Читать книгу A Small Place in Italy - Eric Newby - Страница 10

After once more becoming imbrangled in the labyrinthine one-way street system of Lerici, we followed Signor Vescovo’s painstakingly written instructions about how to get to I Castagni, and crossed the river Magra by a long, multi-arched, brick bridge. Below it, strung out along its gravel banks, a number of despairing-looking men were fishing without apparent success as they, or their descendants, continued to do for all the years we lived in the area.

Beyond the river we followed the Via Aurelia, one of Italy’s more dangerous roads, to Sarzana, an ancient, walled town on the borders of Tuscany. Here we entered the Plain of Luni, the site of what had been Luna, an important Etruscan city and seaport which Livy described as being ‘the first city of Etruria’ and Strabo as having one of the finest and largest harbours in the world, much of its prosperity being because of the marble trade.

But in the fourth century AD its decline began, brought on by the malaria which eventually rendered it more or less uninhabitable. It was subsequently sacked many times: by the Lombards, by the Normans in the ninth century and by the Arabs, who finally destroyed it and carried its inhabitants into captivity in 1016. Both city and seaport disappeared from history some time in the twelfth century, killed off by the malarial mosquitoes, and became an area largely populated by ghosts and goats. Now all that remained of it was an amphitheatre that once seated six thousand spectators and a theatre. It was Luna that gave its name to what is now the present region of Lunigiana, although originally it was much larger.

Then, after a couple of miles, we turned off on to a minor road at a place called Ponte Isolone, a hamlet on the Via Aurelia made up of some half a dozen buildings which included a café, a seed merchant, an ironmonger’s and a shoe shop, all of which, except for the shoe shop, which never had anything in our sizes, we subsequently patronized.

Once on this minor road the roar of traffic on the Via Aurelia became a faint murmur and we found ourselves, as if by magic, in rural Italy. It led away, dead straight in a northerly direction, to where the foothills of the Apuan Alps rose steeply from the plain. Rising above them, deep blue in the distance, were their big peaks, the highest of which, Monte Pisanino, is 1945 metres high, with what looked like snow fields on their flanks. These were the ravaneti, great screes of glistening white marble, debris from the quarries above Carrara.

We had, in fact, although we didn’t know it at the time, left Liguria at Ponte Isolone and were now in Tuscany, in the province of Massa Carrara, a narrow strip of it not much more than a mile wide, salient with the road running up the middle of it and with Liguria on either hand. High on the hillside there was a long-abandoned customs house, on what had been a frontier.

Here, on what was good, alluvial farmland, olives and vines and maize and wheat flourished, and in the lower parts of the foothills lived what had been mezzadri, crop sharers, dependants of the ancient Malaspina family, who at one time had enormous possessions. The family owned the towns of Carrara and Massa Carrara until the middle of the eighteenth century and had a palace and a castle in the latter, and another castle in Fosdinovo up on the hill in the direction we were now going, which was acquired in 1340 by Spinetta Malaspina. Other rich landowners also had mezzadri, who originally gave half their produce to the landowner in exchange for the use of the land and their dwellings, but by the 1960s they received 58 per cent of the proceeds. Those employed by the Malaspina used to live in humble and, by the standards of the time in which they were built, decent, now picturesque farm buildings, many of them built as late as the 1900s by the Conte Malaspina, as a marble plaque displayed in a prominent position on the outer walls of each of them testified.

The majority of these, and the other farm buildings, were rendered in the standard colour for Italian farmhouses almost everywhere except the mountains, known as sangue di bue (oxblood), which grows paler and paler as the years pass until it ends up a very pale pink.

Many of these mezzadri had begun to work on the land when they left school at the age of eleven after five years of scuola elementare, an educational system that endured until the last war. At the time when we bought I Castagni in 1967, the mezzadria system was still functioning in some parts of Italy and there were still numbers of contadini who were more or less, if not totally, illiterate, and could only make a cross on paper instead of writing their names. Today, most of the occupants of the farmhouses are salaried agricultural workers.

Now we were passing a vast and beautiful villa, also rendered in sangue di bue, built by the Malaspina in the eighteenth century at Caniparola, a comparative rarity in what had always been, since the coming of the malaria, and until the development of the Riviera della Versilia in the second half of the nineteenth century, a poverty-stricken part of Tuscany.

