It was very cold last night (26 degrees), yet I slept cozy and sound with my electric blanket set on low. I awoke this morning feeling refreshed and hurried downstairs to take a hot shower. I'm dressed in two wool sweaters, jeans, thermal underwear, two pairs of wool socks, and some hiking boots that are as warm as could be. It does not seem cold in this house, though to date I have not turned on the electric heaters. Both Lawrence and Capote complained of the bitter cold in the winters. If 26 degrees isn't cold, I don't know what is. The house is built into the side of the mountain, and it has stone walls that are a half-meter thick. Many of those stones were taken from a Roman aqueduct that predates Christ. The villa fronts to the southeast, so there are few days of cold wind. As long as one keeps the doors and windows closed and stays bundled up, the house stays reasonably comfortable in spite of the cold temperatures in winter. The sun is shining in the window, and the coffee is hot. This is a fine day to write about this magical villa.

This lovely villa brings good fortune to its occupants, good fortune that continues to this day. When I discovered this villa, I had no idea it was the former home to both D.H. Lawrence and Truman Capote, two of the world's foremost writers. When I returned to my apartment after signing the rental agreement, I found that I had an e-mail message in which a publisher had agreed to publish my first novel sent at the very moment I was with my new landlord!

I've been asked what it feels like to be one of the few persons lucky enough to have had the opportunity to live here. Fontana Vecchia is one of the best-kept secrets of Taormina. Strangely, one can ask most native Taorminians where the house of D.H. Lawrence or Truman Capote is located and they would not be able to tell you. If fact, you would be hard pressed to find a single resident that even recognizes the names of these two famous writers. Yet, a street is named for Lawrence and another for the villa Fontana Vecchia. The natives go about their business without so much as a thought of these literary greats, as though they never existed. Perhaps it is the generation - more likely, it is because Taormina has been home to a multitude of famous residents.

Wonderful, beautiful, tranquil, serene, awe-inspiring, magic and certainly good fortune are just a few adjectives that come to mind when describing the villa. D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, lived here from 1920-22. Thirty years later, Truman Capote moved into the villa. Rather than describe this experience solely in my words, I will let two writers explain in their own words what it was like for them.

When Lawrence lived in the house, there was only one other villa on the East side of Taormina, owned by Lawrence's landlord. Fontana Vecchia, constructed around 1650, was located in a field of orange and lemon groves. A winding dirt road led to town.

 In 1914, Lawrence married Frieda von Richthofen, the daughter of a German baron and a cousin of the famous German ace who shot down 80 Allied planes in World War I. When the couple landed in Italy in 1920, they had scarcely more than pocket change - Lawrence had twenty-nine English pounds to his name.

 Brenda Maddox, in her biography, D.H. Lawrence, states, "Almost as soon as he returned from Monte Cassino, he and Frieda headed south and rented a fine square villa, the Fontana Vecchia, on the outskirts of Taormina on Sicily's east coast. It was really a move from a small English colony to a larger one, with many of the same friends..."

The Lawrences loved Fontana Vecchia and might have stayed on years longer were it not for destiny and his wandering nature. They both loved the villa. It was a veritable Garden of Eden with a garden filled with orange and lemon trees and a marvelous view of the Ionian Sea and the largest active volcano in Europe, Mount Etna. To make it more appealing, the villa was priced right - only two thousand lire (ten dollars) a year. During the two years Lawrence was here, he completed some of his most impressive works, and left Sicily an internationally famous writer with financial security.

In a letter written to a friend simply addressed to Mrs. R.P., Lawrence describes Fontana Vecchia: "I feel at last we are settled down and can breathe.... We've got a nice big house, with fine rooms and a handy kitchen, set in a big garden, mostly vegetables, green with almond trees, on a steep slope at some distance above the sea.... To the left, the coast of Calabria and the Straits of Messina. It is beautiful, and green, green, and full of flowers.... There are a good many English people, but fewer than Capri...and one needn't know them.... Etna is a beautiful mountain, far lovelier than Vesuvious...."

