In early June I was in Florence with the photographer, Guido Taroni, to shoot some images of our workshops. With an afternoon to spare, I persuaded him to come for a walk to try to capture the fragrance in images, or at least try to capture its spirit. If anyone could photograph a smell, Guido Taroni could. We set off from my family home, Villa Colombo, as the light was changing from overhead and intense to angled and golden. An odd couple with a tripod, sniffing at the breeze. Fiesole looms above us, its villas perched on the slopes with the confidence that beauty brings. The air is thick with the scent of jasmine and warm earth, but no hint of fragrant olive.

We walk on past the regimented rows of cypress trees and the ancient, crumbling walls, punctuated here and there with shrines. These hills haven’t changed much since the stories of Dante and Boccaccio. In fact, when the lockdown was first announced in March 2020, my father and I both reread Boccaccio’s Decameron as a way to stay connected and to have something other than the news to focus on. It tells the story of a group of people sheltering from the Black Death in a villa in Fiesole. Although neither of us had read it since school, all of a sudden 1348 felt very contemporary.

Back on our walk, Guido and I press on past the convent of San Domenico, with its Fra Angelico altarpiece, and for me the memory of many Christmas eves, half asleep and fully freezing. As we twist our way up the hill the view shifts perspective, and the drama now plays out below us as the Duomo shows itself in the distance across the valley. The olive groves sway gently; a lush carpet for the eyes. The villas that had shown themselves so proudly from below are now half-buried in greenery. The warm yellow of Tuscan plaster peeks out here and there at the end of steep lanes that branch off the road. On a corner we are met with a house wrapped in jasmine, like a gift. The scent is wonderful, but still not the right one.

The light is moving quickly now, casting its pine needle shadows all around us as we walk up towards Villa San Michele, once a monastery and now a hotel with a world-class view of Florence. Guido and I cut across a disused path as a snake scuttles out of the grass between us. Guido gives me a look that says he had signed up for flowering shrubs, not snakes, and to compensate I tell him I think I have finally caught the smell on the breeze. I clamber up a wall, grasping at promising-looking vegetation.