15 May 1933 – 21 May 1933

This should be all description—I mean of the little pointed green hills; and the white oxen and the poplars and the cypresses and the sculptured shaped infinitely musical, flushed green land from here to Abbazia*—that is where we went today; and couldn’t find it and asked one after another of the charming tired peasants, but none had been 4 miles beyond their range, until we came to the stonebreaker and he knew. He could not stop work to come with us, because the inspector was coming tomorrow. And he was alone, alone, all day with no one to talk to. So was the aged Maria at the Abbazia. And she mumbled and slipped her words, as she showed us into the huge bare stone building; mumbled and mumbled, about the English—how beautiful they were. Are you a Contessa? she asked me. But she didn’t like Italian country either. They seem stinted, dried up; like grasshoppers and with the manners of impoverished gentle people; sad, wise, tolerant, humorous. There was the man with the mule. He let the mule gallop away down the road. We are welcome, because we might talk; they draw round and discuss us after we’re gone. Crowds of gentle kindly boys and girls always come about us and wave and touch their hats. And nobody looks at the view—except us—at the Euganean, bone white, this evening; then there’s a ruddy red farm or two; and light islands swimming here and there in the sea of shadow—for it was very showery—then there are the black stripes of cypresses round the farm; like fur edges; and the poplars and the streams and the nightingales singing and sudden gusts of orange blossom; and white alabaster oxen with swinging chins—great flaps of white leather hanging under their noses—and infinite emptiness, loneliness, silence: never a new house, or a village; but only the vineyards and the olive trees, where they have always been. The hills go pale blue, washed very sharp and soft on the sky; hill after hill.

It’s a queer thing that I write a date. Perhaps in this disoriented life one thinks, if I can say what day it is, then . . . Three dots to signify I don’t know what I mean. But we have been driving all day from Lerici over the Apennines and it is now cold, cloistral, highly uncomfortable, in a vast galleried Italian inn, so ill provided with chairs that now at this present moment we are squatted, L. in a hard chair by his bed, I on the bed, in order to take advantage of the single light which burns between us. L. is writing directions to the Press. I am about to read Goldoni. Lerici is hot and blue and we had a room with a balcony. There were Misses and Mothers—misses who had lost all chance of life long ago, and could with a gentle frown, a frown of mild sadness, confront a whole meal—arranged for the English—in entire silence, dressed as if for cold Sunday supper in Wimbledon. Then there’s the retired Anglo-Indian, who takes shall we say Miss Toutchet for a walk, a breezy red faced man, very fond of evensong at the Abbey. She goes to the Temple; where “my brother” has rooms. Et cetera. Et cetera. Of the Apennines I have nothing to say—save that up on the top they’re like the inside of a green umbrella: spine after spine: and clouds caught on the point of the stick. And so down to Parma; hot, stony, noisy; with shops that don’t keep maps; and so on along a racing road, to Piacenza, at which we find ourselves now at 6 minutes to 9 P.M. This of course is the rub of travelling—this is the price paid for the sweep and the freedom—the dusting of our shoes and careering off tomorrow—and eating our lunch on a green plot beside a deep cold stream. It will be all over this day week—comfort—discomfort; and the zest and rush that no engagements, hours, habits give. Then we shall take them up again with more than the zest of travelling.

To write to keep off sleep—that is the exalted mission of tonight—tonight sitting at the open window of a second-rate inn in Draguignan—with plane trees outside, the usual single noted bird, the usual loudspeaker. Everybody in France motors on Sunday; then sleeps it off at night. The hotel keepers are gorged and scarcely stop playing cards. But Grasse was too plethoric—we came on here late. We leave here early. I dip into Creevey; L. into Golden Bough. We long for bed. This is the tax for travelling—these sleepy uncomfortable hotel nights— sitting on hard chairs under the lamp. But the seduction works as we start—to Aix tomorrow—so home. And “home” becomes a magnet, for I can’t stop making up the P’s: can’t live without that intoxicant—though this is the loveliest and most distracting alternative. But I’m full of holiday and want work— ungrateful that I am!—and yet I want the hills near Fabbria too and the hills near Siena—but no other hills—not these black and green violent monotonous southern hills. We saw poor Lawrence’s Phoenix picked out in coloured pebbles at Vence today among all the fretted lace tombs.