Dear Friend,

As this newsletter is published, we are halfway through our Watermill online ‘virtual’ painting week with Mike Willdridge. No fewer than 118 people booked up to take part in this extraordinary week, painting along at home for a couple of hours each day in a Zoom meeting with Mike. We visited (virtually, that is) the stunning locations we go to during our ‘real thing’ week-long painting holidays at the Watermill. (The pictures above and below this introductory section give a flavour of some of the locations.)

We have given the participants recipes, so they can cook some of the mouth-watering dishes we prepare in the Watermill kitchen, to give them more of the flavour (sorry about the pun) of a Watermill creative week.

Randy Hale’s trial painting for his online session

We have also been busy organising other online, interactive painting sessions, not only with Mike, but with other renowned painting tutors, like Randy Hale and Rebecca de Mendonça.

We have a session with Randy on 10 December, and with Rebecca on 17 December. More details of Randy’s session are below. There will be details of Rebecca’s session in early December.

We are even working on sharing the secrets of those Watermill recipes with online sessions. Watch this space!

Just click
https://watermill.net/ for more info

Meanwhile, from the virtual to the real world: We are confident that things will be more or less back to normal by the time our next season begins, and we have organised another exciting schedule of our world-renowned creative holidays for 2021, in painting, creative writing, knitting and Italian language. Already these courses are filling up: we have more than 210 bookings out of a potential total of some 250/260.

So if you want to find out what all the fuss is about for real, now is the time to reserve your place. There’s more about our 2021 creative courses on our Watermill website: Just click here.

In this month’s newsletter we have stories on:

• two more winter visitors to the Watermill walled garden: one sleepy and one chirpy
• a golden harvest celebrating an annual event that is hundreds of years old
• a tour of the Botticelli bedroom
• Italian cooking, Watermill style: focaccette from Kaoutar
• Randy’s Whistle Stop online session
• introducing a nature-loving watercolour tutor, Caroline Deeble
• how about knitting-up a fountain dolphin?
• new meanings for old words: are you flabbergasted?
• and are you imbottito? The Italians are at this time of year!
• all the data on the latest availability of all our creative courses.

Happy reading!

It would be much ado about something
if we booked a creative week
at the Watermill

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.

Picture (right): Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson in Much Ado about Nothing. Picture from: MovieStills DB.

Another winter guest in the walled garden

Last month, Watermill gardener Flavio Terenzoni discovered another ospite in giardino, guest in garden, and sent us the charming picture right. He tells me he was doing the winter tidying up and cutting back, when he discovered an old bird's nest with this little chap inside. He’s a riccio in letargo, a hibernating hedgehog. Flavio has tucked him in again. Sleep well young man!

A golden harvest

Lois harvests some of our persimmons

In November, the colours of the Italian countryside were gorgeous: yellows, oranges, reds and browns, as the leaves turned and began to fall. And a spectacular contribution to this autumnal splendour was a fruit tree that the Italians call cachi, and the English, persimmon. Not only are its leaves beautifully coloured, but its fruits are magnificent golden orbs, an imposing sight in many a back garden.

We have a persimmon tree in the Watermill walled garden and we have to confess that we grew it mainly for its looks rather than to eat the fruits. We tried them once many years ago and found they left a weird furry coating on our tongue. At the end of November, however, at lunch with Italian friends in Florence, we were persuaded to try them again – and they were delicious, not 'furry' at all. The secret, other friends told us, is not to eat them until they are fully ripe, when the tannins have faded away. We should also, we were told, harvest them before the frosts arrive, and let them ripen on their own in a secluded spot.

So Lois picked a couple of buckets of them – and there they are above, ripening in the Watermill courtyard.

While the golden orbs of the cachi are wondrous to behold, we also think that the fallen leaves are aesthetically pleasing, so we couldn’t help but snap the multicoloured carpet beneath our feet.

An exotic visitor also enjoyed our golden fruits

Picture: Flavio Terenzoni

All in all, Lois picked a hundred or so persimmons, some of which we enjoyed for breakfast and others, we gave to friends in Florence, to brighten their locked-down days.

We were not the only ones to savour the cachi: numerous birds have enjoyed the high-grown fruits beyond our picking reach, most commonly sparrows and black caps. But our most exotic visitor has been ausignolo giapponese, a Japanese nightingale, seen above right. Our gardener, Flavio Terenzoni, captured his/her visit (you see how good my ornithological knowledge is!) on a short video, which you can watch by clicking here.

As we have no doubt mentioned before, The Watermill is surrounded by two environmentally protected areas: The National Park of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, the backbone of Italy, and the Regional Park of the Apuan Alps, home of the marble mountains of Carrara. The air and the water are pure and unpolluted, and the area abounds in wildlife. With his night-vision camera, Flavio has recently videoed a large stag, porcupines and a fox going about their nocturnal activities, which were the subject of stories in previous newsletters.

Pictures: Lara Breckon and Ron Ploeg

As well as the mammalian wildlife (there are badgers and wild boar, too), we have a plethora of birds, which make the springtime dawn chorus quite noisy, and many species of butterflies and bees. I particularly like the swallowtail butterflies and am intrigued by the hummingbird moths, which can actually fly backwards.