It was not only the malaria that the inhabitants had to contend with. Besides having to put up with the already mentioned Saracenic pirates who whisked their womenfolk away, they had to endure being trampled underfoot by an almost endless procession of foreign armies, which used what was a much-trodden route over the Apennines from the valley of the Po and then down the valley of the Magra, on their way south to despoil Rome and other attractive places en route.

What the natives in these northern parts of Tuscany needed to survive such irruptions were not villas but castles, the more Gormenghastian the better, preferably situated on inaccessible crags, and such fortresses were built in considerable numbers. Because of this comparatively few purely domestic villas were built where we now found ourselves. Here, at Caniparola, the hamlet near which the Malaspina villa stood, the road ran past a little chapel, embellished with marble obelisks, in which the family used to attend mass when they were in residence, and passed under an imposing brick archway, part of what had been a huge stable block. The lower parts of the building were plastered with posters announcing incredibly boring decrees, printed in full, or what was going on with the local pop groups. It was a great year for pop, 1967, the year of Sergeant Pepper.

Having passed under the archway, unless the road had made two violent turns, first to the left, then to the right, we would have run straight into the façade of what was to prove to be a rather good, very rustic inn, the Trattoria all’Arco.

Because of this man-made hazard the driver of almost every vehicle ascending or descending the hill, when confronted with it, felt constrained to sound his horn, what for a late twentieth-century Italian was the equivalent of crossing himself, at the same time going into a screaming gear change.

If the vehicle happened to be a bus, one of the service which operated between Sarzana and Fosdinovo, then the sound of the horn at close quarters was unbelievable. It was therefore not surprising that the Arco was a rather noisy place at which to eat in the open air.

Beyond it the road began to climb the hillside – at that time Caniparola was a very small place with no modern buildings at all, apart from one or two post-First World War ones – winding its way upwards in a series of hairpin bends, through fields planted with vines and olives, passing old farmhouses all painted in various shades of sangue di bue.

As we climbed we began to have fleeting views of other places, such as Castelnuovo di Magra, a hill town across the valley to the right which had a castle rising above it. Confronted with what seemed an endless succession of these bends, all of them more or less identical, with what looked like identical vineyards and olive groves sandwiched between them, we began to wonder if we had passed the track which led to the house we had come to see; but on this matter Signor Vescovo’s instructions had been explicit, and we would have had to be barmy to make a hash of them.

‘After a farmhouse on the left of the road with a vineyard in front of it in which the vines are supported on stone columns, the only such ones in the zone, you come to the seventeenth bend.

‘Beyond this,’ he continued, ‘you pass on your right a food shop, a butcher’s shop and a communist cell with a hammer and sickle over it.’ (This was a branch of the Italian Communist Party which, by that time, had passed the peak of the popularity it had enjoyed in the 1950s and early 1960s, epitomized in Guareschi’s Piccolo Mondo di Don Camillo.) But in spite of it now being closed, probably for ever, we always called it ‘The Cell’ because it sounded more exciting than a branch.

‘Then, after the eighteenth bend, you will see, a hundred metres or so up the hill, a tall solitary cypress, from which a rough track leads off to the left.

‘This track,’ he wrote, ‘leads down to a small house. In it lives a widow, a Signora Angiolina. She has the keys of the property and she is expecting you at three o’clock.’

All the years we subsequently lived here we had trouble with what Signor Vescovo described as the eighteenth bend from Caniparola. Wanda made it the twenty-second, I made it the twenty-first and none of the friends who came to stay with us was able to agree how many there were either. It was a waste of time appealing to the local inhabitants, they had never even attempted to count them.

Signora Angiolina was hovering in her vegetable patch outside her house, awaiting our arrival. As she told us, she had just finished feeding her rabbits which lived in a large wooden hutch at the back of the house.

The house looked bigger than it really was as she had rented a large room on the ground floor to a communist social club which was, at the moment, like the cell at the seventeenth bend, more or less moribund, but not completely so, and subsequently it started up with evenings of very un-communist pop which would have made Lenin turn in his grave.

