While Iris Origo was researching the life of early 19th-century poet Giacomo Leopardi, the author/biographer’s first impulse was to visit his home in Recanati, in the Marche region. Nothing learned from papers and books, or even from a subject’s own words, she reflected in Images and Shadows, her recently republished memoir, can replace a direct visual image or the sensation of having lived, even if only for a few hours, in the same physical environment.
So it was with trepidation that I first stepped into Iris, my beloved writer’s, own private rooms at La Foce, the villa on the vast estate of Val d’Orcia, south of Siena, that the Anglo-American and Marchese Antonio Origo bought in 1924, months before they got married. Iris’s quarters are situated on the first floor of the villa: four bright rooms looking on to the garden and, beyond it, ‘the vast, lonely, uncompromising’ landscape. Iris spent her most cherished hours here: writing, reading, playing the piano, having intimate conversations with family and close friends. Her daughters, when they were children, and later on her eldest granddaughter, Katia Lysy, kept her company while she took her morning bath, reading books aloud and discussing them with her.
These pictures, taken days before the villa underwent a renovation, show her rooms exactly as she had left them when she died there in 1988, at the age of 85. Her books were still lying on side tables and stacked on her writing desk. Her forte-piano was in its rightful spot and her clothes were still hanging in her wardrobe. Flowers from her cutting garden stood in small glass vases, just as she liked them. Her presence filled every room, as if she might return any minute.
In November 1923 Iris Cutting (her maiden name) had been scouring Tuscany with her then fiancé in search of ‘a place with enough work to fill our lifetime’. She dreamed of a house more modest than, but not too dissimilar to, Villa Medici, the Renaissance gem built by Michelozzo in Florence. Aged seven, she and her Irish mother, Lady Sybil Desart, had moved to the villa on the hill of Fiesole after the premature death of Iris’s father, Bayard Cutting, scion of a wealthy New York family. Their money came from railways, shipping, land development and sugar beet. Iris soon realised, however, that a Renaissance villa could be found only on land ‘with terraced hillsides planted with olive-trees, and vineyards that were already fruitful and trim in the days of the Decameron’.
The last one on a long list of estates for her and Antonio to see was at the end of a harsh drive up a stony cart-road bordered by neglected woodland. Their spirits sank lower at every turn until they reached the very top: a bare, windswept plateau that commanded a view of Val d’Orcia. Beyond it stood Mount Amiata, an extinct volcano that, like Fukuyama, Iris recalled, dwarfed the whole landscape. With its 3,500 acres of fallow arable land and its 25 stone farmhouses inhabited by crowded families with minimal education and living on a meagre diet, this estate offered infinitely more than a project to last a lifetime. It would be an epic adventure. ‘To live in the shadow of that mysterious mountain,’ Origo wrote, ‘to arrest the erosion of those steep ridges, to turn this bare clay into wheat fields, to rebuild these farms and see prosperity return to its inhabitants, to restore the greenness of those mutilated woods – that, for sure, was the life that we wanted.’
The interiors of the hilltop villa, a 16th-century house of ‘modest proportions’, as Iris described it, had been neglected for decades. Iris entrusted her friend Cecil Pinsent, the English architect who years earlier had restored Villa Medici’s gardens, to make them at least habitable: a kitchen, working fireplaces and one bathroom. When the Origos settled in after their honeymoon there was still no electricity or telephone and, for the time being, Iris’s desire for a garden had to be put on hold. Improving their personal domestic circumstances had to give way for now to the needs of the land and their tenants. Tractors replaced the oxen carts; farmhouses were renovated or built from scratch; they set up an infirmary and a place for the workers to gather after work. The project closest to Iris’s heart was the creation of a progressive Montessori school. Within ten years, the Origos had doubled the acreage and increased the number of farms from 25 to 57.
By the end of the 1920s Iris succeeded in carving out a space of her own. These four smallish, sunlit rooms seem modest now, were it not for some impressive antiques. Her writing desk, with its painted green foliage, and the mother-of-pearl appliques started life in the Villa Medici, while the Chinese porcelain pieces came from the Cuttings’ fabled collection. Her bedroom was brightened with the colourful Florentine weaves of Tessitura di Rovezzano. Made-to-measure furniture (all painted light blue) and a black-marble-accented bathroom lined with Vietri tiles were designed for her by Pinsent.
But what lends most character to these rooms is the garden. Initially, because of the shortage of water, it was a tiny refuge from the harsh landscape. Only after Iris’s American grandmother provided funds to divert water from a stream ten kilometres away did Iris and Pinsent expand the garden. Soon it would become a generous, verdant oasis with fountains, a shaded pergola of wisteria and Banksia roses, geometric box, a lemon and a rose garden. The project was abruptly interrupted after Gianni, the couple’s seven-year-old son, died of meningitis in 1933: ‘Every inch of the house and garden,’ she wrote, ‘every field and tree, seemed full of his presence – I felt that I could not come back.’
But come back to La Foce she did, albeit with long intervals in Britain, where she became a respected author, and in the USA. In 1940, Iris became pregnant again and had a daughter, Benedetta, who now lives at La Foce and who, with the help of her four children, takes great care of it. Iris and Antonio’s other child, Donata, lives in nearby Chiarentana, a fortified farm where she produces fine olive oil. La Foce, after its recent restoration, is as beautiful as ever. Though Iris’s rooms appear slightly changed from when I first saw them, their distinctive atmosphere is still intact. So are the views on to the garden and the wild, lunar landscape beyond.
The garden at La Foce, 61 Strada della Vittoria, 53042 Chianciano Terme (Siena), Italy, has reopened to the public. For details, visit lafoce.com. Several books by Iris Origo, including ‘A Chill in the Air’, her war diary, have recently been republished in Britain by Pushkin Press
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