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remembered the first time I went to work with Vanda Scaravelli
at her house in the hills outside Florence. I had been invited
by her to take lessons with her there after meeting her briefly
in London. This was my first visit to Italy, I had spent the
previous six weeks studying 'Teach Yourself Italian' and Vanda
had told me not to practice yoga at all before I went but
to rest as much as possible! Everything was so entirely new
for me then that the moment of my arrival at her house is
vividly and indelibly printed on my memory. I had flown to
Pisa airport on a grey and cloudy late May day. I had taken
the train to Florence station, found the number 7 bus which
wound its way through the cypresses and villas up to Fiesole.
At Fiesole I sat in the late afternoon sunshine opposite the
Roman theatre and the Pizzeria Etrusca for about half an hour
waiting for a taxi to arrive. Eventually I boarded a taxi
and gave Vanda's address in my excited and hesitant Italian.
We wound further into the hills, past groves of silvery olive
trees with purple irises growing beneath them. When we reached
the top of Vanda's unmade road the driver refused to take
his car any further. I walked along the curving white track
waiting for her house to come into view - a clump of cypresses,
a simple stone farmhouse sitting comfortably, almost casually,
in a landscape that was so perfect, so classically familiar
yet so unreal that I almost did have to pinch myself to make
sure that I was really there. I felt as if I had wandered
inside the frame of a Renaissance painting!
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