En route to summer

Before long it’s strawberries for dessert, children halfway up trees building fairy gardens out of old flowerpots, and somebody insisting we eat outside despite the very obvious threat of rain.

There's a version of this that exists somewhere in every direction — a masseria in the heel of Italy where the stone floors stay cool until August, a whitewashed house on a Cycladic hillside where the wind carries oregano and salt, a farmhouse in the Luberon where the shutters are always half-closed against the afternoon glare. The light is different in all of them and somehow exactly the same. Long and golden and slow to leave. The kind that makes everything — the chipped glasses, the mismatched chairs, the meal that started at one and is still going at five — look like something worth holding onto.

Our latest arrivals are for exactly this sort of life: long, gloriously ramshackle lunches, wet footprints through the kitchen, herbs going to seed, and those magic few months where the house is permanently full of people, pollen, and sweating bottles of lambrusco.

Pack light, but pack well. Bring the good things. The bowls big enough to share, the glasses that survive the journey, the linens that dry in an hour on a warm afternoon.

Alongside it all: sturdy tableware for outdoor feasting, food covers to outsmart crickets and wasps, tomato-shaped dishes made for overfilled salads, and wide-brimmed hats for those determined to stay outside until the very last of the light disappears.

As they say in Italy, where the table has always been the centre of everything: A tavola non si invecchia. At the table, one does not grow old.