Publisher's Synopsis
In 1967 Eric Newby and his wife Wanda fulfilled a long-cherished ambition when they acquired I Castagni, a small and excessively ruined farmhouse in the foothills of the Apuan Alps on the borders of Liguria and northern Tuscany. The house came with a tileless roof, a long-abandoned septic tank and a wealth of indigenous wildlife. This book is brilliant memoir of a house and magnificent re-creation of a forgotten time and era.
'Eric Newby must rank as one of the foremost travel writers of our age . . . His good humour, and his loving eye for a way of life now disappearing, makes it a sterling contribution to that very particular shelf of English literature, describing life as lived among the Italians' Hugh Carless, Guardian
'Newby is of course a travel writer of near genius - wonderfully dry in the narration of the tribulations which so often afflict him and Wanda, splendidly precise on the nuts and bolts of things . . . Highly readable and dangerously liable to induce a craving for one's own patch of Italian paradise' Martin Gayford, Sunday Telegraph
