Dear Friend,

Free at last! At the end of May, after some eight weeks ‘confined to barracks’ in Florence, we were able to motor to our beloved watermill in the wilds of the Tuscan countryside. And very beautiful it looked, too, thanks to the meticulous maintenance work by Karsten Müller, who also supervised our new projects, restoring the old olive press and completing the installation of air-conditioning units in all our bedrooms and public rooms. Added to that, the courtyards and the gardens were awash with colour, thanks to the green-fingered expertise of Flavio Terenzoni.

We made a little 30-second Facebook slideshow soon after we arrived, to try to capture something of the atmosphere of the Watermill in early summer, and you can see it by clicking here.

You can also enjoy four of the pictures from the slideshow at the top and bottom of this introductory section.

Courtyard, walled garden, the Apennine mountains
and the blue Italian sky: waiting for you

All we need now is for you to arrive and enjoy it as much as we do. Italy is now casting off the coronavirus shackles very speedily and life, in city and countryside, is pretty much back to normal, although we are still practising a careful social distancing. All the signs are that by the end of this month, travel restrictions will be lifted in other countries, too, so we are making sure that we are poised to welcome our guests’ return.

But the most exciting sight for us as the Watermill was the wonderful space our team has created in the interior of the old frantoio, the olive press. Please see the story Towards another inspiring space..., below.

You may recollect that we have completely reroofed this building and renovated its exterior walls, so that now the whole fabric of the Watermill is completely restored. Of course, the coronavirus pandemic, and governments’ reaction to it, has squeezed our cash flow, so our exciting plans for the interior of the frantoio have been put on hold until next year. But you can come and see the alluring space that has been created and dream with us about what it will look like in the fullness of time. (One of the consequences of the work is that our non-rolling stones are now gathering moss, as is our chubby Scotsman. Stories about that later the newsletter.)

So, we are ready when you are: buildings renovated, walls painted, furniture restored, window boxes filled, courtyards and gardens full of flowers: we just need your company to make it all perfect.

We do hope you will be able to plan ahead for when we are through this difficult time and you are ready for a relaxing and inspiring break away from it all. Come and join us. *Please rest assured that if travel restrictions in your own country or in Italy mean that the course cannot run on these dates, or that appropriate flights are not available, we will make you a course with the same tutor next year.

As we say, we are confident that things will be back to normal in the next month or so, and, we’ll make sure you stay safe: as well as the extremely high hygiene standards at the Watermill we will also be inaugurating additional special safety measures to keep you safe. Please see the story Keeping You Even Safer, below.

In this month's newsletter there are also stories on:

• Towards another inspiring space at the Watermill
• Why our rolling stones will now gather moss
• Mille miglia? No, Cento chilometri
• Cento chilometri plus: an excuse to hear Caruso singing Puccini
• Another photovoltaic milestone
• Our chubby Scot enjoys the sun
• Our demijohns continue to inspire our painters
• Paint along with Mike in our free online interactive sessions
• Stitch up your knitting course for 2021
• Write with Jo in her free taster lesson
• Creative writing: You call that a lining?
• Take it piano, piano and your Italian will soon be a posto.

Happy reading....

“Time to set sail for the Watermill, me hearties.”
Orlando Bloom and Keira Keightley
in Pirates of the Caribbean

Bring a partner: there's plenty for them to do

They don’t have to participate in the course, but they will be able to enjoy the wonderful hospitality of the mill and, whenever they want, to come out with you to our beautiful locations.

We also offer a range of Alternative activities for partners on all our courses, as well as a generous £GBP 250 discount if they share a room with you.

Keeping you even safer

We’ll give you the space you need

At the Watermill at Posara our aim is to look after you. And that doesn’t mean just providing inspiring tuition, warm hospitality, delicious food and wine, but making sure that you are safe well. As well as the extremely high standards of hygiene normally practised by the Watermill, we will also be taking additional precautionary measures. Our ‘ultimate hygiene’ programme includes:

• doorknobs and drawer handles etc, in the public spaces, will be sanitised every morning and evening
• all cleaning and catering staff will wear protective gloves during their work
• all crockery and cutlery will be sterilised after every meal, also our mugs and glasses after every cup of tea or drink
• dispensers of supplying sanitising gel will be available in the communal kitchen, and outside the guests’ dining room. Sanitising gel will also be available in your rooms
• disposable gloves whenever you need them
• certification from an independent analyst, including microbial testing, that our safety precautions in the kitchen more than meet stringent guidelines on how to prevent infection by the coronavirus.

