the house on a spur of land overlooking the Arno Valley. When I first went to Donnini, it was lived in by a peasant family and still belonged to the Guicciardini family, whose forebear was the patron of Dante’s friend, the poet Guido Cavalcanti. And although Beatrice used to say, with a slightly predatory glint, ‘I have a fantasy to buy that Tower,’ I confess to having had designs on it myself As a boy, on a walking tour of Périgord, I had spent hours in Montaigne’s famous tower, with the Greek and Latin inscriptions on the rafters, and now I, too, had a fantasy – the fantasy of a compulsive mover – that I would settle down in the smiling Tuscan landscape and take up scholarly pursuits. Beatrice’s fantasy, however, was a lot stronger than mine. Besides, I have noticed in her a flair for putting fantasies into action. The tenants left the Tower. She bought it and began the work of restoration. Her friend the Milanese architect Marco Zanuso designed the outside staircase that leads to the upper room. Inside, it became a ‘turquerie’;