My castle, my books.

Luisa Beccaria's chambre frm Marie Claire Maison

Just cracked open my 25 cent, Playboy Press copy of Shirley Hazzard's The Bay of Noon. Certain already that this will be impossible to put down, as this is what has met me on only page 2:

A centenarian has told me that memory protects one from this burden of experience. Whole segments of time dropped out, she said: "Of five or six years, say, around the turn of the century, all I can remmber is the dress that someone wore, or the colour of a curtain." And I would be pleased, rather than otherwise, at the prospect of remembering Naples in similar terms - a lilac dress Gioconda wore one morning driving to Caserta, or the Siena-coloured curtains of the apartment in San Biahio dei Librai.