Plenty of space for all
at a local hilltop restaurant

We will make sure that, if it is still necessary, you will be able to observe social distancing. If this is still required:

• Our minibuses will only take four passengers at a time, instead of the usual eight.
• In the studio you will be able to sit at least 1m away from every other person.
• We will modify our itinerary so that you can eat safely at every meal: for meals at the Watermill, you will spread out to eat at tables in the dining room, the vine verandah, and the courtyard, or there will be two sittings.
• We will only visit local restaurants where there is adequate space for social distancing.

Towards another inspiring space at the Watermill

Builders Nico and Daniele
put the finishing touches to the pointing
before the scaffolding comes down

Last month we had an email from our gardener, Flavio Terenzoni, with the message: “i lavori del frantoio sono terminati, ieri hanno tolto i ponteggi.” Sounds like the words from an aria in an Italian opera, doesn’t it? It was certainly music to our ears because being translated it means “the olive press works are finished, yesterday they took down the scaffolding.”

Yes, all the external renovation and reroofing of the old olive press are now finished. It looks marvellous. We haven’t done any work on the interior of the moment, but all is ready for us to create a new exciting relaxing space for our guests at the Watermill.

As you can see we have a large window that looks out over the millstream and the campi beyond and will also be putting in a glass floor so you will be able to look down to the millstream gushing beneath your feet.

The three pictures above show, from left to right, the view over the campi, the machinery to open the sluice, and the bridges over the Millstream as it returns to the river.

All in all, it’s going to be a perfect setting for relaxing times. We will return to it next year: as the Medici used to say festina lente, make haste slowly. The frantoio is not an essential part of the mill complex (we run the laundry and store the linen in there at the moment), but our guests will still have the capacious sitting room, the airy dining room, the sunlit studio, the vine verandah, the courtyard tables, the roof terraces and river terraces, the walled garden, the riverside gardens and the millstream walks in which to spend their time!

Why not come and see for yourself and enjoy our ‘work in progress’. And while you’re at it, marvel at the size of our non-rolling stones. More in the next story...

Why our rolling stones will now gather moss

On the right are the massive stones of the Watermill’s old olive-crushing machine, now placed in honourable and elegant retirement in our sunny courtyard. But it was a struggle and a half to get them there!

You can see the size of the problem in the picture of the olive crusher (left below), followed by the intricate task of dismantling the machinery (middle picture), then taking the stones, with the help of a friendly neighbour’s tractor, and putting them into position in the Watermill courtyard (picture on the right).

We made one of those fun 30-second Facebook slideshows of the process, which you may enjoy. You can see it by clicking here.

Nail-biting! Watch the video

Even more fun was Flavio Terenzoni’s short video of the most nail-biting part of the process, the toppling of the stones from vertical to horizontal. You can see it by clicking here.

Come and see our non-rolling stones for yourself on one of our renowned creative courses: painting, creative writing, knitting and Italian language. You could paint them, write about them, describe them in Italian and even devise a knitted yarn bomb for them!

Mille miglia? No, Cento Chilometri

Following Bill’s lockdown triumphs in the Round-Our-Florence-Apartment marathon and the 50-mile Kennedy March, in the middle of May he reached another milestone, or rather kilometre post, in his daily gyrations around the specially constructed circuit in Florence apartment: 200 steps round all the rooms and balconies, repeated 20 times each day. That’s two kilometres every day. He reckons he knows every nook and cranny of the apartment intimately.

