Financial Times - The Slow Lane: The art of bridging divides
One of the strangest, most surreal moments in War in Val d’Orcia, Iris Origo’s diary of 1943-44, occurs when the Anglo-American writer, married to a Tuscan aristocrat, meets a German archaeological expert called Heydenreich, in charge of protecting Tuscan art treasures. He tells her how Piero della Francesca’s “Resurrection” was taken away from San Sepolcro in a lorry, which then stopped at Arezzo as that town was being bombed; a bomb landed close to the lorry but failed to explode.
