At the Villa Fasola, Camera Bassa, Via di Santa Margherita a Montici, Firenze
A white sky, just blue, chinks and spots through leaves. Sprung across the window, bouncing in a warm stir of air, branches of fig, thick leaves, notched and curled carrying powder-blue lights and cabbage-green shadows, grey branches, yellow branches, pink branches, thick yellow-white stems and veins. Behind it a thick ledge, two thirds up the window space. Dark green slatted shutters open, white frames, white-squared windows open inwards, white linen curtains, thin but not shifting, white walls with grey skirting painted round, white central heating pipes, the curtains on thick wooden rings on a knobbed brown wood rod. The floor, terracotta tiles, big tiles, solid as stone, glazed texture, highly polished, right through the flat, corridor and all paled orange, cold to the feet, mixing soft shadows and reflected lights while the walls and ceiling stand matt white. Huge wardrobes of plain old brown wood in bedroom and living room. A round table, old again, with slender, nearly straight legs suddenly taking ankles and ending in tiptoes dog’s feet. Cane chairs. A pair of unpolished small tables, square tops like trays with edges, and turned legs, kneed with Jacobean pyramid leg armour, on  either side of a bed that is a couch, covered with blue cloth with a white flower pattern in a strip up both sides. The back of the couch a slightly puffed straw pad set up the wall. Mirrors in picture frames, big and plain wood, small, broad, heavy and gilded. A plain dark green dish on ...