Signora Angiolina’s husband had died a couple of years previously and because of this she was in deep mourning, which meant that she was dressed in black from head to foot: black headscarf, black cardigan, black skirt, reaching below the knee, black woollen stockings – normally she wouldn’t have worn any at all before the cold weather set in – and black felt slippers.

The only item that wasn’t black was her apron which was dark navy with small white spots on it, which helped to cheer her outfit up a bit.

Later she told Wanda that she was fed up with being in mourning – the navy apron was probably a first sign of rebellion against it – and she was looking forward to leaving it off and quite soon she did so, which raised her spirits no end.

Signora Angiolina was in her sixties when we first met her, and was very slim. She had nice, bright-blue eyes and she cried easily. She had greyish-brown hair drawn back tightly from her forehead in a bun, now hidden by her headscarf. And she had a really lovely smile.

It was a tragic face but a beautiful one, a beauty, one felt, that would endure and in fact it did, until the day she died. Even seeing her briefly for the first time it was obvious that at some time in her life something awful had befallen her but we had to wait until we were on more intimate terms with her in order to discover what it was.

Like most contadini she was wary of people such as ourselves who came from cities and were foreigners but, in spite of this, she did bestow on us this lovely smile.

However, when Wanda asked her if she would take us to see the house and unlock the doors for us so that we could see the inside, which was the purpose of our visit, she suddenly looked serious, shrugged her shoulders in a way that was almost imperceptible, and said, ‘ Ma!’

This seemed like bad news. In my experience almost all the Italian contadini I had ever met who used this expression had done so in a negative sense, one that usually boded ill.

When, for instance, while on the run in Italy during the war, I had asked the contadini for whom I was working in exchange for food and a roof over my head, if I had any chance of remaining free when the snow fell in the Apennines, something I had been thinking about for some time, there was no doubt as to what they meant when they said, ‘Ma!’ They meant ‘No!’ And they were right. But Signora Angiolina’s ‘Ma!’ was of a different sort. One she used in the sense of ‘Chissa?’ (‘Who knows?’)

But this was not her only interpretation of ‘Ma!’ If you asked Signora Angiolina, ‘Che sarà successo?’ (‘What can have happened?’), a question that we would be asking all and sundry in this part of rural Italy for the next twenty years or more, one which could cover any sort of calamity – a blow-back in a septic tank, the sudden disappearance of the roof, or the cessation of the water supply – her first reaction would be to say ‘Ma!’, implying that she didn’t know.

What she meant by ‘Ma!’ in this particular instance, as Wanda subsequently explained to me, being more practised in the understanding of such things, was that she was not the actual owner of the keys, and was therefore expressing trepidation at the thought of having to be responsible for opening doors to rooms to which she may not have had access previously, unless someone had died in one of them, in which case she might have entered it for the wake.

Worst of all, for her, was the idea of opening them up for a couple of unknown persons who might quite easily turn out to be robbers. But in spite of all this, the implication was that she would do it. It was all rather confusing.

Her other favourite expression, one which she used when confronted with a fait accompli which had on the whole turned out well, as, for example, if I had cut down, as I subsequently did, one of two trees, and it turned out to be the right one I had felled, not the wrong one, was ‘Hai fatto bene!’ (‘You have done well!’), uttered in resounding tones.

I loved it when Signora Angiolina gave me one of her ‘Hai fatto bene!’ broadsides. It always gave me the feeling that I had just received an accolade from the Queen for saving her corgis from being run over, or that I had just been kissed on both cheeks by General de Gaulle after having been decorated with the Croix de Guerre avec Palmes for doing something frightfully brave and important – ‘Well done, Eric!’

In fact if Signora Angiolina called me anything it was what everyone else called me in this part of the world, that is if they called me anything, which was ‘Hayrick’ without the ‘H’, ‘Eyrick’, or failing that ‘Enrico’.

So now, having delivered her ‘Ma!’, Signora Angiolina went off to get the keys from some hiding place, five of them altogether, all very old, three of them large and very beautiful works of art.

Then, having armed herself with a small reaping hook and giving it a preliminary sharpening on a special sort of sharpening tool embedded in a large log, she set off down the track, leading the way, to the place where Signor Vescovo had written that there was a way to the right off the main track. From this point it then made a very steep, slippery descent to a little bridge which, at that point, spanned a torrent.

