Notes from an Italian Garden Book

"I fell in love with Etruria one chilly evening in January. They were having a New Year's Eve festival in a little town near Campagnano, and a group of local boys dressed in Renaissance costumes were marching in a torchlight parade down the main street. As I stood there in the cold watching the flames lurching to the sky, I realized that I felt very much at home in this ancient place."

Thirty years ago Joan Marble and her sculptor husband bought a piece of unpromising land in Lazio, the area north of Rome that was home to the ancient Etruscans. They built a house and grew a wonderful garden. This the story of their life there, of the unexpected friends who helped them, and of their conquest of an intransigent landscape.