“The importance of it is how ancient it is,” said Mrs. The very mention of the word “Tuscany” calls up romantic images of landscapes of iconic beauty.Ĭortona is a hillside city in the province of Arezzo halfway between Rome and Florence, its deep roots evident in its Etruscan and Roman walls, medieval character and Renaissance buildings. “The first day the house was ours I stayed up all night and looked out over the valley-the hill towns looked like little ships floating,” Mrs. It took four years to make habitable the three-room, three-story structure, built into the side of a hill, which fronted onto a roadway and offered sweeping views of the Val di Chiana at the rear. “We always had a fantasy of having a pied a terre in Europe,” she said, adding that when opportunity arose, it was “a little stone house in a stone city with high ancient walls” that captured them. Van Doren, recalling that they met someone in Italy who was buying and renovating old apartments. “It was 700 years old and hadn’t been lived in for 100 years,” recounted Mrs. His newly published “The Lion of Cortona,” a novel in three parts, depicts the perilous personal journeys of several individuals during the politically tumultuous 13th century. In the case of Charles Van Doren of Cornwall, it was a little house in Tuscany that opened its doors not only to him and his wife, Gerry, but to the town of Cortona as well, and then its history, which proved to be fertile ground for his imagination.
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