Diana Athill: A Florence Diary

'What I was after was not a shared experience, but the excitement of discovery. I was hungry for the thrill of being elsewhere.'

Diana Athill died a year ago this week. She was 101 and had lived a rich and exciting life, working for the BBC during the war then spending fifty years in publishing at Andre Deutsch, of which she had been a founding director, and where she worked with many famous authors including Simone de Beauvoir, Philip Roth and Margaret Atwood. She had numerous love affairs but never married, saying that she had been so hurt by the break up of an early romance that she was never again able to expose herself to the possibility of such pain.

A Florence Diary is not about any of that.

In 1947 an aunt gave Diana and her cousin Pen a trip to Florence to celebrate the end of the war. It was Diana's first trip abroad;

'It was my very first 'elsewhere'. None could be lovelier.'

Her mother asked her to keep a diary, and so she did. Almost seventy years later, Granta Books published it.

At 8am on 24 August Pen and Diana leave Victoria Station on the Golden Arrow. It takes them forty hours to get to Florence. They do not travel in luxury - they have second class seats in which they sit up all night, eating food they have brought with them in carrier bags. Their luggage includes canvases, an easel and a straw hat. Diana loves practically every minute of her holiday, but she tells it as it is - this is no glossy travelogue. On the Simplon-Orient Express - which was clearly not as smart as it sounds - she meets Italians 'smelling of garlic and sweat', a baby's dirty nappies are hung on the luggage rack to dry and use again, and Pen is propositioned by an dirty old man. Diana, however, has breakfast 'with and paid for by Alfonso' (an Italian prince whom she has only just met) and remarks that;

'Pen felt rather sad for a short time.'

Alfonso does so much for both of them that, when they decide to go to a Milanese hotel for a bath en route, Diana claims to be surprised that he doesn't offer to wash them as well. Yet they turn down his offer to stay in his family's apartment - this would be a step too far - and indeed it seems that relations with all the men they meet are innocent. (Though of course Diana is writing the diary for her mother, so who knows?)

Once in Florence the girls stay a few days in a hotel before moving into their pensione. Again, it's the small details that stand out - Diana 'paying innumerable officials small fees in exchange for incomprehensible forms' in her effort to collect the bag she has booked through from London; Pen marching down a street shouting the name of the money-changer who has been recommended to them but for whom they have no address; both girls permanently covered in mosquito bites (I remember this from my own first trip to France - in London I had never seen a mosquito and thought they all lived in the Tropics and gave one instant malaria.)

Once installed at the pensione (where the fee of 12s 6d per day includes all their meals) the girls embark on days of sightseeing and lazy lunches. Galleries, gardens, churches - San Lorenzo, Santa Croce, Santa Trinita - palazzos; they revel in it all, but Diana still has time to notice what she calls 'the tiny glimpses of foreign ordinariness' - there is no hot water for baths because, in its post-war penury, Italy has no coal and the heat has dried up the water supply for electricity; a conjuror outside a church is 'doing a very rude trick with a little funnel' (what that might have been is left to our imaginations.) On leaving the hotel they forget half their possessions; the hall porter hands them 'a very squalid suspender belt and a pair of dirty pants of mine.'

Not surprisingly, it being Italy after all, food features large in Diana's diary;

'The best part of the food...is the cakery part,,,I could eat them forever... all I seem to have written about is pastries..'

'We discovered the peaches - oh bliss! oh rapture!'

'We succumbed to our British instincts and went and had a cup of tea in the English-American Tea Rooms'

(shades of Barbara Pym's An Unsuitable Attachment and the visit to Babbington's tea room at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome.)

Then, among all the stories of sponge fingers and ice creams, a sudden glimpse of sublime beauty;

'There is a moon and the sky is velvet blue, and the lights on the hill opposite are reflected in long wavering streaks in the velvet blue Arno - so lovely.'

In between they shop for shoes, enjoy thunderstorms, and even watch a neighbour kiss and cuddle her pet black hen, before Diana reluctantly returns to London;

'I really don't think I have ever had such a lovely fortnight in my life.'

I must say that before I read this book I was prepared to be annoyed by it. In 1947 my own parents could hardly afford a day trip to Southend, and although Diana and Pen travelled fairly frugally, anyone who was able to spend weeks in Italy just after the war moved in pretty rarefied social circles. There is however something about Diana's writing that sweeps all of that away. Her sheer enthusiasm for being in Florence, her joy in great art and small things, her clear-sighted fascination with all the people she meets - her straightforward exuberance for life.

When this book was published in 2016, Diana wrote an introduction under the title 'Holidays' in which she makes some excellent observations about travelling, why we do it and what we gain from it.  By then she had been all over the world (she writes beautifully about Dominica, home to Jean Rhys, one of 'her' authors at Deutsch, and of another trip to Florence in which she has to help deliver puppies while co-hosting a smart dinner party), and everywhere it is the little things that she remembers;

'Waking up on a train at night...and seeing a lantern being carried along a platform by an unknown man talking to another in an unknown language'

(Another experience that resonates for me - my first trip to Ireland in the depths of winter, the night train to Fishguard. Outside, Welsh voices, lanterns swinging.)

In the end it is these 'tiny glimpses of foreign ordinariness' that make A Florence Diary such a pleasure to read, and I am so glad Granta published it.






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