Mellow autumn sun, verdant beauty and secluded villas: rural

France and Italy bewitch at mid-term break. Tim magee shares the best spots to escape

with friends and family

74 | October 2013 | T h e G l o s s M AGA Z I N e

travel

MaN in a SUItCaSe

I’ve no problem with doing nothing on holidays except read, swim and tan. I can lie really, really still while other people sightsee, box-tick and nip from one patch of shade to another. We don’t get summers, so getting short-changed each season means it’s okay having one week out of 52 doing nothing except soaking in sun to your bones.

We were spoilt with summer this year though. My undeserving Irish head now believes it’s going to be like this forever. Now we can look at the October break like normal people, and not go chasing the dregs of the year’s last rays to some black-sanded, white plastic corral off the African coast.

We can now approach mid-term like grown-ups. No silly bright clothes that you only take out in countries where no one knows you. Dressed properly and teeming with vitamin D, we can go back to France and Italy in October and show off the relaxed, cool Irish to counter the memories of the sweaty, garish lobster people that invade their towns and resorts each summer.

Autumn is the most handsome season. There’s a common dramatic stillness to the Dordogne and Tuscany at this time of year – undisturbed, raw rural life. That so-still mist. Cypress trees and crisp morning landscapes that haven’t changed since Roman times. Pleasant days but cooler nights by wood fires. It’s the absence of things that makes it attractive – the absence of traffic, crowds and the clutter that high-season selling brings. The absence of high prices and low expectations. Hunters replace tourists. Add some family, friends and rent your own piece of that peace, and for a short time, pretend to be a real European.

There is candyfloss everywhere you look. On the

ground, hanging in the air, from the trees, and on me

head. All day long. It’s my memory of Le Four à Sel,

on the fringe of Montignac in the Dordogne, and I’m

not looking back in a sentimental soft-focus dream

sequence, it’s just that I’m usually there when the

poplars are still sprinkling the last of their cotton.

I’m hounded by my two nieces from dusk to dawn:

one blonde four-year-old, cute and curly, talking festival,

and the other, the blonde’s PA, minder and mentor, a

ten-year-old dark Italian bookworm. They tag team me

any time I try to get even a second’s respite.

And there’s no let-

up. I read the same

bloody paragraph of

a book over and over

for a week. It’s like

a social experiment

with a giddy child

at the controls. I am

dragged back to the

pool just as I have

finished applying sun

screen. I’m constantly

shopping or cooking for

people who I only see

once a year. I drink red

wine from a box until I am

dragged, purple-toothed,

to dance to some cheesy

commercial nonsense. And

I love it.

Le Four à Sel is a bunch of self-catering gîtes that

track the riverbank outside Montignac. Rent one stone

Périgordian home overlooking the communal courtyard

with its barn (for dancing) and you’re happy. Rent both

and you’re le maire of your own walnut grove, slice of

riverbank, fields and playground. Rent them all and you

have your own private French hamlet.

Buildings and land, however pretty, are just buildings

and land though, so its attentive owners Brenda and

David – who manage the discreet, invisible host thing

so well – make a jaded old visitor like me feel that I am

the lucky, newly-elected, disco-dancing mayor.

www.lefourasel.com.

The book The Past Is Myself is pitched as Englishwoman

Christabel Bielenberg’s life in Berlin under the Nazis. It

should actually be pitched as one of the greatest real

life records of love in history’s most oppressive period of

peer pressure.

You couldn’t make this

book up – English niece of

big newspaper magnate

comes to Berlin during

Hitler’s rise to power to

train as an opera singer.

Falls for a gentle German

who, despite being the

physical model of the Aryan

dream, despises, and even occasionally batters the Nazis.

Christabel’s true story should be on any holiday reading list.

Christabel’s son, Christopher, who features in the

book, owns two breathtaking villas, Casa Dei Fichi and

Bernardino, on private land full of olives, rosemary, sage

and the odd roaming boar overlooking the stone streets

in Campiglia Marittima.

Once you’ve read the book you can’t help but scan

the houses for signs of the story. With the stamp of

Christopher’s personality, his family’s eye for the aesthetic,

his countless books, his obvious love of food, wine and

nature, your break is given an added fourth dimension.

Family and friends should be the motto for the villas. I

was there with both in Bernardino. Keeping with the war

theme, my toddling godson looked like a travel version

of Winston Churchill and shared his penchant for early

bottles and long speeches. He would sit passively, all eyes

and jowls, by the indoor-outdoor fire listening to our adult

small talk fuelled by big Tuscans. It was great.

Last year sister villa Casa dei Fichi installed a magnificent

pool that overlooks the Tuscan hills all the way down to

the Ligurian sea. Balmy during the day with a chill of an

evening, keep at a gentle simmer with wine, wild boar,

chestnuts, polenta, porcini and the peppery kick of new-

season olive oil, beside the cosy stove indoors or the

friendly wood-burning oven on the terrace outside.

Family and friends, with an interesting book in one hand

and a glass of something good in the other, one eye on the

whole capon in the oven and the other out to Elba, just in

case Napoleon shows again – in a house that has itself some

powerful ties with history. www.invitationtotuscany.com ^

France the dordogne italy tuscany

Montignac.

View of the river Vezere.

View of Le Four à Sel from

across the cornfields.

there’s a common stillness to the dordogne and

tuscany at thIs tIMe of year – undisturbed

rural life.

Pool with a view at

Casa Dei Fichi.

Casa Dei Fichi from the drive.

Travel.indd 74 20/09/2013 14:25