Page 27 - Joseph Wright of Derby: Virgils's Tomb & The Grand Tour.

appropriate).There invariably followed a gargantuan lunch in an osteria called
Il Principe in Pieve di Teco where far too much local Sciacchetrà red wine was
consumed which had the fatal effect of cutting one off at the knees!Again, each
year we would go down toVentimiglia either to lunch at La Mortola with ‘Dodo’
Hanbury Forbes or with Colin Callahan nearby. ‘Dodo’, who was Cecil
Hanbury’s widow and who had looked after the gardens since 1913, took a
great liking to me and we would dive from the rocks on the point together.
She endearingly decided to nickname me ‘her little rabbit’, I imagine on
account of my very blonde hair, and to tell me tales of the German occupation
giving me some live ammunition found in the grounds as a memento which
was thrilling. Colin Callahan lived with his wife and two daughters barely a
few hundred yards east of La Mortola point.Aged about 16 I rapidly fell under
the spell cast by his blonde and devastatingly coquettish and quite ‘forward’
daughter, Mimi. We swam and frolicked together and I thought of little else
thereafter till emboldened, since she frequented the Lycée in Paris, I innocently
invited her to lunch in the city on my return home on LeTrain Bleu suggesting
meeting in the lobby of my father’s hotel,The Royal Monceau, where I was a
habitué and where he always had a suite available. Alas, the tryst never took
place. A school boyish note was intercepted by her irascible Irish father who
peremptorily wrote to my papa accusing me of having tried to seduce his
daughter. I was humiliated….and frustrated!19 In later years my favourite
visitors to the Villino were the girls from the Courtauld and Dante Leonelli, a G.Moreau, The Birth ofVenus, (detail). See
talentedAmerican artist also from the Courtauld who who became a professor note 19.
at the RCA and mounted with the Continuum Group the first exhibition of kinetic light art in the mid-70s at The
Hayward. My father exhibited him and his collages were quite avant-garde.The idyll was interspersed with hill walks
to surrounding villages particularly Solva and Moglio which my father much enjoyed. In Moglio we went to an Osteria
to have local white wine and salami rolls while I tried my hand at bocce (bowls) at which I gradually became quite adept
so that in my teens I was invited to join the local village team with our gardener.

19. Colin was a well-respected society sculptor in the 1940s and 50s.A bust he made of my mother (see illustration) resides somewhere in the depositories
of theVictoria and Albert Museum.Three years ago, after a visit to La Mortola, the first in decades, I decided to revisit the beach where we had swum
50 years or more earlier. It was virtually unchanged, barely accessible by a footpath and forming a perfect crescent.The seaweed was still piled over a
foot high, dry and crackling underfoot on the foreshore.The fishermen’s gozze were no longer wooden but, alas, mass produced glass fibre, ditto for
their huts, no longer made of bamboo (stuoia).A woman lay sunbathing in the evening rays of the sun. I went to ask her if she knew what had become of
the Callahan villa and she said it had been converted into apartments. I asked her if she had known Mimi, who had, alas, died young.‘Mimi, ma certo!
The whole village was smitten by Mimi’. I turned to face the dying rays of the sun across the cove, the rays on the wavelets looking totally Claudian. I
felt an intense wave of melancholia sweep through my very soul and there in the glistening Mediterranean I could have sworn I could see the mirage of
Mimi, jumping and twisting her lithe form and swimming an elegant crawl, the very reincarnation of a painting by Gustave Moreau that the gallery
owned in 2001 entitled The Birth of Venus and which she so totally resembled in life.

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