I cannot remember a time in my life when I was not planning a trip to Italy.
In high school, I pulled out of a March break trip to Rome and Florence on the basis of irreconcilable itineraries: All of my classmates, as well as the supervising teacher, were more interested in meeting Italian men than in what I wanted, which was to be transported into another time and place via old art, strange food and breathtaking views of silver olives and golden sunflowers.
Over the next 30-odd years, the fantasy expanded to include renting a house in Tuscany with friends and family, basking in the fabled sun, cooking enormous al fresco dinners, knocking back the world's best espresso in some tiny café and passing on my passion for Italian art to my teenaged daughters.
I bought guidebooks and reread Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun so often I can still recite passages from memory. I bookmarked websites and bought thick glossy catalogues from villa rental agencies. I tried to persuade my husband – whose idea of the perfect vacation is two weeks at an Ontario cottage – that this was something we really should consider. He made faces. I think the best I ever got out of him was a non-committal “some day.” In the distant future. When pigs fly.
But then something happened. The stars collided, or the moon was in a favourable house, and somewhere, maybe, a hog took wing. My husband never did come around, but two female friends decided to treat my ramblings about Tuscany as if they had the makings of a solid plan.
My friend Ursula wanted to travel to Tuscany with her two teenaged daughters before the younger one finished high school. A woman of unusual determination, she lined up another friend with two daughters in university. Ursula then presented the six of them to me as a package. I recall that her view was basically that I had spent all these years doing the groundwork, and she had lined up enough people to make it work, so what were we waiting for?
Thus began the once-in-a-lifetime adventure we've dubbed Enchanted August, after the book and later film Enchanted April, about four English women in the early 1920s who rent an Italian villa sight unseen after reading an advertisement in a London newspaper. Our planning started in the winter of 2004 and last summer found the three of us, and our six daughters, crossing the Atlantic by various routes and, in mid-August, meeting at the farmhouse we had rented in Italy for two weeks.
Of course, we had heard all the horror stories, either from our own research or from relatives who worried that we might be making a terrible and expensive mistake. Writers of British Sunday features seem to have created a sub-genre from this type of story, documenting how what were supposed to be blissful shared holidays with best friends turn into disasters when fantasy meets the reality of crumbling insect-infested homes and domestic incompatibility.
We decided, however, to ignore the tales of discomfort and woe, and I am happy to report that ours turned out to be a very different saga – one about how such a trip can not only work well, keeping all friendships intact, but also be both hilarious and glorious, enhancing relationships and providing conversational fodder for years to come. The key ingredients, say the various women, were planning, patience, goodwill and a shared sense of humour. That and a high threshold for communal living that, happily, seems to be one of many legacies that has survived our generation's hippy youth.
We also had some advantages over Elizabeth von Arnim's fictional characters. They started out as strangers, whose motives and personalities clash, whereas we knew each other well, and had a history of successful family cottage holidays. That said, we are 21st-century mothers, with hectic lives, so sometimes our planning meetings felt as if they required almost as much organizing as the holiday itself.
Still, we made them a priority, having several long dinners during the 15 months leading up to our trip.
This allowed us to share ideas and research and, most importantly, communicate our expectations so none of us would end up surprised or disappointed. (Another benefit of the months of planning was that we grew comfortable with how each member handled her finances. This allowed us to lump some large expenditures on to one credit card, confident that everyone would pay her share – a crucial matter when three families are taking on the responsibility for a trip that would cost us each between $10,000 and $15,000.) Italy in August wasn't everybody's first choice. For most of us, August always feels like the end, rather than the beginning, of vacation; summer's almost over and one might as well give up and hunker down for fall. But we had no choice: The house we wanted to rent, owned by Toronto art historian and university professor Marta Braun, is not available from June to mid-August, when it is occupied by its owners; we couldn't go earlier or later because we had the girls' school schedules to consider.
