chic new interiors: the 18 bedrooms, dispersed around the
hamlet; an intimate core building with its sundowners' ter-
race, spa, jazz bar, and art gallery; a pool hidden among
exquisite gardens; lavender walks; a bar, restaurant, and
bistro; a cooking school; a 14th-century church regularly
used for concerts. There are still the original three villas
for hire, too, and a parallel renewal in those buildings not
incorporated into Cioffi's dream, but raised by its ideals
all the same.
As it happens, Miani says that she owes the Italian grain
of her work to the English. She remembers an adolescent
visit to the Chianti villa of Matthew and Maro Spender, re-
spectively the sculptor son of the English poet Stephen
Spender and artist daughter of the abstract expression-
ist Arshile Gorky. "And when I arrived in this very simple
rural house I was amazed," she recalls. "They were living
a contemporary life but not an English country life; they
were looking after the texture of what they have found.
