KINTA BEEVOR
Kinta Beevor was five when she fell in love with her parents’ castle facing the Carrara mountains in Italy. She and her brother ran barefoot, exploring an enchanted world. They accompanied Fiore, the stonemason, searching for wild mushrooms in the hills, while Ramponi showed them how to tickle trout. The freedom and beauty of life at the castle attracted poets, writers and painters, including D.H. Lawrence and Rex Whistler.

The other side to Kinta’s childhood was very different. It was spent with her famously ‘formidable’ great aunt, Janet Ross, outside Florence in a grand villa where Boccaccio set part of the Decameron. But soon, the old way of life and Kinta’s idyllic world were threatened by war. Nostalgic, yet unsentimental and funny, this is a book which transports the reader to Tuscany and the sound of bells from a distant campanile.

Kinta Beevor was born in 1911 at Northbourne in East Kent. After her father went off with a Yeomanry regiment to fight in the First World War, her mother, Lina Waterfield, took Kinta and her brother out to Florence where she started the British Institute. Kinta’s childhood was spent at Poggio Gherardo outside Florence and at her parent’s castle at Aulla. She returned to England,married and had three sons. She lived at Eastry close to where she was born, but she still returned to Tuscany each year.

Kinta Beevor died in August 1995.

War in Val D’Orcia: 1943-44 – A Diary
The author, an Anglo-American married to an Italian landowner in 1924, found herself raising a family during the civil war and foreign invasion in the remote Tuscan countryside. This diary records her concerns to keep her household and sixty orphans together and save a rural community from annihilation. It is a story of confusion and bewilderment as a peasant society is confronted by disaster when, in the space of a few months, a whole way of life is changed completely beyond recognition. It is also a story of tragedy and suffering, of individual courage, generosity and heroism.