Our man in Libya and Iran: Lady Carnarvon joins Nicholas Hopton to talk diplomacy, travel and Foreign Service.

In this episode from Highclere Castle, I sit down with Nick Hopton to talk about his book, "Marma Mia," which begins as the story of buying and restoring a holiday house in an unspoiled part of Tuscany, the Maremma and becomes a wider family and personal journey. 

Nick shares how reading "A Year in Provence" during COVID while he was British Ambassador to Libya helped inspire him to write a feel-good book that encourages readers to discover lesser-known regions. 

We discuss his Foreign Office career and his approach to languages, including learning Arabic across postings such as Morocco, Yemen, Qatar and Libya, along with French, Italian, Spanish, some German, and some Farsi ahead of becoming ambassador to Iran after the 2015 nuclear deal and the reopening of the British embassy. 

Nick explains how a friend’s suggestion to look beyond Chianti led serendipitously to the first house they viewed and ultimately boughtalongside the realities of renovating abroad: high costs, practical challenges, and the highs and lows of making a place work for family life. We also talk about his unexpected love of landscaping and working with a skilled digger operator he calls “Michelangelo,” the region’s food, wine, local olive oil and its strong Tuscan accent. 

Nick recounts a memorable moment when a friend arrived with an armed escort and the town’s mayor turned out to greet them, and he updates me on ongoing projects, including drilling a 97-meter well to reach a fresh aquifer. Looking ahead, Nick describes writing best in the relative isolation of the Italian house and shares his interest in writing more broadly about the Mediterranean, linked to his role creating a new program at the University of Cambridge Centre for Geopolitics. We touch on the Napoleonic history of the area, including the principality of Piombino and Lucca and Napoleon’s sister Elisa and end with a playful question about a dream dance guest Nick chooses Dante’s Beatrice, reflecting his early love of Dante’s poetry and its lifelong influence.

00:00 Meet Nick Hopton & the book ‘Marma Mia’ (restoring a house in Italy)

00:50 Inspired by ‘A Year in Provence’: writing a feel-good travel memoir during COVID

01:59 Diplomatic life & learning languages: Arabic, French, Italian (and more)

04:26 Why you should speak the local language (even with bad grammar)

05:17 Falling for Tuscany’s Maremma: the serendipitous house-buying story

07:42 Renovation reality: highs, lows, and why the Maremma stays authentic

08:44 Landscaping obsession: diggers, Kubotas, and ‘Michelangelo’ the operator

11:05 Food, wine & dialect: tomatoes, olive oil, and the Tuscan accent

12:49 Small-town surprises: the ambassador friend visit and the mayor’s welcome

13:43 The work never ends: is the villa project ever really finished?

14:01 Digging a 97m Well & the Never-Ending House Project

14:27 What’s Next After the Book: A Wider Mediterranean Focus

14:58 Seeing the Mediterranean Holistically (Cambridge Geopolitics & Trade Routes)

16:26 Duff Cooper, John Julius Norwich & Highclere’s Colorful Guests

17:20 Writing Habits: Tuscany, Isolation, Rhythm & Beating Procrastination

18:37 Italy, Maremma & Napoleonic History: Elisa and the Principality of Piombino and Lucca

20:30 Diplomatic Postings & Reopening the UK Embassy in Iran (2015)

23:09 Iran Today: Regime Weakness, Protests, and a Hope to Visit the Cradle of Civilization

24:21 Highclere’s Library, the Book Club, and a Shared Love of Italy

25:27 Finale: The Summer Dance Fantasy Guest—Dante, Beatrice & Vita Nova

You can hear more episodes of Lady Carnarvon's Official Podcasts at https://www.ladycarnarvon.com/podcast/

New episodes are published on the first day of every month.

Transcript

Lady Carnarvon: Welcome to my podcast. Today I'm delighted to be sitting here at Highclere Castle with Nick Hopton, who's written a wonderful book about his journey restoring a house in Italy. But it's so much more than that. It's about his family and his own journey in discovering things about himself as he went through the process. It's called Marma Mia, and it's about a little-known part of Italy, which I think you all need to visit. Welcome, Nick. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Nick Hopton: Lady Carnarvon, thank you very much for having me on your podcast.

Lady Carnarvon: Marvelous. I couldn't put your book down, Nick, actually. And then having read it, I passed it to my husband, Geordie, and said, "You’ve gotta read it". And then he snagged it, and he has also very much enjoyed it. So that's the first thing—I wanted to turn the pages. I imagine you might have been thinking a little bit about A Year in Provence, which really, I guess, struck gold for Peter Mayle. All of us authors are thinking about travel books and Peter Mayle, but in a sense, you've also done it. But now with Italy—had you read A Year in Provence in advance?

