Low life | 11 July 2019

The hotel manager had arranged for me to borrow an Alfa Romeo Spider Duetto two-seater convertible (1982) for the afternoon. And now, after lunch, here it was, as promised, parked on the forecourt. ‘You’re familiar with left-hand drive cars I take it, Mr Clarke?’ she said, a touch apprehensively I thought. ‘I’ve had a Spider,’ I said. ‘Similar to this, but a later, fuel-injected model.’ A true statement — although I was as confounded by it as she was. She handed me the key and a map with a suggested scenic route marked in Biro. I climbed in, fired the thing up, and with a cheery wave, 10,000 exploratory revs and a pip on the horn I set off through the village.

Soon I was motoring along a deserted B road of buckled tarmac threading its way through the Tuscan hills. Perhaps the simplest way, in this media age, to describe the fertile countryside on either side of the road is to say that The English Patient was filmed here. With the sun scorching my brow, a wobbly steering wheel, and my right arm rowing up and down the gears like a galley slave’s, the Duetto was not a relaxing drive. But the throaty, grunting engine noise, then its appearance, drew an astonished stare from an old man stacking straw bales. And after a dozen miles, it seemed to me that an Alfa Romeo Spider and an empty B road in front of you, on a sunny day in July, is a pretty good way to see Tuscany for the first time, especially if your visit coincidentally marks the beginning of a new chapter in your life.

It was somehow odd to see olive groves punctuating wheatfields.