We are in the extreme south end of the house, if there is any such thing as a south end to a house, whose orientation cannot be determined by me, because I am incompetent in all cases where an object does not point directly north & south.  This one slants across between, & is therefore a confusion.  This little private parlor is in one of the two corners of what I call the south end of the house.  The sun rises in such a way that all the morning it is pouring its light through the 33 glass doors or windows which pierce the side of the house which looks upon the terrace & garden; the rest of the day the light floods this south end of the house, as I call it; at noon the sun is directly above Florence yonder in the distance in the plain, directly across those architectural features which have been so familiar to the world in pictures for some centuries, the Duomo, the Campanile, the Tomb of the Medici, & the beautiful tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; in this position it begins to reveal the secrets of the delicious blue mountains that circle around into the west, for its light discovers, uncovers, & exposes a white snowstorm of villas & cities that you cannot train yourself to have confidence in, they appear & disappear so mysteriously, as if they might not be villas & cities at all, but the ghosts of perished ones of the remote & dim Etruscan times; & late in the afternoon the sun sets down behind those mountains somewhere, at no particular time & at no particular place, so far as I can see.

Again at the end of March he wrote: 

Now that we have lived in this house four and a half months my prejudices have fallen away one by one & the place has become very homelike to me.  Under certain conditions I should like to go on living in it indefinitely.  I should wish the Countess to move out of Italy, out of Europe, out of the planet.  I should want her bonded to retire to her place in the next world & inform me which of the two it was, so that I could arrange for my own hereafter.

Complications with their landlady had begun early, and in time, next to Mrs. Clemens’s health, to which it bore such an intimate and vital relation, the indifference of the Countess Massiglia to their needs became the supreme and absorbing concern of life at the villa, and led to continued and almost continuous house-hunting.

Days when the weather permitted, Clemens drove over the hills looking for a villa which he could lease or buy—­one with conveniences and just the right elevation and surroundings.  There were plenty of villas; but some of them were badly situated as to altitude or view; some were falling to decay, and the search was rather a discouraging one.  Still it was not abandoned, and the reports of these excursions furnished new interest and new hope always to the invalid at home.

“Even if we find it,” he wrote Howells, “I am afraid it will be months before we can move Mrs. Clemens.  Of course it will.  But it comforts us to let on that we think otherwise, and these pretensions help to keep hope alive in her.”