‘The track goes down through a chestnut wood,’ he had written, ‘which is why the houses and the place are known as I Castagni.’

The bridge which spanned the torrent was nothing but a couple of cement drain pipes covered with earth. The torrent itself was deep, narrow, bone dry and almost completely hidden from view by the chestnut trees which soared up into the air from the ravine the stream had carved for itself. The bed of the stream was horrible, filled with the refuse that people further up the hill had chucked into it: bits of plastic sheeting, half buried in the bottom of it, empty bleach containers, rusty tins and other assorted muck.

Now, for the first time, we saw the house.

It stood at the far end of a grassy dell, overlooking the terraced fields that covered the hillside one above the other, and it was surrounded by vines and old olive trees that cast a dappled shade as their branches moved in a light breeze from the west.

The house itself faced south. It was sheltered from all the winds that blew between north-east and south-east by the groves of chestnuts that also rendered it invisible from further up the hillside in summer, and did so even now in what was autumn although the leaves were beginning to thin out.

It was a small, two-storey farmhouse, built of stone partially rendered with a cement that, over the years, had turned a creamy colour in some places and in others a lichenous green. The overall effect was of a building on the verge of becoming a ruin.

It was roughly rectangular in shape, roughly because it was possible to see where, over the years, other small wings had been added on, which was why the ones that looked the oldest were roofed with stone slabs. Others, of more recent date, were covered with tiles that had either weathered to a faded pink, or else to a yellowish golden colour. To prevent them being whisked away by some freak wind, stones the size and shape of footballs were disposed along their outer edges in what looked like a rather dangerous fashion for anyone standing below if one of them rolled off.

There were no roses, or any other kind of climbing plant winding their ways up the walls, as there would have been in England. No garden. No shrubs, only an orange tree. There was no muck lying about either, apart from that in the torrent. Everything else was spotless. This had been up to now a strictly utilitarian establishment.

As soon as we had taken all this in, without even seeing the interior, we both knew that this was the house we had been looking for and this was the house we would have to have if we were going to have one at all.

The first door we came to had the orange tree growing up a wall to one side of it. As was all the other timber used in the construction of the house – floorboards, roof timbers and joists – the door was chestnut.

The planks from which this had been made had faded over the years to a beautiful silver-grey colour but when Signora Angiolina finally succeeded in turning the key in the lock and we went inside, the door shut on us and we found ourselves in what would have been complete darkness, if the door had not been riddled with holes through which the sun shone in long, slender beams as if someone had fired a shotgun at it.

Yet although it looked as if it was on its last legs, as did the bridge over the torrent, and one of the first things that would have to be replaced if we bought the house, this door was still there, in the same condition, when we finally left I Castagni twenty-five years later.

What we were now standing in was a room about fifteen feet long, ten feet wide and six feet high, what had been a cowshed, or a stable for mules, or possibly both.

Until very recently the principal means of moving supplies from one place to another in the mountainous areas of Italy had been by pack mules, hand carts, big wooden sledges with sides made of wattle, wooden stakes interwoven with split branches, which were usually drawn by cows. For the rest it was what people could carry on their backs.

A few years before we arrived on the scene the asphalt road up which we had driven, following the bends, had not existed. Neither had the bends. All there had been in those days was a steep, cobbled mule track which went straight up the hill from Caniparola to Fosdinovo without any bends at all, and stretches of this ancient route still existed and were still used by local people travelling on foot.

The floor of the cowshed was also cobbled, with thin rectangular stones laid edge to edge. Iron rings for tethering the animals were sunk in the rough stone walls in the back part and there was still a good deal of dung lying about, but so dry and powdery that it was impossible to know what sort of animal had produced it.

The only illumination, apart from that provided by the self-closing door with the holes in it, which was of rather limited usefulness, came from a small, barred window that looked out towards the bridge over the torrent some thirty yards away.