Nick Hopton: First of all, I'm delighted that you enjoyed the book. And thank you for reading—that's well beyond the call of duty. I hadn't read A Year in Provence until COVID, at which point I was actually the British Ambassador to Libya. My sister had just given me A Year in Provence, and it's a book I'd always resisted reading for some reason. But then I read it and I couldn't put it down. It made me feel so good at what was actually quite a tricky time for everybody. During these long periods of enforced... not idleness so much, but we were all locked down. I've written books before and I thought, "Okay, maybe this is the time when I write one about our house project in Tuscany". It came remarkably naturally. My intention was to write something that, like Peter Mayle's book, inspired people to get to know a region they might not know, but above all, made them feel better about things.

Lady Carnarvon: I think we all need feel-good books, and this is a feel-good book. What's interesting to me is it's paired with your own highly successful life as one of our ambassadors and "men abroad" for the Foreign Office—starting from Cambridge reading, I know, Modern Languages in French and Italian, and then of course being sent, as is the wont of the Foreign Office, to the Middle East. I assume you then had to learn Arabic. Is that how it went?

Nick Hopton: Yes, absolutely. I've learned Arabic on and off for almost four decades. I joined the Foreign Office with European languages. My first posting was Morocco. During my time there, I first tried to learn the local dialect, Darija. I found it impossible; it is really a transliterated form of Arabic. It doesn't have structured grammar in the same way as Fusha, a more classical form of Arabic, which I then turned to when I gave up on the Maghrebi.

I learned a bit then, and then I didn't do much with my Arabic for a very long time until, after the Arab Spring, I was sent to Yemen. Yemen is a wonderful country—very complicated and difficult—and it was going through a very turbulent period with the fall of Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was the then-dictator who fell in the Arab Spring. It was a wonderful place to learn Arabic because everybody speaks it, and they speak a beautiful Arabic. Not many people spoke English, so I was forced to really get to grips with it at that point. Then I was also able to use and develop my Arabic a bit when I was posted to Qatar later, and then obviously Libya towards the end of my career.

Lady Carnarvon: So on top of Arabic, you also obviously speak French and Italian. Were there any other languages that you added to your table of languages?

Nick Hopton: I married someone of Chilean origin. Having visited South America, it wasn't good enough anymore just to slur my bad Italian into Spanish. So I learned some Spanish along the way so at least I could find out what people were saying around me when I was visiting Chile. I had a little bit of German, and when I was posted in Iran, I learned some Farsi.

Lady Carnarvon: Wow. I wonder sometimes if the facility for languages develops as you learn more, but I think each language is its own challenge. That's very humbling for many people.

Nick Hopton: I don't see myself really as a linguist, which may sound odd because I speak quite a lot of languages. There are people who are natural linguists who love the grammar stuff; I'm not one of those. The bit I've always put emphasis on is communicating, often through very ungrammatical use of the language. If you are in a place, you owe it to the people you are meeting there to try at least to communicate in their language. You normally get a lot back from doing that. People shouldn't be scared that they're not "natural linguists"; they should feel courageous and just throw themselves into it. My Italian grammar goes really badly awry after all these decades of speaking, but the key thing is to try.

Lady Carnarvon: The book begins with you and your wife, who is called Lucinda, and your decision to buy a holiday house in this unusual part of Tuscany. It's not where many English people buy; it's slightly out of the way and unspoiled. Do you want to share how you began?

Nick Hopton: It was very serendipitous—the beginning of our love affair with the Maremma, which is that bit of Tuscany to the west of Chianti. It stretches nowadays from Lucca down to Cecina and down towards Grosseto. It's a big area. Historically, it was a very important part of Italy. Almost 3,000 years ago, the Etruscans were a very important pre-Roman empire.

Lady Carnarvon: We have an Etruscan temple here! There is a synergy building already. I hope it's an original one. I didn't know they got as far as Highclere, actually.

Nick Hopton: The Etruscan Empire went as far as the Po Valley in the north. Nowadays, people talk about Etruria as being more limited, but we came across the idea of buying a property in this region in a very serendipitous way. I've been wanting to look for a property for a long time. An Italian friend of ours said to me, "Forget about Chianti. You need to look at the 'new Chianti,' which is the Maremma". There is a particular series of five hilltop medieval towns which are in that first range of foothills, 20-30 minutes from the coast. We ended up buying the first house we saw. It’s been a labor of love—a real adventure with highs and lows.