Lawrence was not alone in praising their new home. Frieda expressed her delight with Fontana Vecchia. "Along our rocky road the peasants rode past into the hills on their donkeys singing loudly; the shepherds drove their goats along, playing their reed pipes as in the days of the Greeks." Frieda claimed that she felt the influence of many civilizations: "Greek and Moorish and Norman and beyond into the dim past."

The shopping was done by their servant, Grazia. All through the winter roses bloomed. Their daily lives were governed by a simple rhythm, always with Lawrence helping with the household tasks. They made many excursions away from the villa, but Frieda loved her Fontana Vecchia, "our own house above the almond trees, and the sea in the cove below, the lovely dawn-sea, where the sun rose with a splendour like trumpets every morning!"

During the period Lawrence lived at Fontana Vecchia, he completed one play Touch and Go (1920) and three of his novels were published, Women in Love (1920), The Lost Girl (1920), and Arron's Rod (1922). The Sicilian summers were stifling. To cope with the heat, Lawrence lounged in the garden in his pajamas. One particularly hot afternoon when he went to the garden trough for some water to drink, he saw a yellow snake. The snake calmly began to drink, pausing a moment to look at Lawrence. Lawrence recognized the snake was poisonous and became frightened. He picked up a log and waited until the snake had finished drinking and had begun to slither back to its hole. He hurled the log at the snake, but missed it and the snake safely disappeared into its hole. Upon thinking on the matter, Lawrence felt ashamed he had tried to kill one of God's beautiful creatures that meant him no harm. This story Lawrence tells in his remarkable poem "Snake," written on the patio and later published in a collection of poems titled Birds, Beasts and Flowers.

In Sea and Sardinia Lawrence describes the surroundings: "The lemons hang pale and innumerable in the thick lemon groves. Lemon trees, like Italians, seem to be happiest when they are touching one another all around. Solid forests of not very tall lemon trees lie between the steep mountains and the sea, on the strip of plain. Women, vague in the orchard undershadow, are picking the lemons, lurking as if in the undersea. In a letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith in May of 1920, Lawrence writes, "Fun if you came to Taormina this summer; but August and September are supposed to be monstrous hot. But perhaps you like heat…We in our Fontana Vecchia are about ten minutes out of town, lovely and cool. We've had some sweltering days already-but our house with its terraces doesn't get too hot: so many green leaves…It is very dry here-all the roses out, and drying up, all the grass cut, the earth brown. There is a lot of land, peasant land, to this house. I have just been down in the valley by the cisterns, in a lemon grove that smells very sweet, getting summer nespoli. Nespoli look like apricots, and taste a bit like them--but they are pear-shaped. They're a sort of medlar. Wish you had some, they are delicious, and we've got tree-fulls. The sea is pale and shimmery today, the prickly pears are in yellow blossom.

"I've actually finished my new novel, The Lost Girl: not morally lost, I assure you. That bee in my bonnet which you mention, and which I presume means sex, buzzes not over-loud. I think The Lost Girl is quite passable, from Mudie's point of view. She is being typed in Rome at the moment, which is going to cost me the monstrous figure of 1000 francs. If the exchange goes right down I'm done.

"Meanwhile Secker is actually doing Women in Love and The Rainbow. That is, he is sending Women in Love to press at once, so he says - and The Rainbow to follow almost immediately, if all goes well. Of course, he is rather in a funk, fearing the censor…Meanwhile life at Fontana Vecchia is very easy, indolent, and devil-may-care…"

The Lost Girl did well, winning the James Tait Black Prize in Edinburgh and bringing a prize of a hundred pounds, the only work of Lawrence to ever win an award.

