The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Flashback
Benedetta Origo remembers childhood summers in Italy with her writer mother, Iris
Summers in Italy with Iris Origo, by her daughter
THIS IS A PHOTOGRAPH of my mother, Iris Origo, my sister, Donata – who is almost three years younger but was very plucky and sporting – and me. We are sitting on a stone wall at our summer home in a small town called Lerici in Italy, with the Gulf of
La Spezia behind us.
My mother was always so elegant and fresh, with her pale-turquoise linen dress and canvas sandals handmade by Ferragamo, and she had the most extraordinary periwinkle-blue eyes. My sister and I were invariably dressed the same at that age. We were never told to be careful not to get our clothes dirty. I remember playing in the dust and there was an Italian mother looking at us, and she rather disapprovingly turned to my Swiss nanny and said, ‘They’re getting awfully dirty.’ My nanny looked at her and said, ‘At home, we have soap.’
The house was built in the early 1920s by the architect Cecil Pinsent
(who also came to our home in Tuscany, La Foce, and restored that, too). It was before my parents were married – my mother visited the area with her mother. She looked down on this beautiful rocky coastline and the villages of Lerici and Tellaro, pointed to a promontory and said, ‘That’s where I want my house.’ She was able to buy the land and Cecil built this lovely home, straddling the two bays with a cave underneath going from one side of the promontory to the other.
When my mother decided to sell the Lerici house in the late ’70s because she couldn’t keep on looking after it, Berlusconi was interested in buying it, though he didn’t in the end.
My mother was an absolutely wonderful storyteller. At bedtime she would choose ghost stories, which was perhaps not such a good idea. We would huddle up together in the dark after she’d left us. She was wonderful at organising games for us, too, such as treasure hunts. We would also play and swim with the Beevor boys, Nigel, Hugh and Antony [the military historian], who lived nearby with their mother, Kinta. Antony was the youngest and when he got tired, Kinta would swim with him on her shoulders.
My mother loved children. She built a children’s home near La Foce and found adoptive families for orphans in America and Italy. During the war, this same children’s home was put aside to house children who came from heavily bombed areas. Many were sent to the country where they were much safer, except they weren’t that safe after all because the front came right past our door. The Germans took over La Foce and we were evicted from our home. All of this is told in my mother’s diary, which has become a classic book called War in Val d’orcia.
It was hard to let the Lerici house go but times change; La Foce was our real home, and my children and grandchildren feel it’s where they belong.
Still, I like to remember Lerici the way it was. We would spend the evenings after supper on the loggia, watching the fishing boats go by in the dark; each one had a lamp held out above the water to attract the fish, which would then be caught in nets. It was the most romantic of times for a child; it was absolutely magical.
When my mother decided to sell the summer house in the late ’70s, Berlusconi was interested in buying it