Dear Brett,

You are really depressed. But one always feels ill the first few days one comes to Italy. Here it is clear and the sun is still warm: but it is very, very windy.
Our colds have gone, and I am simply taking things easy.
Here everything is decidedly cheap.
Forty lire is less than two dollars and a single room at De Vargas is three dollars and fifty.
We paid twenty-five pounds for this: house, which is not a little.
But it is full of rooms, a huge vineyard in the garden, and we are high above the sea.
Beautiful but windy.
Downstairs there is a farmer Giovanni, who looks after us.
And the sea is almost always blue.
It is a good place to be apart, and living is really cheap.
We manage on five shillings a day.
There is something i like very much about the Mediterranean: it relaxes after the tensions of America.
Give it a little while to get used to it.
But after the first moments the need to wander and make a kind of Iliad always comes back to me.
But even if we put together all our money, we couldn't afford a small boat, to enjoy this sea so rich in coasts to the fullest.
As you see, you wouldn't have to sail more than a day, to land in some land.
But enough!
We never get out of the need for money.
The people here, the farmers, are terribly kind, as in some sort of old times: they bring us fish and artichokes.

D.H.L.

Frieda Lawrence continues

We are in a villa and I am still doing the chores, and all the cheerful Italian cooking.
There is an old Giovanni, last year one night he was almost dying according to the doctor; then in the middle of the night he felt so hungry that he put a huge pot of potatoes on to boil, washed down with a bottle of oil and one of vinegar, and after eating everything he was miraculously cured.
L. is so well, and you will see that you will be too, as soon as the cold has passed.

F.