The English Patient

The frame of the novel is a bombed-out villa in the Tuscan hills as the war in Italy ends: a nurse, a burned man, a thief and a sapper hold together in the ruins of a former nunnery above Florence. The map centres on Villa San Girolamo at Fiesole and the city below, and reaches out to the Egyptian and Libyan desert the patient remembers.

Hana

Villa San Girolamo, Fiesole

The villa

The whole frame of the novel happens here: a young Canadian nurse stays behind in a shelled hillside villa to care for a man burned beyond recognition, its rooms open to the sky, its garden mined. The real Villa San Girolamo at Fiesole served as a wartime hospital and gave Ondaatje his setting.

Chapter 1, The Villa

explicit Ondaatje names the Villa San Girolamo, a real building complex and former nunnery on Via Vecchia Fiesolana at Fiesole, in the hills above Florence; coordinates from the site's Wikipedia entry.

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