One of the reasons Daphne Phelps didn’t relish having hoi polloi like me at Casa Cuseni (see The Gardens at Casa Cuseni, Sicily) is that she was used to welcoming important people like Tennessee Williams, Roald Dahl and Bertrand Russell as her guests. In fact the locals were so used to seeing the rich and famous there that the local paper had a headline saying that Greta Garbo was due to arrive, but, as Miss Phelps makes clear in “A House in Sicily”, she never made it.
Casa Cuseni was sought out because it has the best outlook of any of the “English” houses in Italy. The red roofs of the town of Taormina tumble down below it; on one side is the azure blue of the Ionian Sea; on the other the towering mass of Mount Etna. The volcano is alive and in winter the snow on its peak is often cut through with rivers of red molten lava. The garden, like the other “English” gardens, is on a steep terrace, at the bottom of which is a large deep pool which has the dual purpose of an irrigation tank and a swimming pool. Immense care was taken to make the most of the location in the design of the pool and it was built with mathematical precision so that when both the moon and the pool were full the reflection of the snow-capped Mt Etna would be seen in the water, framed by two pink columns. Similarly, the main bedroom of the house was positioned so that the window framed the view of Mt Etna.
Since Daphne Phelps’ death the house has been opened as a boutique hotel. Each of the rooms has been named after a famous former guest. I was amused to see that the main bedroom with the view of Mt Etna has been called the “Greta Garbo” room and that her non-arrival has been magically transformed on the hotel’s website into the claim that she stopped there for a year.
“If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods”, or as it is usually put,
In my three weeks away, I didn’t once switch on the TV or see an English newspaper and didn’t miss them one bit. On the other hand, I did miss my garden and it was a big disappointment to get back and find that the tomatoes had finished. But the flower garden, in spite of the onset of autumn, is still going strong. There’s colour everywhere, from the maples, which are turning a dark red, to the dahlias and cannas. At this time of year you expect the hybrid dahlias to start showing signs of wear and tear, but the tree dahlias are just getting into their stride and are covered in flowers.
Until very recently Paris was the undisputed capital of gastronomy. Then the Michelin inspectors turned up in Tokyo and found, to everyone’s amazement, that the standards in Tokyo were higher. Tokyo now has 14 3 Star restaurant’s compared to Paris’s 10 – and, to put things in perspective, London’s 1.
Japan is dark green, England pale green. The dark green of Japan is the forest which covers three quarters of its land mass. The pale green of England is its agricultural land- what we fondly call our “green and pleasant land”. The stark contrast between our two countries came home to me today in a 500 mile plane journey from Tokyo to Fukuoka. There was no cloud cover, so you could see the country clearly set out before you, from coast to coast. Essentially, Japan is one mountain range after another; steep mountian sides which are useless for farming, hence the dense forest. All the people and all the cultivation are crowded in the few flat parts, which are mainly along the coast. Japan has one quarter of the usable land of the UK and double the population.