The Maremma is not very well known by British people or Americans. It's much more visited by Germans and Swiss, but above all, it's where the Italians go on holiday—the Romans and the Florentines. It has an extraordinary authenticity and a cultural beauty to it.

Lady Carnarvon: I love the way you just lurched into it. Many people would love to read about all your landscaping challenges. We have landscaping challenges here which involve diggers and Kubotas. I never knew how much I loved Kubotas until I married my husband.

Nick Hopton: I didn't know I had any landscaping interest in me either until we entered on this project. I recognize I do not have green fingers. I talk about my failures in the growing department in the book. But what I have enjoyed very much is working with a very skillful digger operator who I call "Michelangelo" in the book. His ability to manipulate a digger shovel to move things precisely and create spaces that never existed before—it's as artistic as someone using a paintbrush.

Lady Carnarvon: I thought it was very Jeremy Clarkson! I wasn't quite sure whether you were Jeremy Clarkson or Kaleb, or if Michelangelo was Kaleb and you were the Jeremy Clarkson figure.

Nick Hopton: I fear I was probably more in the Clarkson mode and he was more of the Kaleb—the capable one.

Lady Carnarvon: I'm a chartered accountant by training, so I have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to hide the bills in different codes so my husband doesn't come across them too soon! But Italy is very dry, a very different climate to here.

Nick Hopton: Particularly around where we are in the summer, the tomatoes are absolutely extraordinary. One of our family's favorite dishes is the Insalata Caprese, which is with tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil. The olive oil locally is high quality. I think it's just the enjoyment of the seasonality and the local people.

Lady Carnarvon: Is the language there a vernacular which is slightly different from the Italian you learn?

Nick Hopton: It is essentially Tuscan. It has a very aspirate 'C' sound, which actually verges on the Arabic at times—the "hasa" for casa meaning house. It is a very agricultural area; the closest cities are Pisa in the north and Grosseto in the south. The people work on the land and they are very genuine, friendly, and supportive of these interlopers.

Lady Carnarvon: I loved the story of when your friend from the Embassy came to stay and suddenly the Mayor and everyone turned out to say hello.

Nick Hopton: We try and keep a very low profile, but that was blown a little bit when my friend came up from Rome and suddenly this armed escort of Carabinieri demanded attention. I went to meet them at the gates of the town—it’s a town of 3,000 people—and suddenly found Sindaco, the Mayor, and all his entourage around. They felt they needed to greet whoever this was with their Carabinieri escort.

Lady Carnarvon: Do you think you've finished all your work at your villa now?

Nick Hopton: The project goes on. This year we've dug a well; we had to go down 97 meters to hit a lovely aquifer. I have other books I am thinking about. I think I will write more about the Mediterranean as a whole, looking at it through my experience of working and traveling around the region. Recently I've taken on a role creating a new program at the University of Cambridge Centre for Geopolitics, looking at the Mediterranean as a whole—the European, the Arabic, and the Asian edge. There’s a very good book by John Julius Norwich about the Mediterranean, which I'm sure you've read.

Lady Carnarvon: He also came here and stayed, because his father, Alfred Duff Cooper, used to regularly stay here during the 1930s with Lady Diana Cooper. Duff Cooper, of course, was Ambassador in Paris straight after the war; I love his diaries.

Nick Hopton: I wrote most of this book, Marma Mia, in the house in Tuscany. As a writer, there is a lot of procrastination. Being a bit isolated and remote helps you carve out the time. I need to write at least a couple of hours a day on a regular basis. I remember reading about Zadie Smith—that's how she writes, locking herself away in some house.

Lady Carnarvon: I go to the top floor here, but at the moment it's so damn cold. I love traveling to Italy—the language, the food, the people. We are having a summer dance this year at Highclere. If you could take anybody with you—besides your wife—who would you ask to accompany you to a dance here?

Nick Hopton: You mentioned the library at Highclere and that you have a very early edition of Ariosto. I would choose Dante, whose poetry I love. He is greatly inspired by a figure called Beatrice. She features in a book he wrote called Vita Nova (The New Life). I read that when I was 16 and that inspired my love of Italy. Dante admired her from afar; the whole of the Divine Comedy is essentially a love poem to Beatrice. If I had the chance to take Beatrice to your dance, she would be my guest for the evening.

Lady Carnarvon: Thank you so much for joining me here today.