IF PROUST is right and profound memory is triggered by scent, then for me, the smell of lavender brings back a summer a dozen years ago in Porto Ercole, on the Monte Argentario peninsula. Some friends had rented a house high on a hill, set back in a grove of cypress trees with a pool at the bottom. I was finishing a book about the siege of Sarajevo, and my friends gave me a room at the top of the house, clean and white and full of the clear Tuscan light. It was quiet and private and reminded me a bit of a nun’s cell. I loved it.

In fact, it was a writer’s house. Casa Moorehead belonged to the late travel writer Alan Moorehead, who had written The Blue Nile. Long after my friends went to sleep and I sat up with my laptop looking out of my little window on to the stars — why are there always more stars in Tuscany than anywhere else? — I took comfort that I was somehow writing with his lingering presence. His books, and his children’s books, were still on the shelves.

Some time later, I had a Roman boyfriend, Filippo, whose childhood had been spent in Porto Ercole. But his mother, Annie, was one of those lovely spirited English girls, like someone out of a Muriel Spark novel, who drove out to Rome in a convertible with a girlfriend in the 1950s, fell in love with a dashing Italian, and stayed. She began taking her children to Porto Ercole in the 1960s when it was a small fishing village.

The photos from that time show walnut-tanned skin, Pucci tops, headscarves and large sunglasses. There were poses of handsome people on cigarette boats and picnics among the cypress trees. David Niven featured largely around this time, as well as Ava Gardner and Audrey Hepburn.

Filippo was a wonderful storyteller and told me about his youth playing tennis at a chic hotel called Il Pellicano, and his years at the beach. What he remembered, too, was the smell of lavender, but also summer parties. The houses owned by wealthy Romans that cling to the rocks along the coast were full of music, dancing and film stars in the late 1970s and 1980s.

This place is also infused with history: Caravaggio died here in 1610 and when you go for a walk in a field, you find shards of ancient pottery sticking to your sandals.

But more than history, it’s about love. Il Pellicano, which is set on a rock high above the Tyrrhenian sea, was founded by two people who were madly in love. So it’s a little bit like going to Casa Moorehead to write a book. You go to Il Pellicano to fall a little bit more in love.

The story goes like this: an Englishman, Michael Graham, a Second World War pilot who later survived a near-fatal plane crash in Egypt, goes to California to sell Porsches. A former girlfriend of Clark Gable, Patsy Dalzell, a socialite who looked a bit like Grace Kelly, fell in love with Graham simply by reading an article about the crash in the Los Angeles Times. They meet at a place called Pelican Point, near the Monterey Peninsula, a wild place where the sea crashes against the rocky coastline. Of course, they fall in love!

The couple, lured by stories of la dolce vita, and by the cinema of Fellini and Visconti, escaped to Italy. In 1965 they bought land from a member of the Borghese family, who owned much of coastal Tuscany. They founded Il Pellicano, and Patsy invited Clark Gable’s friends to come and party. The place took on a life of its own.

It was all so chic. The Queen of the Netherlands arrived. Charlie Chaplin and Oona and their children came. Jackie Kennedy visited. The grandest Roman families had villas scattered along the coast.

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Here, the coastline lacks the voluptuousness of the Amalfi region — but I prefer it, somehow. This is the southern end of La Maremma, the coastal Tuscan region known for food and wine, where in the autumn you can hunt, or eat pasta with wild boar and drink the deepest red wines. If you drive farther up the coast, it gets wilder and less touristy -— I love the region just south of Pisa near Bolgheri, or Capalbio, south of Porto Ercole, where the beaches are long and sandy like the Hamptons.

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