Reviewing Verdura’s childhood memoirs, Happy Summer Days, for the The Sunday Times in 1976, Raymond Mortimer wrote, “Though we English don’t think of the Mediterraneans as animal lovers, little Fulco and his sister, like their father, far preferred the brute creation to most of the human beings they knew. In the villa, its courtyard and large garden they found dogs galore, cats, cage-birds, horses, donkeys, hens, squirrels, guinea-pigs, tortoises, a savage ram and even a couple of stinking baboons.”