After a brief excursion to Sardinia, Lawrence wrote an ill-tempered and most remarkable travel book, Sea and Sardinia, which he completed in about six weeks. Though he never revised the book when it was completed, Frieda found the manuscript in one of the villa's bathrooms. It was submitted for publication in April, 1921, to Curtis Brown, through whom it was published by Martin Secker. What sets this travel book apart from others is Lawrence's narrative description of the villages and people he and Frieda visited. In the narrative, Lawrence reveals his disdain for the Sardinian and Sicilian males and both islands' cultures. (He claimed the Sardinians were more stupid than the Italians.)

Lawrence was fascinated with Mount Etna. "Why can't one sit still? Here in Sicily it is so pleasant: the sunny Ionian sea, the changing jewel of Calabria, like a fire-opal moved in the light; Italy and the panorama of Christmas clouds, night with the dog-star laying a long luminous gleam across the sea, as if baying at us, Orion marching above; how the dog-star Sirius looks at one, looks at one! He is the hound of heaven, green, glamorous and fierce!--and then, oh, regal evening star, hung westward flaring over the jagged dark precipices of tall Sicily: then Etna, that wicked witch, resting her thick white snow under heaven, and slowly, slowly rolling her orange-coloured smoke. They called her the Pillar of Heaven, the Greeks. It seems wrong at first, for she trails up in a long, magical, flexible line from he sea's edge to her blunt cone, and does not seem tall. She seems rather low, under heaven. But as one knows her better, oh, awe and wizardry! Remote under heaven, aloof, so near, yet never with us.

"The painters try to paint her, and the photographers to photograph her, in vain. Because why? Because the near ridges, with their olives and white houses, these are with us. Because the river-bed, and Naxos under the lemon groves, Greek Naxos deep under dark-leaved, many-fruited lemon groves, Etna's skirts and skirt-bottoms, these still are our world, our own world…If you would see her, you must slowly take off your eyes from the world and go a naked seer to the strange chamber of the empyrean. Pedestal of heaven!…"

While preparing to depart for Sardinia Lawrence wrote of the window on the lower terrace, "Fasten the door-windows of the lower veranda. One won't fasten at all. The summer heat warped it one way, the masses of autumn rain warped it another. Pull a chair against it." After 78 years, the window still does not fasten!

And as he is departing he writes, "Very dark under the great carob tree as we go down the steps. Dark still the garden, Scent of mimosa, and then of jasmine. The lovely mimosa tree invisible. Dark the stony path. The goat whinnies out of her shed. The broken Roman tomb which lolls right over the garden track does not fall on me as I slip under its massive tilt. Ah, dark garden, dark garden with your olives and your wine, your medlars and mulberries and many almond trees, your steep terraces ledged high above the sea, I am leaving you, slinking out. Out between the rosemary hedges, out of the tall gate, on to the cruel steep stony road. So under dark, big eucalyptus trees, over the stream, and up towards the village. There I have got so far."

The ancient Roman tomb predates Christ and lies but thirty feet from the villa. Many of the trees are still living. The fragrance of jasmine and orange blossoms still lingers in the air. The path is now bricked and leads down to the gate below, but in the night it is still dark and treacherous.

Lawrence's life in Fontana Vecchia was not entirely pleasant. As early as 1916, he had begun to batter Frieda during their infamous rows, often in front of friends. The present landlord vividly remembers her uncle's description of the Lawrences' terrific fights. The man claimed he could hear the couple's screaming from his villa two hundred meters away.

The Rainbow was seized and banned on the grounds of obscenity, and he learned that Women in Love had been described in John Bull as "a shameless study of sex depravity which in direct proportion to the skill of its literary execution becomes unmentionable vile."

If that weren't enough, Lawrence was sued for libel by Philip Heseltine, who charged that Lawrence's effeminate character Halliday was a representation of himself. After the publisher approached Heseltine, he accepted a settlement of fifty pounds. Heseltine consoled himself by growing a beard. The payment of hush-money so enraged Lawrence he let his distaste for Heseltine and his wife be known to a long-time friend, Samual Koteliansky, "Well, they are both such abject shits it is a pity they cant be flushed down a sewer."

