The Land Where Lemons Grow by Helena Attlee

Author:Helena Attlee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Countryman Press
Published: 2014-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

The remarkable beauty of the Riviera and the mild winter climate attracted two very different groups of visitors. The first were artists, dazzled and entranced by the extraordinary clarity of the light. When Monet came to Bordighera from northern France in 1884, he is said to have found it difficult to paint lemon and orange trees silhouetted against the sea, and yet his painting entitled Sous les Citronniers captures perfectly the vibrant, dusky light beneath laden trees in an orange grove. In a letter to Alice Hoschedé he described with delight the wild profusion of almond and peach trees all muddled up with palms and lemons in a garden.18 The largest garden belonged to a Signor Morena. Rather like Andrea Doria’s sixteenth-century garden in Genoa, it stretched from the top of the hill in Bordighera to the sea. When Monet first visited Signor Morena to ask if he could set up his easel in the garden, he returned to his hotel with armfuls of flowers, oranges, mandarins and sweet lemons. ‘This garden is unlike any other,’ he wrote in a letter; ‘it’s a dream, where all the plants in the universe grow naturally.’ Morena’s villa is now called Villa Mariani, after the painter Pompeo Mariani, who lived there from 1909 until his death in 1927. It is possible to visit it and see the views that Monet painted, although the garden no longer stretches down the hillside to the sea.

The Riviera’s mild winter climate also attracted invalids and in particular sufferers from tuberculosis. This trend began in the late 1850s when Dr James Bennett, an English gynaecologist suffering from TB, came to Menton for his own health. When he recovered he wrote a book that was published in 1861 to promote the Riviera as an overwintering station.19 ‘I believe that the time is fast approaching,’ he said, ‘when tens of thousands from the north of Europe will adopt the habits of the swallow, and transform every town and village on its coast into sunny winter retreats.’ How right he was, and citrus trees were a vital element of the vivid impression made by the Riviera upon its frail visitors.

The romance of the Riviera was greatly enhanced in 1855, when Giovanni Ruffini published a novel in English called Doctor Antonio: A Tale of Italy. The book begins as a story about the relationship between Lucy Davenne, a beautiful young English girl injured in a carriage accident on the road between Nice and Genoa, and Dr Antonio, a political exile from the Bourbon regime in Sicily. The ‘rich odour of orange and lemon trees’20 surrounds the doctor and his young patient, creating a background for their unspoken romance. When Dr Antonio allows Lucy to leave the house for the first time after her accident, he leads her into the garden, where the ground is covered by ‘a thick layer of orange and lemon blossoms, out of which came in strong relief a profusion of violently red wild poppies’.21

When Lucy returns after many

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