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How to get ahead in Tuscany

29 June 2006

The village is seething with Brits. Well, it’s that time of year. There is a strict and, obviously, unspoken hierarchy which more often than not needs illustrating to one’s fellow countrymen (and especially women). For living among the English in Tuscany is a complicated game of snakes and ladders, the rules of which are never openly acknowledged but must be strictly adhered to at all times.

For example, the longer you own your house, the higher up the ladders you may climb. Full-time residents teeter happily on the uppermost rung (slightly prey, as in Britain, to the slippery snakes of accent and interior decor of foreign homes) while red-faced tourists wondering why the shops are shut in the middle of the day grasp frantically, their hot hands sticky with ice cream, for that elusive bottom rung. They grasp in vain.

Living in Italy is like being called to the bar. One defers, as one knows one must, to those with ten years’ call to one’s own meagre three, to neighbours who have been pressing their own olive oil for ... ‘Gosh, you know, I’ve no idea. Years, darling!’

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