Overhead a trap door with a ladder opened up into a room which had been a hay loft. It was almost twice the height of the cowshed and much brighter, the light entering it through a large opening in one of the walls through which the hay had been forked up. Other illumination was provided by gaps in the tiled roof where the rain had been coming in. Every bit of timber in these two rooms – beams, ceiling joists and floorboards – was riddled with wormholes and you could break off bits as if they were biscuits.

Further investigation was made impossible because someone had had the truly devilish idea of more or less filling the loft with large coils of heavy wire, of the sort used to set up trellises in vineyards, each of which was inextricably interlaced one with another. The only other way in was round the back of the house where there was another door, literally in mid-air, which needed a ladder to get to it.

Meanwhile, as we were taking in all this ruin, lizards, no doubt deluded by the mild November weather into thinking spring had come, or it was still summer, scuttled about upside down on the tiled roof through which daylight was only too clearly visible. Looking at it I felt that one of us would only have to emit one really hefty sneeze to bring the whole lot, beams, floorboards, joists, roof tiles and all, down about our ears. On one beam there was the skin cast by an adder. Every year, even when the beams were put in order, the adder or its descendants continued to shed its skin in this same place.

‘Ma,’ said Signora Angiolina, as we all three gazed at these irrefutable evidences of decay. What she meant by this enigmatic utterance, devoid of the usual exclamation mark and without the shrugging of the shoulders, was not clear, although I could hazard a guess. It was the first observation she had made since we reached the house, though she had made it abundantly obvious that she was not happy about the condition of the torrent when we came to it. ‘Sono gente ignorante,’ she said, but to whom she was referring was not clear. It could have been a whole band of ignorant people.

‘Cor!’ I said, the English equivalent of Signora Angiolina’s epithet. If the first two rooms were like this what on earth would the others be like?

Only Wanda expressed herself clearly and confidently, although she had said, ‘My God!’ when she first saw the loft and its roof; but then she had recovered.

‘Providing Signor Botti doesn’t want the earth, we’ll be all right,’ she said.

Having exhausted the possibilities of the cowshed and the loft for the time being, we moved on westwards to the main door of the house, passing on the way a bread oven that was built into the wall with a brick chimney rising above it to the height of the upper storey. According to Signora Angiolina it was out of action and was likely to remain so. The only man capable of repairing it had contracted a painful skin disease of a sort that repairers of ovens and users of cement are apparently liable to and was unable to carry out any more work of this sort.

To the right of the door a flight of stone steps led to the upper floor where the chimney of the oven terminated. Originally these steps had been protected from the elements to some extent by a tiled roof but the main support of it, a long beam, had collapsed, taking all the tiles with it and smashing most of them.

High overhead the main chimney stack rose into the air. It had a flat stone on top of it, supported by four rough brick columns, each about a foot high, to stop it smoking. To me it looked more like a tabernacle of the Israelites than a chimney.

Now we waited outside the front door while Signora Angiolina, Mistress of the Ceremonies, a role she enjoyed much more than being in mourning, selected the right key to open it. This was the finest door in the house. In fact, although rough and primitive, it was one of the best of its kind in the entire neighbourhood, apart from those we saw in some houses up the hill in Fosdinovo, but those were doors of town houses rather than rustic ones. It was difficult to imagine one more rustic than ours. Subconsciously, we were already beginning to refer to objects such as the doors at I Castagni as ‘ours’.

This door consisted of a number of large slabs, probably cut from a single tree and set up horizontally, one above the other, on a stout frame. These slabs were of a beautiful dark colour and looked as if they had been soaked in oil. And this is what we later discovered they had been treated with, linseed oil over a long period, a treatment which we ourselves were to continue.

Such a door would have been irreplaceable if it had been damaged and every time we came back to the house from England our preoccupation was always with the door. Had it fallen to pieces? Had it been damaged by vandals? These were the questions we always used to ask ourselves while descending the hill and crossing the torrent. In fact, like most other objects at I Castagni which we took over, it outlasted us.

The key for this door, which, like all the others, was of hand-forged iron, was the biggest of the lot. It was a key that was easily identifiable, even in the dark, not only because it was the biggest but because someone at one time had attempted to turn it in the lock, or perhaps another lock, and when it had failed to open had inserted a metal rod through the ring at the end of the shaft and twisted that a full half turn without breaking it. Now, in order to turn the key in the lock, it had to be inserted upside down and then jiggled about for what could be ages. Yet we never considered the possibility of changing the key and the lock for a new one. The key was much too beautiful. In fact there was another complete set of keys but I lost them the first day we took over the house and we never found them again.