The middle-of-May milestone was that he completed 1,000 laps, or more than 100 km. Wow! We are surprised he hasn’t worn a groove in the parquet and the ceramic tiles. That’s Bill above at the finishing line , waving his chequered flag and clutching a winner’s bouquet. As the florist was closed, we couldn’t run to roses, but Lois thoughtfully wrapped a bag of fresh mint from the market in a red ribbon and presented it to him. It may not have been such a colourful floral display, but it certainly smelled good!

The challenge was to work out where to go next, but Bill decided to reassign his virtual journey, as if he was walking from our apartment in Florence to the gateway of the Watermill the north-west Tuscany. Freedom from lockdown means he’s not going to make it all the way. But he did reach (virtually of course) the wonderful walled city of Lucca, to pay his respects to his favourite composer Giacomo Puccini.

Cento chilometri plus: an excuse to hear Caruso singing Puccini

Well, that was a doddle. Here we are (virtually) in the bar Stella Polare in the centre of Lucca. The Pole Star café, is the very essence of a sophisticated late 19th-century meeting place. Note the dark wooden furnishings and the clean symmetry of the black-and-white tiles on the floor. Note also the ceiling, gleaming white too. It would not have been like that in Puccini’s day: he was a chain smoker and, we suppose, so were most of his drinking chums, so the ceiling would have been a fine shade of nicotine yellow!

We don’t know whether Puccini and the celebrated tenor Enrico Caruso ever met in the Stella Polare, but they were friends and contemporaries, and if they were here in 1906, they might have discussed Enrico’s recording of Puccini’s Che gelida manina, from La Bohème.

Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, we can still hear that incredible singing clearly today. You can listen to a digitally remastered version by clicking here.

Incidentally, Caruso was not prepossessing: “short and tubby, with an undistinguished moustache and an undesirable Neapolitan accent,” according to one report. But so remarkable was his voice that Puccini instantly gave him the part of Rodolfo in La Bohème, saying, after the audition: “Who has sent you to me? God?” Listening to that voice more than a hundred years later, you can see what Puccini meant.

And to continue your enjoyment of lyrical Puccini melodies, here is a link to a marvellous contemporary voice, Kiri Te Kanawa, singing Puccini's O mio babbino caro. The link also has a built-in romantic ‘Ahh’ factor (perhaps to the point of soppiness, but indulge yourself) as it is accompanied by scenes from A Room with a View, as Lucy Honeychurch falls in love. Just click here.

Another photovoltaic milestone

The picture (below left), from our handy little photovoltaic monitoring app, shows that one day in late May our watermill photovoltaic array was still merrily producing electricity even on a cloudy day. Our latest milestone is that now we have produced more than 13,000 kWh of electricity from the sun. What’s more, we have also saved more than 9 tonnes of carbon dioxide production.

Our arrays of photovoltaic panels, hidden away on our south-facing roofs overlooking the river make us totally self-sufficient in electricity generation, even powering the new air-conditioning units in all our bedrooms and public rooms. We’ve commissioned the air-conditioning system, and we now have another little app which enables us to control each unit remotely, even from Florence!

Our chubby Scot enjoying the sun

Someone else who’s been enjoying the Tuscan sunshine is the chubby Scot above. Some years ago, when we were living in Scotland, it was given to us by our sculptor friend, Norman Defoe. His fulfilled repose looks even more at home in the watermill gardens. And he has even grown a mossy moustache.

Our demijohns continue to inspire our painters

We are always delighted when our painting guests continue to enjoy their Watermill experiences, by painting from photographs when they get home. The latest such picture (above) comes from Shirley Coles, and is of our intriguing demijohns. Shirley says: “I am always fascinated by the demijohns when I come to the Watermill and always have a go at painting them. This is my first one although somewhere I have plenty more!”

Here’s a montage of some paintings from other Watermill guests and tutors:

The demijohns were used in the old days for fermenting wine, but these days people tend to use stainless steel drums and they throw these beautiful old glass vessels away. Our gardener Flavio Terenzoni has been collecting them and we are happy to store them in the Watermill courtyard, where they have provided inspiration for many of our guests. They also inspired us to make another of those short, fun Facebook slideshows, which you can see by clicking here.