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“This house is sheer magic.”
    Delightedly, Valérie laid the espresso jug aside and showed Poldi a guest room that had once been the family chapel. Although plaster was flaking off the vaulted ceiling, luminous frescoes depicting the Garden of Eden and the expulsion of Adam and Eve could still be seen between the mould patches.
    â€œLast year I had a dowser to stay,” said Valérie. “A German who said he’d never detected such a charge of positive energy anywhere else.”
    Hanging throughout the house were gloomy old portraits of the former residents of Femminamorta. Melancholy youths, old men with spiteful eyes, and powdered belles encased in corsets and silken gowns.
    â€œ Voilà , my paternal ancestors, the Raisi di Belfiores,” Valérie explained. “Bourbons, cowards, whoremongers and visionaries, heroes and poets, saints and ghosts – they’re all there. Until 1861, when Garibaldi dispossessed and shot a random sample of them.”
    Poldi nodded. After all, she had seen The Leopard with Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon some twenty times.
    â€œEverything has to change so that everything can stay the same,” she said, quoting from the film.
    For the surviving Belfiores, however, change had meant growing more impoverished from generation to generation and, to prevent their old house from succumbing to the forces of gravity, selling off land bit by bit and – mon Dieu – taking up middle-class professions.
    â€œI’ll bet some of them still haunt this place,” Poldi said, contemplating the portrait of a particularly disconsolate-looking ancestor.
    â€œ Mon Dieu , and how.”
    Since her German–Bavarian–Italian visitor was so obviously taken with the house, Valérie showed Poldi the adjoining wine cellar, an airless vault containing a big wine press of age-old oak, various brick basins for the fermenting must, and some old wooden casks in which a grown man could have stood upright.
    â€œThis was where the dowser detected the focus of the positive energy.”
    â€œIt must be ages since any wine was made here, though.” Poldi indicated the dusty casks and the rubbish and mattresses piled up behind the press. “A sad waste of all that positive energy.”
    â€œ Oui, mon Dieu ,” said Valérie. “Originally this was all a wine-growing area. The Raisi de Belfiores only lived in Femminamorta once a year at harvest time. At the end of the nineteenth century there was an earthquake that brought half the ceilings down. My great-great-grandfather promptly quit the house for fear it would collapse, and he never set foot in it again. Nobody did so for a century after that. Then, in the 1970s, my father inspected the place and found it was relatively intact. All the earthquake did was dislodge some plaster.”
    â€œAnd the wine?”
    Valérie shook her head. “After the Risorgimento the Belfiores gradually sold everything off, just to avoid having to do any work.”
    Poldi learnt that Valérie had inherited the little estate from her father, who had left her mother shortly after her birth.
    â€œThey loved and hated each other. That kind of incandescent passion will destroy any relationship.”
    â€œAn amour fou ,” remarked Poldi, who knew a thing or two about such matters, thinking of my Uncle Peppe.
    â€œI hardly knew my father, but when I heard he was leaving me this place I thought it was time I got to know him. So I learnt Italian and moved here. But, mon Dieu , we were going to have some coffee.”
    In the drawing room, some decrepit armchairs covered in faded upholstery were clustered around a coffee table piled high with a mixture of old tomes and tattered paperbacks. There were books everywhere: on the tables, in bookcases, in display cabinets and in the library, which, said Valérie, dated from the eighteenth century.
    She produced some stale biscuits and an espresso so