Celebrating an annual event that is thousands of years old

Vivienne gets to work on one of
the White’s 600 olive trees

There’s something magical about olives, not just the colour of the trees, shifting as the wind exposes the underside of the leaves; nor that the older trees, some of which have been around for hundreds of years, are gnarled sentinels of time. But the annual harvest is also a signal that, whatever our troubles, the world will go on. By November, the olives must be picked, and the local frantoio, the olive press, is busy producing the wonderful green liquid with which we will flavour our food and enhance our cooking in the coming year.

The oil we use at the Watermill comes from our friends Vivienne and Nick White who live in a wonderful house up the hill from us. Usually other friends of theirs from the UK come to help with the harvest, but travel restrictions and quarantine have ruled that out this year. So, for a couple of weekends before we, too, were cabined, cribbed and confined in Florence, Lois contributed another pair of picking hands. (As Bill’s medical condition precludes picking, he was in charge of lunch: freshly made panini from the pasticceria, stuffed with mozzarella and tomato, a melange of ice creams from the gelateria.)

It is not really possible to mechanise olive-picking, so the techniques have been largely unchanged for millennia. The lower berries are picked by hand; the upper ones shaken from the trees and gathered from the nets carefully arranged beneath them. Lois says: “It’s hard work, but it is wonderful to be out in the fresh air all day and to be taking part in something that has been going on for thousands of years. It is a real privilege.”

The Watermill has ordered 60 litres of Vivienne and Nick’s extra virgin olive oil: come and join us on one of our creative courses next year and you be able to sample it for yourselves.

No Botticelli’s on this bedroom’s walls!

Picture: Francesco Lastrucci

To whet your appetite for a Watermill creative week, we are continuing our series of ‘tours’ of our Watermill bedrooms, all of which have been painstakingly restored and, we think, elegantly decorated. They are all named after famous Italian artists, mainly of the Renaissance but also moving into the later Mannerist period.

Of all the painters we celebrate, Sandro Botticelli needs least introduction. Two of his paintings, Primavera and The Birth of Venus are artistic icons, instantly recognisable. We are sorry to say we have no Botticelli’s on the walls of the bedroom named after him, but we do have some alluring original pictures by modern masters (and mistresses).

As you come into the bedroom you will see two delightful collages by Susan Winfield, which we purchased many years ago and which still cause us to smile. You can see one of them above. And then there is the extraordinary painting on silk of Venice (below), by our friend Annabel Collis:

This started life as a silk scarf, commissioned by Bill as a birthday present to Lois, but she liked it so much that she didn’t want to wear it, but rather had it framed. The colours are wonderful.

Just some of the delights of the Botticelli bedroom, which also has lovely views from its balcony over the Watermill walled garden and the Apennine mountains beyond. Another perfect setting for a Watermill creative week.

We made one of those fun, 30-second Facebook slideshows, with more pictures of the Botticelli bedroom, which you can see by clicking here.

We’d be delighted to welcome you here for one of our caring and inspiring creative holiday weeks – painting, creative writing, knitting and Italian language. Come and choose your favourite bedroom.

We are sure that you will love it, whichever Florentine genius you choose: Botticelli, Bronzino or Brunelleschi, Donatello, Fra Angelico or Ghiberti, Gentileschi, Ghirlandaio, Lippi, Uccello, or Vasari (more about them in later newsletters).

Details of all our creative courses can be found by clicking here. Come and celebrate Italian genius with us.

Italian cooking, Watermill style. Do you like the idea? Let us know!

Over the years we have welcomed thousands of guests here for our renowned creative courses, where they have enjoyed the tranquil and spectacular setting of this part of rural Tuscany, inspirational teaching, warm hospitality and the convivial company of like-minded people.

But whether they are here to learn more about painting, creative writing, knitting or the Italian language, they are almost universal in their praise for the Watermill food. Almost every week, somebody says: “You ought to write a cookbook!”

We have been toying with the idea for some time, but we think that probably the way to proceed is to do something online — and to that end we have been making some little videos about some of our speciality dishes, which, in the fullness of time, we may well work up into online Watermill cookery sessions. Watch this space!

The theme we are developing is called Italian cooking, Watermill style and Lois is not only planning to present our own recipes, but also on those of our friends and neighbours who add a local flavour to our culinary offerings.

If you been to the Watermill you know that every evening when we serve aperitivi on the vine verandah we prepare a small stuzzichino, an appetiser, to go with them. One of them is often focaccette (above).

Focaccia is a flat, oven-baked bread containing olive oil, typically associated with Ligurian cuisine, but which is very popular in our part of Tuscany too. It is often used for sandwiches, stuffed with mozzarella cheese and tomato, or with a ham and cheese filling. Focaccette is the diminutive plural, and we serve these tasty ‘crumpets’ with your aperitivi one evening, accompanied by local cheeses, hams or salami.

Capturing the flavour of autumn
in the Watermill:
bresaola with Parmesan shavings,
home-grown tomatoes,
chestnuts and prosecco

The focaccette are prepared by Kaoutar Okbani, originally from Morocco but now living in nearby Fivizzano, who works with us during the summer months, helping to look after our guests on creative courses. Lois watched her at work and made a little video, which you can see by clicking here.

As we said, we are developing the concept of creation of a series of our favourite recipes from our Watermill creative weeks. Is this something that might interest you? If so, please let us know by leaving a comment on the Watermill Contact form. It will spur us to further action. In the meantime, why not try Kaoutar’s focaccette with some cheese or ham – and, of course, an aperitivo glass of prosecco. Salute!