It was a secret to few people that Frieda had a legion of lovers during the Lawrences' rocky marriage. Her episodes continued at Fontana Vecchia. The present landlord revealed that one such lover was a resident of Castelmola, a little village just above Taormina. Maddox sheds more light on the subject: "The full list of Frieda's lovers, it has been said, would fill a small telephone book. Unfortunately, the book has not been found. (One lover, who declared himself somewhat belatedly, was an elderly Italian immigrant living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1990. Just before he died, Peppino D'Allura announced that he had been Frieda Lawrence's lover in Taormina in the early 1920s. At the time a mule driver for a wine merchant, D'Allura claimed that one day when he was visiting the Fontana Vecchia, Frieda suddenly appeared in the nude. She offered him the gift of herself, which he accepted."

Early in 1921, Lawrence agreed to rent Fontana Vecchia for another year, but in a letter to Eleanor Farjeon that same month he expressed second thoughts, "Well perhaps you'll be glad you haven't come to Sicily. It thunders and lightens for 24 hours, and hailstones continually, till there is hail-ice thick everywhere, and it is deadly cold and horrid. Meanwhile the almond blossom is almost full out-a sea of blossom, would be, if it weren't shattered…I have said I will take this house for another year. But I really don't believe I shall come back for another winter." Shortly following this letter he pronounced himself weary of expatriate social Taormina and went to a fancy-dress ball wearing his old gray jacket. "To hell with them," he said.

While at Fontana Vecchia, Lawrence's income and fame in America were exploding. In January, he received an advance of five hundred dollars for The Lost Girl and, in March, 50 dollars for "Tortoises." Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious was published in 1921 and gave notice that America had discovered a great English writer.

On November 5, 1921, Lawrence received a letter from an admirer of Sea and Sardinia that was to change the Lawrences' life. The letter was written by Mabel Dodge Sterne. Mrs. Sterne invited the couple to come to live in Taos, New Mexico. Given his rising fame in the States, the move made perfect sense, and Lawrence quickly accepted the invitation. "Truly, the q-b [Queen Bee, a label he often attached to Frieda] and I would like to come to Taos - there are no little bees." Frieda shared Lawrence's enthusiasm for leaving Italy because she felt the expatriate cluster colony of Taormina was not conducive to Lawrence's writing.

While packing their belongings, Lawrence communicated with his stepson, a rare occasion, and sent him a copy of Sea and Sardinia. The boy was said to have loved the book, the only book he had read of Lawrence's, and agreed that his mother, "q.b," was "Mama to the -nth"

Lawrence packed their things into four trunks, including two gifts from Sicilian friends - a painted wooden side panel from a peasant cart, and a novel, Maestro Don Gesualdo, written by a Sicilian writer, revered by Lawrence, who had recently died in Catania.

Fontana Vecchia had been kind to Lawrence. When he and Frieda left the villa, he had $1729.54 in an American bank account and more in his Italian and London accounts. The reader can gain a relative sense of value when one considers that T.S. Eliot had an annual income of 250 pounds, working as a full-time bank employee and struggling as a part-time writer. At the time, Lawrence was earning an annual income in excess of 400 pounds as a full-time writer and world traveler.

In February, 1922, Lawrence and Frieda bid farewell to Fontana Vecchia to begin a worldwide sojourn which was to end with Lawrence's death from tuberculosis in Venice on March 2, 1930 at the young age of 44.

When Truman Capote discovered Fontana Vecchia in April of 1950, the villa's charm and beauty immediately bewitched him. He could hardly believe his fortune when he discovered this villa had been the home of D.H. Lawrence and felt it might be inspiring and lead to a brilliant future as a writer. Just after finding the villa, Capote wrote, "We have just had luck, at least I hope it is luck, in finding a place to live...about twenty minutes walk from Taormina, very isolated, but plenty of room and a wonderful view. It costs $50 a month, which is rather a lot, at least by Italian standards, but I like it tremendously."

