For the last 20 years, most of my August nights have been spent in Italy, of late in Umbria, halfway up a hill cloaked in oak woods. Spring is something that local people speak of with nostalgia, relegated to a day or two between snowfall and heatwave. If you blink, you miss it. Summer is now a season that runs from April to October.
The English are notorious for their dreary obsession with the weather. Yet I have found that wherever I have lived or travelled, in whatever culture, the weather is a subject of constant comment and frequent local analysis. Italians tend to commence every other conversation with a temperature check. In winter, it is cold, and in summer, of course, it is hot - "fa caldo". This is a phrase repeated so often and with such vehemence that an English tourist was heard to enquire "Why is everyone so down on Aldo in the summer?"
Meteorological inanities aside, in summer Italy is deliciously hot. Living, as my family does, in a rambling terracotta refrigerator during the winter, we appreciate the near- magical transformation of our house into a pleasantly cool summer residence as much as any tourist could.
April to October is the high season for tourism in Italy in general, and it is the high season for guests - dozens of them. Forty-four staying at any one time is our (pretty uncomfortable) record, 10 or 12 is the norm. There are regulars, first and foremost my eldest daughter and her family. And there is Otto, the one-time revolutionary, my oldest and dearest friend, who makes an annual pilgrimage to Umbria from Venezuela. Then there are over-lapping trails of family and friends, and friends of friends. Most of our guests are artists, but they don't have to be. The one thing they do have to be is good company in the evenings (we can all be as dull as we choose during the day); the other house rules are - not to be sick in the house; and not to get tired and emotional in the kitchen.
When it comes to guests, I am a lot more Latin American than English. Some of our visitors have stayed for years on end and I have thoroughly enjoyed their company. During the day, though, I relax my duties as hostess, pulling the strings again each evening from dinner onwards. I am the designated cook.
So summer evenings start, for me, with a trawl through the herb garden, gathering whatever I need for supper that night, carefully pulling taragon, parsley, chives, salads and so on, from between the rampant weeds that flourish among them. Gardening is a little more than a hobby - more, really, of an overriding obsession. Years of experience have shown me that its discussion is not to everybody's taste, so I'll let it go here with only a mention of its main contribution to every summer night in the guise of its heady fragrance. There is a long, high, hedge of honeysuckle and jasmine beside the house, there are pots of lilies and beds of mock orange, roses, lavender and rosemary. All these scents waft through the balmy twilight, although, the later it gets, the lingering smells are always those of the jasmine and the lemon flowers.
Anyone who believes that living in the countryside is a haven of peace and quiet is mistaken. There is a nightly cacophony which breaks down, more or less, as follows. From afar, frogs croak with intermittent but almost deafening insistence. This is overlaid by cicadas, which are utterly tuneless but seem to be endlessly tuning up. There is, in the middle distance, the sound of water playing in the fountain. Then, nearer, the breeze in the cypress trees.
In a huge oak tree behind the herb garden a nightingale sings to the delight of the new guests and the distaste of old ones. This is year three. This nightingale has five notes. I remember the pleasure I first felt on hearing it outside my window, blessed as any oriental princess by its clear song. Any song on a perpetual loop palls in the end, particularly if the loop is only a few seconds long. Often now, on summer nights, I ponder the wisdom and sanity of those Chinese emperors who sacked entire kingdoms in search of a nightingale. And, if there are any searchers left out there, they can have mine.
Meanwhile, the younger children (either two or four 10-year-olds headed by my daughter, Florence, and grandson, Felix) have beaten a retreat after dinner, scavenged pro visions for their camp out on a garden terrace, and retired in good order to their adventure.
Unless we others choose to go down to the lake, which is only four minutes away, but which I am usually too lazy to adjourn to, we are not unduly plagued by mosquitoes. But there are always one or two. Like the Carib Indians who lined up on the shore of Guyana to scare off Sir Walter Raleigh and his men, they seem to be constantly running around and lining up to give the impression of being legion.
Against the backdrop of so many miscellaneous noises, there is always music - Cuban, Malian, blues, opera - whatever is topping the house charts that week. And over the music, there is talk, lots of it, from huge round-table discussions to splinter groups, with heated debates on everything from painting to malicious gossip.
After about one o'clock, the group begins to thin. Since I sleep very little, I am often the last up. I like wandering around the house at night when everyone else is asleep. It is one of my favourite times for reading.
In fact, I like summer nights so much that I decided to skip winter altogether and head off, en famille, to the Caribbean for six months. A lot of our regular visitors came out to stay with us, so the house-party feeling extended to the tiny island of Nevis. Despite having had a lovely time on that island paradise - who couldn't? - I found summer lovelier when preceded by some good, bracing cold.
The mosquitoes were monstrous, and the entire island was beleaguered by wild donkeys which brayed, stampeded and fornicated astonishingly loudly from dusk till dawn. Island conversation, when the island is minuscule and lives for tourism, can get on to a loop only marginally longer than a nightingale's. Most of these churlish reflections were not uppermost in my mind during the months I lived on Nevis. They surfaced, gradually, while contemplating the hosts of fireflies around our house in Umbria. Having said that, I'd go back to the Caribbean any day, but only for a holiday strategically planned in, say, February, for a few weeks. Summer in Italy is too good to need to travel in the hopes of reproducing it.
Although I love having guests, I don't go out very much. But for the last five years I have had a lot to do with the Umbrian film festival. This takes place in the first week of July in the small Renaissance hill town of Montone.
We drop a huge screen over the facade of a palazzo in the main square and then sit out in the cafes watching movies until the wee hours. When our film festival is over, I do stir myself to sit out in squares around the neighbouring cities watching their selection of films alla Cinema Paradiso under the stars.
Mostly, though, summer nights are spent at home, with motley concerts and shows put on by the household. The last one was an adult puppet show which was a cross between Little Red Riding Hood and Reservoir Dogs. It was put on by Gerrald, an elephant trainer, and was very good, but I cannot take any credit for it because my contribution was the refreshments during the interval.
Had this been a piece about August days it would have had to include paroxysms of shopping, missed flights, visits to the accident and emergency unit and mountains of laundry. But August nights are another matter.
