So captivating was this illusion, that I found myself wishing it to be a real place. It reminded me of those intensely romantic illustrations from the late nineteenth century. My house suddenly felt terribly inadequate to its setting (which it is, in fact, as are all the houses here, but the illusion made it seem even more so than usual), and I imagined myself on the terrace of a simple white villa, overlooking a formal garden that blended into woods and fields and a swath of vineyards and orchards dotted with other white houses. The pines I didn't have to change.
I would have liked to walk in that envisioned landscape, and then go down to that bay and sail across it to explore the dark, mysterious headlands of the further side as they slowly emerged into morning and afternoon, to listen its to brooks tumble and watch its birds fly, and sit on one of its shaded hillsides to look back and see this place as my imagination had transformed it, small with distance, a perfect miniature world, and no illusion.