Travel to Villa Clara with Sara Steele
Sarah Steele is off to Italy with her latest novel and we are ALL invited!
Locations in Villa Clara
Do I choose the settings of my novels based on fascinating places I want to visit? Absolutely! My new book THE LAST LETTERS OF VILLA CLARA is a romp through 1960s London and Tuscany, in search of a missing Vermeer painting. I dig deep into the world of art dealing and art forgery, and of course painting itself. In creating a fictional Vermeer work, I travelled to Delft, the great master’s home town. To wake up each morning in the street where he was born, and listen to the same church bells he would have heard himself, was quite incredible.
Amsterdam (c) Sarah Steele
Locations in Villa Clara
Of course it is impossible to appreciate Vermeer’s works without a trip to the Rijksmuseum, yet very hard to see them when you get there. Vermeer’s Milkmaid attracts quite the crowd.
Rijks Museum(c) Sarah Steele
Locations in Villa Clara
The star of Vermeer’s catalogue is of course the Girl with a Pearl Earring, who resides at the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague, a short train ride from Delft. Way off the tourist trail, it’s a gem of a museum where you can spend time alone with some truly outstanding art. I was the only one in the room with the Girl when this was taken. A real treat.
Villa Clara? (c) Sarah Steele
Locations in Villa Clara
One of my characters, Bruce Cato, is a master of reproduction, based loosely on the famous forger Eric Hebborn, but with added scruples. Bruce lives in Villa Clara in Tuscany, producing copies of artworks for film sets, hotels, and collectors who keep the original under lock and key. It is here that he leaves the first clue in a trail for his niece Phoebe in 1989, setting her on a path to discovering the story of Bruce’s lost love Leonora Birch. Villa Clara sits a short distance from the Tuscan town of San Gimignano, famous for its many towers, and somewhere I have spent many happy times.
The Tower (c) Sarah Steele
Locations in Villa Clara
I spend a lot of time scouring luxury overseas estate agent websites to find locations for my novels, and this Tuscan property leapt out at me when searching for inspiration for Villa Clara, with its own medieval tower, serving as Bruce’s studio.
London (c) Sarah Steele
Locations in Villa Clara
Of course, much of the story happens in London in 1963, just as the Beatles and Carnaby Street were emerging, and the Profumo Scandal rocked the Establishment. Leonora Birch, a former artist, makes ends meet by running a Pimlico boarding house, then very much a working-class area that had suffered extensive bomb damage during the war. It is in the fictional Ludlow Gardens that Nora’s two tenants Joan and Margot become friends, helping Leonora settle an old grudge.
I’m sure many a breakfast was had at the nearby Regency Café, still a London institution.
Regency Cafe (c) Sarah Steele
London in the sixties had a thriving nightlife, especially around Soho, exemplified by the Flamingo Club and its infamous all-nighters. Young Joan finds herself at the centre of a fight there – not an unusual occurrence, apparently!
Locations in Villa Clara
At the other end of the spectrum, my ‘baddy’, Sir Edwin Viner, owns an upmarket art gallery on Bond Street, which is still home to Sotheby’s and Christie’s and several other galleries where if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it. Here’s a wonderful photograph of Bond Street, taken around the mid 1960s.
Locations in Villa Clara
Bond Street (c) Sarah Steele
Locations in Villa Clara
My research led me to a couple of venerable art institutions, as I hunted down information about Great Masters Drawings. The obvious starting point was the Courtauld Institute and its vast library, temporarily housed near Kings Cross when I visited.
British Library (c) Sarah Steele
Locations in Villa Clara
A cheeky email to the British Museum led to a private visit to the Drawings Room, in which I was shown pieces from the BM collection, usually kept locked away, due to the fragile nature of these works.
The drawing (c) Sarah Steele
Locations in Villa Clara
Was it worth writing an entire book, just to be shown this exquisite Albrecht Dürer drawing that rarely sees the light of day?
I think you know the answer!
Wow thank you so much Sarah!! Amazing tour around your story locations
BookTrail Boarding Pass: Last letters from Villa Clara
Twitter: @sarah_l_steele
