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said; but trying to interview Attilio proved to be like trying to interview a will o’ the wisp.
    As we went up the hill with Signora Angiolina we had a last, fleeting glimpse of the little house through a break in the trees. Smoke was coming from the chimney which meant that Attilio had emerged from his place of refuge in the bedroom and was about to start preparing his evening meal. I wondered what it would be: perhaps some magic potion that would render him invisible.
    A little later, sitting in Signora Angiolina’s cavern-like kitchen, eating cake and drinking the white wine made with long-ripened grapes, of a sort that was always produced for honoured guests, she told us what she knew about Attilio. We, ourselves, decided to say nothing.
    ‘Attilio is a very good little man, un ometto molto bravo ,’ was how she described him for the second time that afternoon, as though we hadn’t taken it in. ‘He can do anything, repair anything,make anything. Some people think he is a bit strange, because he talks to himself more than he does to other people but he does this because he is really rather timido and some people make fun of him.
    ‘When he was young,’ she went on, ‘he learned the work of a blacksmith, and of a wheelwright. He can still work anything in iron or wood and he can make spades and hoes and the handles for scythes and for any other tools that are needed.
    ‘And he can make ladders, the triangular sort called tramalli , and he makes the oil lamps you saw in the kitchen.
    ‘Once he made a merry-go-round for the children hereabouts, and paid for a band to play while he made it turn.
    ‘He also made a cinema in which you looked through a sort of telescope – [what she probably meant was a magic lantern] – at coloured pictures, while a gramophone played music.
    ‘He even made an aeroplane and launched it with him inside it from a high place on the way to Fosdinovo, but the machine fell to the ground and he was injured. He doesn’t like to be reminded of this.
    ‘But his greatest skill, because he has such a good memory, is as what we call a narratore di fiabe , a teller of tales. Attilio inherited this skill from his father, who learned it from his father. There were also women who told stories, narratrice , they were called.
    ‘He knows many stories, Attilio – L’Uomo Verde d’Alghe [The Green Seaweed Man], L’Uomo che Usciva Solo di Notte [The Man who Only Went Out at Night], L’Oca con le Penne [The Goose with the Feathers], Il Drago e la Cavallina Bianca [The Dragon and the Little White Mare], and many, many more. Some are very old, from the time of the Saraceni .’
    I knew. I had already heard whoever the old man in the mountains was tell two of his stories, the one about Maestro Giovanni , the other Il Figliolo del Re Portoghese (The Son of the King ofPortugal) back in 1943, in the course of the second of which, being very tired, I had fallen asleep, but when I woke up he was still telling it.
    ‘Now,’ said Signora Angiolina, ‘Attilio is the last narratore in these parts and when he goes that will be the end of the fiabe.
    ‘He is also very religious,’ she went on. ‘And however difficult things are for him, he never complains,’ she concluded. ‘The other night it began to rain very heavily and I was worried about him. So I went down the hill to the house – he was already in bed – but there was a light shining through a hole in one of the shutters covering the window of his bedroom. I looked through it and there he was, sitting up in bed reading his breviary with his umbrella open while the rain came pouring through the ceiling. The next morning he went up on the roof and repaired it.
    ‘Of course I didn’t tell him about seeing him in bed with his umbrella. He would not have liked it.’
    With what, in card-playing circles, amounted to a full house, it seemed unlikely that Attilio was in any imminent danger of losing his pied à terre , at least not for some time.