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the local Italians. ‘It’s Italy the same as ever,’ he wrote, ‘whether it’s Mussolini or Octavian Augustus’. What neither he nor Rina foresaw was that Frieda would enjoy the benefits not only of sunshine, wine and pasta but also of an adulterous liaison with the handsome Ravagli. Ravagli later re- called how when he showed Frieda the villa she walked ahead of him with ‘well calculated movements of her body’ and then sat on a bed, remarking that it was ‘perfect for making love’ while looking straight into Ravagli’s eyes. In her letters to Martin back in England Rina described the frequent rows between Frieda and Lawrence, who evidently was aware of his wife’s infidelity and frustrated by his apparently growing impotence. Life at the Villa Bernarda was hectic, Rina wrote to Secker: ‘I can almost see its walls palpitating from the pent-up storms of emotion’. Lawrence was beginning to form the idea of a novel about adultery, and at Spotorno wrote two short stories which prefigure Lady Chatterley : ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’, in which a young girl discovers sexual desire when being rescued from a flood by a gipsy; and ‘Sun’, based on Rina, in which a young woman in Italy with her child but without her husband sunbathes naked in the woods and is tempted to make love to a local peasant who spies on her. The Spotorno episode must have caused Lawrence pain: whereas Frieda was sometimes generous with her physical a V ec- tions (she confessed to making love with a fellow hiker when she and Lawrence were crossing the Alps to start their life together), Lawrence was (except for one lapse) faithful and monogamous. But he was starting to put together ideas for what would become Lady Chatterley’s Lover (initially entitled Tenderness) , and his wife’s a V air with Ravagli undoubtedly contributed to its composition. It was, as Lawrence’s biographer John Worthen puts it, a ‘verbal act of love to Frieda’ at a time when she had taken a lover and he was ‘less sexually involved with her than in their entire life together’. He started writing it when they moved to Florence, or more precisely to Scandicci just outside Florence, in April 1926, renting a villa on a hill overlooking the Val d’Arno, the Villa Mirenda. In his
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