Wisteria

In April, my thoughts turn to spring and the time when I set off for Italy to paint for the first time. Emerging from winter in the Midwest, it was an adventure inspired by the 1922 novel Enchanted April by British writer Elizabeth von Arnim.  Her book was set in the 15th century Castello Brown in Portofino. 

In the novel, four dissimilar women exchange the drab greyness of their post WW I lives in London for a month’s holiday in Italy after reading an advertisement about a villa that is for rent for the month of April.  The enormously popular book was later adapted for the screen in a 1991 Miramax film of the same title that I have watched every April since first discovering its magic. 

My journey was to a magical villa in Tuscany named Spannocchia.  A painter named Billyo O’Donnell had shown me a picture of the villa where he leads weeklong painting classes from time to time.  Seeing images of this magic place had the same effect on me as reading an advertisement about renting a sun-filled Italian villa in April had on the four women in von Arnim’s 1922 novel.  It didn’t matter that I’d never bought a paintbrush, easel, or oil paints in my life.  I could see myself there, and Kit with me. 

So off we went in 2010 with Billyo and a group of painters in search of Italian light that somehow we would capture on blank canvases, just as we had long done as writers, capturing words on paper or on a blank screen at a computer.  Our week was filled with magic light, outings to local historic hilltop towns, homemade meals prepared by local cooks in Spannocchia’s kitchen, walks to collect flowers and take in vistas that seemed to go on forever, and conversations with new friends who would become family in the years since that first trip together. 

A second trip followed three years later that combined a painting workshop led by Billyo with a writing workshop that I designed.  Should I ever be given the opportunity to live there forever, I would pack us up and leave immediately.  My days would be spent learning all I could from the cooks who prepare delicious dishes from the villa’s vegetable and herb gardens, aged ham and prosciutto from the black and white cinta pigs raised on the property, honey gathered from off the beaten path stacks of bee boxes, and wines and olive oil bottled from the villa’s grape vines and olive trees. 

This month, as April finally begins to release its promise of spring, I have found my thoughts wandering around the grounds at Spannocchia where I once painted a wall of wisteria growing above an old carriage house where lemon trees planted in enormous terra cotta pots are stored in winter.  While rooting around a storage shed at our home in the Sierra Foothills, I found my canvas painted during that trip still taped to a wooden board, as yet unfinished (perhaps) and still unframed.  It is now propped up against a window in the living room, a daily reminder that I should once again take out my easel, paints and brushes and either finish it or declare it done. 

A five-minute walk up our road there is a bank of wisteria with as yet unopened buds, as eager as I am for sunshine and warm temperatures to allow them to burst forth with purple blossoms that will transport me back to Spannocchia once again.  That is the magic and enchantment of April, wherever you find yourself.