Italian Idyll

PAINTING AN EXPERIENCE

It is midday, and one of the great rituals of the Arniano Painting School is just beginning. Our hostess, Amber Guinness, of that famous brewing family, rings a tiny handbell. My fellow painters and I lay down our brushes and proceed like cardinals to a table shaded by lemon trees at the side of the 18th-c. Tuscan farmhouse. 

There is a reassuring pop and the first of the day’s bottles of Soave is opened. Guinness—whose new cookbook, A House Party in Tuscany (Thames & Hudson), is out now—drifts around dispensing wine into our rapidly drained glasses. “My father used to have a horror at seeing an empty glass,” she says. It is like being at a private house party. Only much more interesting. 

The other attendees on this week-long course are like characters in an Agatha Christie novel. A retired oil executive from Rochester, New York, is talking to the bestselling English author who arrived on the Orient Express; the daughter of a construction magnate is discussing art with an English poet; and the Swiss octogenarian is making merry with our painting teacher, William Roper-Curzon, a son of the 20th Baron Teynham, and a former tutor at the Royal Drawing School in London. Amber has already succeeded in creating a sense of esprit de corps in this group of strangers, who each pay for bed, board, and instruction from Roper-Curzon.

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WRITTEN BY SAMUEL MUSTON

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROBYN LEA

This story appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of MILIEU.