Getting Snobbish in Tuscany

Suppose you bought a house in Tuscany. Then what? Then the problem would be to move heaven and earth to avoid being taken for an American or a Brit.

Your whole life would revolve around getting people to say “Buongiorno” in the street instead of “Hello.” It’s not easy, as Anna Blundy explains. For instance how do you get people to stop addressing you in English? For a start, you have to dress like an Italian. Guess what that means.

Though it was almost 100 degrees in the shade and all the Italians had taken refuge in Sardinia, I drove to Lucca wearing stilettos and a tight skirt. I curled my hair and retouched my lipstick all day. ‘Buongiorno, Signora’ all round and immediately on to the next rung.

Are you sure you have the backbone for that kind of punishment, girls?

Of course, there’s another problem lurking out there. How to differentiate yourself from the other ex-pats that are crowding in, looking for their own Tuscan villa just a little down the hill from Tony Blair? The technique is to sound as if you have lived in Tuscany forever.

[O]ne must adopt a tone of utter despair when speaking of the continuing invasion (in which we ourselves, naturally, have played no part). ‘Do you think there are more than there were when we came?’ I ask Jenny, bowing to her impressive decade of prosecco-swilling.



‘Oh God, yes,’

And the awful thing is that, the way the Italians aren’t having children, there ought to be bargains in the Tuscan villa market for years to come. It’s too awful, darling.