Bouquet
He bought her a bunch of dried flowers at the Fontaine of Vaucluse where Petrarch lived.
The gesture was so unusual she felt obliged to reciprocate with ropes of shiny liquorice for him.
They ordered citrons presses, sipped them by the jade green water and almost decided to start again.
So what if their gifts looked slight compared to all the lyric poems - three hundred and sixty six of them - that Petrarch wrote to Laura, the girl he glimpsed, one April day, inside a church in Avignon . . .
`He shouldn't be thinking of her in church' he said. 'That's all people think of in church', she said and so they limped on through their holiday.
He filled the car with giant tomatoes, strings of onions, smelly melons and plaits of plump ink garlic that wouldn't last till Christmas, while she bought six litre bottles of virgin-extra olive oil - enough for years of relationship, but not quite enough for love.
Felicity Napier
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