When I was thirteen, my parents took me to Tuscany. In between the noisy chaos of Florence and the gravity-challenging architecture of Pisa, we went to a little village in the Apennines on the strength of my mother’s curiosity in Milton’s choice of simile, “Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks of Vallombrosa”. If he had written “as glorious as autumnal leaves in Patagonia”, would we have gone there instead, I found myself wondering last week. For surely there is no more wonderful palate of natural colours above sea level than this, the gold, bronze, flame-orange, scarlet, pink and red of the lenga and the ñire, set against the bare rock, snow and glacial blues of Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park, a reward only for those prepared to invest a couple of days walking
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