This lock had the peculiar foible that when the wind was blowing from the south-west it would open itself. The only way to prevent this happening was to secure the door to a ring-bolt in the outer wall of the building using the wire of which there were great coils in the loft.

This door opened into a living room of an unimaginably primitive kind, with a floor made from rough, irregular stone slabs on which it was difficult to set a chair without it wobbling.

To the left, as we went in, there was an old, varnished wood, glass-fronted cupboard with blue-check curtains, an armadio a muro; and against the far wall there was something known as a madia, of which this was a very ancient example, a kneading trough for making pasta with a removable top, which could also be used as a table.

To the right of the door there was a fornello a carbone, a charcoal-burning stove, built of brick, and next to it was an open fireplace, with a shelf over it. At one time, what must have been a long time ago, the walls, the stove and the fireplace had all been whitewashed but by now the smoke of innumerable fires had dyed them all a uniform bronze colour.

Inside the fireplace a long chain extended up the chimney into the darkness from which was suspended a large copper pot, and round about the fireplace were disposed a number of cooking utensils, all of them archaic but all of them still in use. The ashes in the fireplace were fresh and there was plenty of kindling and enough logs to make another fire stacked to one side of it.

The other furniture, all of it apparently homemade, consisted of a small table with a plate, a bowl and a knife, fork and spoon set on it, a chair and a minute stool that looked as if it had been made for a child, for sitting in front of the fire. But although they were homemade these items had been constructed and repaired with great skill by whoever had undertaken the work.

The only window was small and barred with metal slats, like the one in the cowshed. Beneath it there was a small marble sink with a brass tap that was working; above it was an extremely dangerous-looking electric light fitting, which consisted of a bulb connected to the two naked wires which supported it by a couple of blobs of solder, a lighting system that was not at that moment working, although Signora Angiolina said she knew how to get it going.

The only other illumination was provided by several small, homemade brass lamps, fuelled with olive oil, that looked as if they might have been looted from an Etruscan tomb.

‘Who has been living here?’ Wanda asked Signora Angiolina. This was the first intimation we had had that someone might already be in residence at I Castagni.

‘This is the room,’ Signora Angiolina said, with a certain air of surprise, as if this was something that was common knowledge, ‘in which Attilio lives.’

‘But who is this Attilio?’ Wanda asked. By the way she spoke I knew that she was worried. Neither of us had envisaged the existence of a sitting tenant or, even worse, a squatter.

‘Attilio is the brother of the wife of Signor Botti, the padrone, the owner. He is only a little man,’ she said, referring to him as an ometto – as if his smallness was some sort of recommendation. ‘Ma lui è molto bravo. He knows how to do everything.’

What we had already been forced to designate mentally as ‘Attilio’s Room’ – were we really going to have him as a sitting tenant, even though he was ‘molto bravo’? – was separated from the back part of the premises by a partition made from canniccio – wattle and daub. Canniccio was made with interwoven canes, the thinnest of the giant reeds that grow everywhere in this part of the world, plastered with a mixture of clay, lime, dung and chopped straw. These reeds, which grow to a great height, fifteen feet or more, were everywhere on the hillside and once established spread like wildfire. Their roots had the consistency of cast iron and in trying to eradicate them I succeeded in bending a pick.

These canes had dozens of uses: as supports for clothes lines, for supporting vines and making pergolas, for fencing in earth closets and rendering the user invisible to the vulgar gaze, for picking fruit from tall trees (by attaching a little net to the end of one of them). And when they finally rotted and broke they made good kindling. Meanwhile, unless ruthlessly controlled, they devastated the countryside.

Now the whole of this partition wall was riddled with wood-worm and was beginning to fall apart. A ruinous door in its left hand side opened into what had been another cowshed. It was difficult to imagine domestic animals, however domesticated, walking through one’s kitchen/living room on their way in from the fields in the evening to their sleeping quarters and each morning going the other way, back into the open air, but this was presumably what had happened.

