Summer's Lease

Summer's Lease is a novel, set predominantly in Italy, by Sir John Mortimer, author of the Rumpole novels. It was first published in 1988 and made into a British television mini-series, first shown in 1989. The name "Summer's Lease" comes from William Shakespeare's Sonnet 18. The relevant line is And summer's lease hath all too short a date. The novel is divided into six parts: "Preparations, Arrival, First Week, Second Week, Third Week, The Return".

Molly Pargeter is a forty-something wife and mother of three girls, who leads a stable but dull life in 1980s West London. She feels overweight and there is no passion in her relationship with her husband Hugh, who is secretly seeing another woman. For most of her life she has found escape in detective novels and books on art, especially about the fifteenth-century Italian fresco painter Piero della Francesca. Then in a newspaper's small ads Molly sees the details of a villa in Tuscany, Italy to let and after travelling to Italy to view the villa "La Felicita" she decides to take it for the family's August holiday. The villa is conveniently located for the art-centres of Florence and Siena and also for Urbino, a day's drive away across the "Mountains of the Moon" where possibly the world's greatest small picture awaits Molly: Piero's "Flagellation". In the first week of the holiday the water disappears; the swimming pool is empty and there is no running water in the villa. Then, in the second week, when the body of the ex-pat letting agent is discovered also in an empty swimming pool, Molly suspects foul play. She becomes more involved with life in Mondano and its society: an aristocrat, a wealthy socialite, several ex-pats (who all seem to be hiding something) and the figure of the villa's owner – the mysterious "S. Kettering". The search for the truth behind the disappearing water, the corpse and S. Kettering's identity becomes an obsession which leads Molly across the "Mountains of the Moon" for more than just the small painting.

The Piero della Francesca Trail is an excursion which traces the works created by Piero della Francesca in Arezzo, Monterchi, San Sepolcro (his birthplace) and Urbino. To his contemporaries, Piero was admired as a mathematician and geometer as well as a painter, and today his paintings are celebrated for their serene humanism and use of geometric forms.

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