Mediterranean

‘Kennst du das Land wo di Zitronen blühen’ says a character from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, pining after the warm weather of Italy. As a teenager in Strasbourg, then in Paris, I often repeated this sentence to myself, hoping one day to live in a land of lemon trees and soft breezes. I found it in Australia

Australia’s “Mediterranean climate” is not just a weather experience. It is visual, tactile, olfactory. It feels like soft pine needles and the prickly-smooth skin of cactus; it smells of eucalyptus, laurel and jasmine.

Walks around Melbourne’s inner suburbs taks me back to my family’s homeland, in the South, where the weather can burn, but it never bites for too long, where the lemon trees bloom, and where life is happy.