This cowshed was also cobbled. It was also completely windowless. These downstairs rooms were so dark that I began to wonder if the inhabitants had been spiritualists. What was good news was that the floorboards overhead and the beams that supported them were in quite good condition.

The key that opened the door of the room at the top of the outside staircase was the most complex and beautiful of all the keys and the easiest to use. There was no juggling or jiggling necessary. The Signora inserted it the right way up and it opened first time.

Inside there were two rooms, back and front, divided from one another by a less ruinous version of the partition wall on the ground floor but reinforced with wooden uprights that gave it a slightly olde-Englishe, half-timbered appearance. To the left of it, another rickety, lockless door, similar to the one on the ground floor, separated the two rooms, front and back, both of which had two windows. All four were minute. It was obvious that if we were going to be able to read in either one of them, even in broad daylight, we would have to have bigger windows and these walls would take some excavating as all of them were composed of large stones and were more than two feet thick.

The roof itself appeared to be more or less sound but the main beam which supported it, a really hefty piece of chestnut, would have been more reassuring if it hadn’t had a great crack in it.

Looking at it, as I already had at numerous other beams and boards during this tour of inspection, I found it difficult to decide whether I Castagni might be good for another hundred years, or might collapse altogether in the course of the next couple of hours.

The view from the outside balcony of this upper floor was terrific. Here we were about eight hundred feet above the sea. It was a beautiful afternoon and the sun shone from a cloudless sky, flooding the front of the house with a brilliant golden light.

To the west, beyond the house, the grassy track that led past the front of it from the torrent, gradually descended a hundred yards or so beyond it between lines of vines to a pretty two-storeyed building, a smaller version of I Castagni; and some fifteen miles or so beyond it were the mountains of the Cinque Terre beyond La Spezia, behind which the sun was now beginning to sink, like a huge orange.

Far below to the south-west was the Plain of Luni, with its innumerable small holdings and market gardens. And beyond them were the wooded heights that rose steeply above the far, right bank of the Magra, here running down through its final reach before entering the Ligurian Sea.

It was at this moment that I took a black-and-white photograph of the house which, when it was printed, had more of the quality of an engraving than a photograph, a magical effect, but one that I was never able to emulate, however hard I tried.

Down on the ground floor, at the foot of the outside staircase, next to the front door and at right angles to it, there was another door that opened into what was a miniature, protruding wing of the house. This part of it was almost completely severed from the main part of the building by a frightful fissure that ran from top to bottom of it.

According to Signora Angiolina, who had been living in the neighbourhood when it occurred, it had been caused by the great earthquake of 1921, which had damaged or destroyed a number of houses in the region. Again I had the feeling that yet another part of the building might be about to collapse.

This was the only room in the house to which Signora Angiolina did not have a key, apart from the one that opened the door to the loft at the back of the house, the one that was going to need a ladder to get to it.

The only way one could see into this little room was through a heavily barred window; fortunately the wooden shutters were open.

It was a very small room, freshly whitewashed and lit by the same sort of oil lamps we had seen in the kitchen. The few bits of furniture, which almost completely filled it, consisted of a large, old single bed of polished wood with a high back inlaid with mother-of-pearl; made up with clean white linen sheets which were turned back, ready to receive whoever was going to sleep between them. Alongside the bed there was a little stool covered with a worn fragment of carpet, and on the wall next to the bed there was a crucifix and an oleograph of La Santissima Vergine del Rosario di Fontanellato, Wanda’s village near Parma, where I had been a prisoner-of-war in 1943, and below it there was a small, circular, marble-topped table, which it later transpired contained a vaso da notte, a chamber pot.

On the other side of the bed there was a very old wooden chest. Overhead the whitewashed ceiling looked decidedly wonky, with big patches of damp where the rain had penetrated; but in spite of this the room was a lap of luxury compared with the rest of the house, and the only part remotely ready for occupation.

‘And who sleeps in this room?’ Wanda asked superfluously. Like me she already knew the answer before Signora Angiolina confirmed that this was the bedchamber of Attilio. It was also unnecessary to ask who washed and ironed his sheets.‘Sta arrivando adesso, Attilio,’ she said. ‘He is coming now.’