Love from Venice

In the summer of 1957, anxious to impress an admirer who had moved to Paris, while rebelling against her family, Gill Johnson, aged twenty-five, gave up her comfortable job at the National Gallery in London and travelled to Venice to take up a job teaching English to an aristocratic Italian family. 'Love from Venice' is her vivid evocation of that summer, the last hurrah of the European Grand Tour, when the international jet set lit upon the city for their fun.

Born in 1932, Gill Johnson grew up in Hampstead and Selsey. Evacuated to Scotland after the fall of Dunkirk, she returned home in 1943 only narrowly to escape being hit by a Doodlebug rocket in Buckinghamshire. Leaving St Mary's Calne school, she joined the Bach Choir in 1949, and is now the choir's longest serving member. After marrying, she worked in the British Embassy in Paris, then returned to London to assist Kenneth Clark, the art historian. To fund the education of her four sons, she imported sorbet from the Rhône Valley. Having lived in the northern Auvergne, Italy and Hong Kong, she has settled in west London. Love from Venice is her first book.