Nicky Haslam

Immaculate conceptions

A strange mixture of sand, lime, glue and hair make up the exquisite moulded ceilings of the greatest houses of Europe

Some 30 summers ago we were staying at a famously beautiful villa outside Turin; our hostess was — indeed is — renowned for her superb taste and distilled perfection of every aspect of douceur de vivre. Each night we dined in a different sylvan setting — under inky trees, in flower-filled gardens and in 18th-century rococo salons, amid porcelain bouquets of those selfsame flowers.

Another room, with candles lighting the chinoiserie panelling, is forever incised in my mind, not only for the decor but for the last course. In what appeared to be a vast rock-crystal bowl (in fact simply ice) was a fruit salad made solely of white fruit — white strawberries and white raspberries from frames and canes; white peaches and nectarines from glasshouses; white cherries, grapes and pears from orchards; white apricots from Armenia. Pale as moonbeams, its contours gleaming, this creation was as refined as the frankly edible marvels of plasterwork illustrating this ravishing, erudite book.


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Refined — but not in the genteel sense. To the ancients, white was the colour of heaven. So perhaps the fact that there is no true white — any more than there is true black — on Earth, made it nigh impossible, but highly desirable, to create it artificially. So doing had been the goal of western civilisations for centuries (the Chinese, conversely, associate white with death). It was, and still is, symbolic of immaculateness — that mystical yet ever-enduring ideal. The rarest things are white.

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