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Grandmother had suffered a lot and didn’t even go to San Gavino to see her youngest sister, her brother-in-law, and their children take the train for Porto Torres. And she had suffered for the house, too. The new owners had replaced the arched front entrance with an iron gate. The wooden pilasters, and the low wall separating her lolla from the courtyard, had been knocked down, and the lolla closed in by aluminum-frame windows. The low upper floor, which looked out over the roof of the lolla , and where the hayloft had been, had become a mansard, like the ones you see in postcards of the Alps. The stalls for the oxen and the woodshed made into a garage for cars. The flower beds reduced to a narrow perimeter along the wall. The well plugged up with cement. The tile roof, above the loft that was now a mansard, replaced by a terrace with a hollow-brick parapet. The multicolored terra-cotta tiles, which made kaleidoscopic designs on the floor, covered by outdoor tile. And the furniture was too much for the space of the rooms that the sisters now occupied in the houses of their husbands’ families, and no one wanted it—so old and cumbersome, from a time best forgotten. Only grandmother had taken the things from the bedroom she had had as a new bride, to re-create it in Via Giuseppe Manno.
     
    By the time they made the trip to Milan she knew that the family had grown prosperous, because her sister wrote to her that Milàn l’è il gran Milàn , Milan is the great Milan, and there was work for everyone and on Saturday they shopped at the supermarket and filled carts with perfectly packaged food, and that idea they had always had of economizing, of cutting no more than the exact number of slices of bread, of turning their coats, jackets, suits, of unraveling sweaters to reuse the wool, of resoling their shoes a thousand times—all done with. In Milan they went to the big department stores and got new clothes. What she didn’t like was the climate, the smog that blackened the edges of the sleeves and shirt collars and the children’s school smocks. She was constantly having to wash everything, but in Milan there was lots of water—they didn’t offer it on alternate days, as in Sardinia, and you could let it run and run, without worrying about washing yourself first, then with the waste water washing the clothes, then throwing the dirty water into the toilet. In Milan washing and bathing were fun. And then her sister didn’t have much to do after the housework, which was soon done, because the houses were small; millions of inhabitants had to live in that space—it wasn’t like Sardinia, with its enormous houses that were of no use to anyone, since they had no conveniences. In short, she had soon finished the housework and then she wandered around the city looking in the stores, and shopping.
     
    My grandparents didn’t know what to bring to the wealthy relatives in Milan. After all, they didn’t need anything. So grandmother proposed a poetic package, for old times’ sake, because it was true that they ate and dressed well, but Sardinian sausage and a nice Pecorino and oil and wine from Marmilla and a side of prosciutto and marinated cardoons and sweaters for the children hand-knitted by grandmother would bring them the fragrance of home.
     
    They set off without letting the relatives know. It would be a surprise. Grandfather got a map of Milan and studied the streets and planned itineraries for seeing the best sights in the city.
    They all three got new clothes in order not to make a bad impression. Grandmother bought some Elizabeth Arden cream, because now she was fifty and wanted the Veteran—her heart told her that they would meet—to find her still beautiful. Not that she was very worried by this. People always said that a man of fifty would never look at a woman the same age, but this reasoning was valid only for the things of the world. Not love. Love doesn’t care about age or anything else that isn’t