They set up home together in the Via Michele di Lando in 1975 while spending weekends with Greenlees at Bagni di Lucca. Their son, Bacchus, was born the following year.At Bagni di Lucca, at the turn of the Seventies, Chanter staged three congresses for a pioneering Italian conservation group, La Lega Italiana per la Protezione degli Uccelli. Casa Mansi was a handsome, uncomfortable, old-fashioned house with a vaulted basement that could support the weight of their combined libraries of 28,000 books. The winters they spent at the beautiful Villa Fraita in Anacapri, which Greenlees had bought from the writer Francis Brett Young in 1949.This was never to be some precious expatriate idyll. At the same time, he taught English literature at Florence University.In 1969, the two men bought a house in Bagni di Lucca, the faded summer resort of the grand-dukes of Lucca that had been home, at one time or other, to Montaigne, Byron, Heine, Ouida and Montale. In September 1938, Picture Post ran a full-page picture of a despondent Robin on his way to Summer Fields prep school being comforted by his mother on Paddington station: “Another boy sets out into the world.” Behind the saccharine was the authentic misery of a sensitive and mistreated child.

Chanter left Wellington College with relief at 16, studied at the Lyc?Fran?s in Kensington, and won a scholarship to read French and Spanish at Queen’s College, Oxford. Before he went up to Oxford, he did National Service in the Pay Corps and learned accountancy, a skill of which he was proud.At Oxford, Chanter found it hard to concentrate and managed only a second class degree In 1954, he travelled to Italy where he met Ian Greenlees. The heir, ominously, of a Scotch whisky fortune, Greenlees had taught at Rome University before the war, befriended the anti-Fascist philosopher Benedetto Croce in Naples and, after the Allied landings in 1943, established a broadcasting station on the Italian mainland at Bari. Robin’s father, the Lord Mayor’s son Jack, a naval officer turned publicist, was a drunkard of legendary savagery who hated his only son, spoke to him only through his mother, and finally disinherited him.With the unswerving rigidity of raffish families, Robin Chanter was delivered up to the hell of a middle-class British education. In 1958, he was appointed Director of the British Institute of Florence, a teaching institution that had been founded by Italian scholars and the leading Anglo-Florentines in 1917.

After a spell studying history of art at the Courtauld Institute, Chanter joined Greenlees as librarian at the Palazzo Antinori. A handsome and untidy man, shambling through the lanes of Santo Spirito to Angiolino’s, or padding in blazing sunshine down to the Faro in Anacapri, he embodied friendship without limit and happiness without consequence.All mere illusions, of course. Chanter’s later years were disrupted by family loss and bad health, but he was sustained by a devoted wife and four daughters. In reality, far from throwing away his life, Robin Chanter did much to cheat the demons that leered over his cradle.John Roberts Chanter, always known as Robin, was born in 1929 in Folkestone, Kent. The Chanters had been solicitors in Barnstaple in Devon, had invested prudently in new residential districts, and supplied a Lord Mayor. An outstanding linguist, and popular with Italians of all degrees, he promised a path into the heart of Italy that bypassed the main rooms of the Uffizi. According to him, it was easy: “In a sense, Walt guided us because we knew what he would like.”In fact, with his neatly trimmed moustache and 1930s character-actor appearance, Hench bore more than a passing resemblance to Disney himself, a fact that the “Old Mousetro” used to elude fans on his walkabouts through Disneyland.

Hench was also renowned for his wicked sense of humour: after an employees-only preview of a new attraction in 2001, the designer was asked for his opinion of it. Straight-faced, he shot back, “I liked it better when it was a parking lot.”While humble about his own vast expertise and endlessly kind to junior Disney employees, Hench could use his sharp wit to prick pomposity in others: in the 1980s, when the CEO of one of the principal sponsors of Epcot was reiterating ad nauseam that the outside of the Future World exhibit had to be white, Hench abandoned diplomacy with, “Mr Grey, I have 33 different shades of white in my palette Which is your personal favourite?”Alan Woollcombe. Hench, however, knew what his boss wanted, and is acknowledged throughout the company as having had more influence over the parks’ concepts and designs than anyone else. Not that Hench’s efforts were confined to theme parks: when the company was put in charge of the pageantry at the 1960 Winter Olympics in California, he became best known for his definitive designs for the free-standing and hand-held Olympic torches.Disney himself died in 1966, before Walt Disney World was completed or any of the later theme parks were on the drawing board. To add to the surreal nature of the episode, Destino has just been nominated for an Oscar in the Best Short Film (Animated) category.Nineteen fifty-four marked a turning point in Hench’s career, when Disney appointed him Mickey Mouse’s official portrait painter (a role he was to perform on Mickey’s 25th, 50th, 60th, 70th and 75th anniversaries) and, perhaps more significantly, enlisted him as one of the first project designers for his new venture, WED Enterprises. WED (later renamed Walt Disney Imagineering) was Disney’s vehicle to create a Disneyland, the first of the company’s theme parks.Hench, as one of the “imagineers”, was one of the designers of Tomorrowland at Disneyland and then went on to create the attractions at the New York’s World Fair in 1964.