Capote's hunch proved omen: During the thirteen months he lived in Fontana Vecchia, he completed his most famous work to date, The Grass Harp, a book that catapulted him into international stardom.

Shortly after arriving at Fontana Vecchia, Capote enthusiastically expressed his joy to a friend, "When we first leased Fontana Vecchia - this was in the spring. April - the valley was high with wheat green as the lizards racing among its stalks. It begins in January, the Sicilian spring, and accumulates into a kingly bouquet, a wizard's garden where all things have bloomed; the creek sprouts mint; dead trees are wreathed in wild clamber roses; even the brutal cactus shoots tender blossoms."

Capote paints a surreal picture of Fontana Vecchia in his book The Dogs Bark: "It is very like living in an airplane, or a ship trembling on the peak of a tidal wave. There is a momentous feeling each time one looks from the windows, steps onto the terrace, a feeling of being suspended, like the white reeling doves, between the mountains and above the sea."

"If we do not go to the beach, then there is only one other reason for leaving the house: to shop in Taormina, and have an aperitif in the piazza. Taormina, really an extension of Naxos, the earliest Greek city in Sicily, has had a continuous existence since 396 B.C. Goethe explored here in 1787; he describes it thus: 'Now sitting at the spot where formerly sat the uppermost spectators, you confess at once that never did any audience, in any theatre, have before it such a spectacle as you there behold. On the right, and on high rocks at the side, castles tower in the air...' Goethe's vantage point was, I gather, the Greek theatre, a superb cliff-top ruin where even today plays and concerts are occasionally given."

Capote shared his villa with his lover, Jack Dunphy. If the villa's old walls could speak, what a story they could tell. There was a day at Fontana Vecchia when Capote is said to have swapped lovers with Tennessee Williams, though it is uncertain if Williams and Capote ever engaged in sex. Williams was often seen sipping drinks with Capote at the famous Wunderbar in Taormina's center. I recently visited with the Wunderbar's owner, who confirmed this to be true. At the time, he was a boy of twelve working at his father's establishment.

"Taormina is as scenically extravagant as Goethe claims; but it is a curious town. During the war, it was the headquarters of Kesselring, the German general; consequently, it came in for a share of Allied bombing. The damage was slight. Nevertheless, the war was the town's undoing. Up until 1940 it was, with the exception of Capri, the most successful Mediterranean resort south of the French Riviera."

"We do not have many visitors at Fontana Vecchia; it is too far a walk for casual callers, and days go by when no one knocks at the door except the ice boy."

Robert Linscott, a senior editor at Random House, said of Capote's Grass Harp, "Wonderful Wonderful Wonderful...There is a perfection about these two chapters that is simply miraculous. I read and reread and love every word...Rumor has it that you plan to return in March...I hope this means with the completed manuscript, as it would be a pity to leave such ideal working conditions before the job is done...I adore every word you have written to date. I read it all through last night from beginning to its present end and had to stop every few paragraphs to hug myself with pleasure. It the last chapter is as good as the preceding ones, this is really going to be a masterpiece."

The following quote is from Gerald Clarke, writer of Capote, A Biography: "The view from the huge windows and broad terraces was as wonderful as Truman said, however, a more than adequate reward for the hike up that steep and stony path; down below, a valley of olive and almond trees, the blue Ionian Sea beyond, and, in the distance, the mirage-like outline of the Italian mainland."

Clarke reports on their departure in mid-September of 1951, "Truman and Jack stuffed their belongings into the little Renault...they said farewell for the last time to Taormina, whose appeal had depended, more than they had thought, on the charms of Fontana Vecchia."

Fontana Vecchia and good fortune must have smiled on Capote, for, as Clarke points out, he went on to become "the most photographed writer of his generation."

To this day, Fontana Vecchia remains as bewitching as it was in Lawrence's time. Thousands of tourists each year take the short walk from Taormina just to get a glimpse of the house of D.H. Lawrence and Truman Capote from the street below. Chances are likely the ancient villa will bring good fortune to its tenants for another 350 years.