ABSTRACT
"The brothers Sitwell are here," Adrian Stokes wrote excitedly from the grand Hotel Bristol in Rapallo in early 1925. "The Sitwells were the first to open his eyes, met by chance in Italy," Adrian later said of his first becoming a Sitwell protege in 1925 in Rapallo. Persuaded by Osbert, Durham agreed to give Adrian money to fund his life as a writer rather than putting pressure on him to get paid work as a journalist and train as a lawyer. Free from the pressure, Adrian accompanied the Sitwells that March to Valencia, Madrid, Seville, Ronda, Malaga, Cordoba, and Granada in Spain. "They were really quite alarming—alarming rather than forbidding. All of them were wearing black capes and black Andalusian hats and looked magnificent," said Cyril Connolly after seeing the Sitwells and their entourage that April 1925 at the Washington Irving Hotel in Granada.
