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come to live with him in Venice, he left the comfort of his dust-crusted beach house one morning, returning nine hours later to a pasha’s lair—marble floors burnished, white brocade flung at every surface, the delicate preen of cinnamon candles chasing twenty years of cigarette smoke.
    “Cristo.”
    B ARLOZZO ARRIVES AT four bells. Unsmiling and at ease with silence, his Tuscan reserve clashes with my piffling chatter and my Donna Reed–twirling about him, patting a cushion where he might sit, telling him how happy we are to have our first visitor, coming at him with a wine glass full of water, which he refuses, saying, “Acqua fa ruggine, water makes rust.” Once I’ve exchanged his water for wine, he drains half the glass and, without preamble,reveals that he was born in this house. “Upstairs in the little room that looks west. Down here is where the animals lived. Dairy cows and a mule slept here,” he says sweeping his hands about our salotto, living room, “and the manger was in there, in the space that’s your kitchen.”
    This fact enchants me, soothes the earlier jilt I’d felt about its stingy space. Now I think my kitchen is a beatific snug. I’m so sure that Donna Reed never cooked in a manger. “Four generations of Barlozzo men sharecropped Lucci lands. I would have been the fifth but, after the war, everything changed. My father was too sick to work, and so I did odd jobs for the Luccis to earn our keep. I was more valuable to them as a handyman than a farmer. They have eight properties that sit between Piazze and Celle and I just moved from one to the other, patching roofs, building up walls, trying to rescue things from neglect, from the shame the war left behind.”
    At ease with silence. Until he wants to talk. As though he’s been saving stories, his is a soliliquy, an old monk’s soft chanting. He tells us that when his parents passed on he stayed alone here for a few years before he rented a postwar apartment in the new town, a kilometer or so down the road. He was the last person to have lived in this house full-time, its having since been used for storage and sometimes to house the extra hands the Luccis hired during the olive and grape harvests. He hasn’t worked for the Luccis or even set foot in the house for more than thirty years. What he doesn’t say is as eloquentas his spoken story. He rests between phrases, leaving time for us to listen to the silent parts.
    “Would you like to see how it’s been restructured upstairs?” I ask him.
    He walks the rooms with us. Barlozzo’s family kitchen was where our bedroom is now. He runs his hand over the new drywall where the fireplace once was. The two other bedrooms were a pantry— la dispensa, he calls it—where, from great oak beams, his father set the wine-washed hind legs of his pigs to swing in the cool, dry breezes of a winter and a spring until the haunches shriveled into the sweet, rosy flesh of prosciutto.
    “We hung all sorts of things from these beams,” he says, “figs and apples threaded on strings, whole salami, tomatoes and chiles dried on their stems, braids of garlic and onions. There was always a pyramid built up of round, green winter squash, each one piled on the other, stem-side down, and they’d last that way from September til April. The walls were lined with wide board shelves sagging with the weight of peaches and cherries and apricots preserved in jars, sotto spirito, under spirits. When things were good, that is.”
    Having understood him to say “Santo Spirito,” I tell him I’d surely like to have the Holy Ghost’s formula for putting up cherries, and it’s the first time I hear him laugh.
    We show him the two bathrooms and he just shakes his head,mumbling something about how shabbily the Luccis put things together. He talks about claw-foot tubs and exposed brick walls. He laments that the Luccis ignored the mountains of old handmade terra cotta floor tiles that sit in their sheds and cellars