Teresa’s wedding dress.’
His spirits begin to lift as the sweet tang rises from the purply-black mass whooshing around their legs like a live thing, and clinging passionately in unmanageable clumps as they try to stamp it down in the hand-welded metal tank. The smell is deliciously alluring. Pistola can’t resist cramming a handful into his mouth even though the mix of prickly skin and pips is far less pleasant on the tongue than in the nostrils. Soon he and Fiorenzo and Donato are singing as they stamp, holding on to each other, knee-high in what will one day be Bepi’s Bardolino.
Then, in typical fashion, Donato lets loose a few inflammatory comments and a fight starts. After an evening in the company of yet another Valkyrie of easy virtue, he has decided he wants to head north when school finishes. Shake the dust of Campino from his feet forever. He has never been very fond of his birthplace anyway.
‘Show me another village as unattractive as this one,’ he barks, kicking wildly into the unruly clumps with a dripping leg. ‘No charm whatsoever! Where are all the pretty piazzas? The rolling hills lined with cypresses that the German girls rave about when they discover Tuscany? We live in a flat muggy hellhole! In summer we’re stung to death by mosquitoes and flies, and in winter everything’s foggy and frozen! Why on God’s earth did our cretino ancestors choose here to settle?’
He’s not wrong. Campino’s valley has one of the worst climates in Italy. Still, Campino is Pistola’s haven. He feels a bond with his graveyard ancestors. It incenses him to hear his village being consigned to hell. He cuts Donato off in mid-tirade.
‘Basta, figlio di puttana! Bring your blondes here and see how long they go on raving about cypresses when they’re floating downstream to the sound of cicadas, and lying on the bank with the juice of wild grapes running down their chins …’
Donato throws a fistful of purple stuff at him.
‘Your problem, Pistolino mio, is that you’ve never been ambitious. Why travel when you have such a great life here in paradise, fishing for slimy frogs in filthy rice fields—’
Pistola immediately lashes out, causing the three of them to lose their balance and topple over into the purple mixture. Soon they’re punching each other and thrashing around, covered in grape juice like drunken Dionysian revellers. As Fiorenzo leaps up and hangs spiky bunches on his ears like earrings, they hear a commotion. The master of the house has arrived and is being greeted by his two big black dogs, Diavolo and Nero. Galvanised, they jump out of the tank and rush to hose themselves down at the farmyard tap. As Bepi passes on his way to the house, they comment loudly on the day’s heat.
With their now burgundy-coloured shirts drying on a fig tree, they climb back into the tank, their naked torsos displaying a diverse selection of body types. Donato’s the muscular one. To compensate for being small, he spends time during the summer holidays building up his body with barbells his father’s brother brought from Chicago. Fiorenzo is a big-boned lad like his mother the weed-plucker, with strong arms and shoulders developed by his labours in his father’s silkworm industry. Pistola is the tallest and leanest. Though as agile as a monkey on the school gym’s wall bars, and the only one who can shimmy to the top of the rope, no amount of exercise seems to build up his body. Nor are there any body-building weights in Campino’s few shops, even if he could afford them.
The incorrigible Donato has more gripes to get off his chest about his village. What he really hates is that it lacks the kind of architectural gems littering the rest of the country.
‘What about the church?’ Pistola is fond of Campino’s little Gothic extravaganza.
‘That overworked monstrosity? Thank God it’s falling to pieces.’
‘Squarcione’s farmhouse?’ says Fiorenzo. ‘Wasn’t it built by some count or other?’
‘What can you see behind those scruffy old olive trees of his?’
‘I think Zia Andromaca has a nice old house.’ Pistola has always liked the stone building his aunt lives in.
‘That falling-to-bits square box?’
‘You’re forgetting Casa Caprini,’ says Fiorenzo.
Casa Caprini is Campino’s only stately home. It has a small claim to fame. Italy’s national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi once slept in it, a fact proclaimed by an insignificant marble plaque on the wall outside. The Caprini family were lawyers and supporters of Garibaldi’s efforts to unite Italy, and they lived in this majestic three-storey villa at the other end of Via Luigi Caprini from Pistola’s house. It has marble floors, paintings on the ceilings, and a majestic marble stairway.
‘I wouldn’t rate Casa Caprini too highly in the architectural stakes either,’ Donato says grudgingly. ‘But I like the cherubs on the ceilings.’
Pistola is silent. He has never told his friends about the illicit connection he has with Casa Caprini. It’s a secret piece of family history revealed to him one evening by Nonno Mario while the two of them were cooling off outside the house listening to the frogs.
Pistola had just turned thirteen and Nonno Mario had decided he was old enough to be given the family heirloom he had kept for him since the death of his mother, a garnet ring Pistola would one day give the girl he married. Behind it lay the poignant love story of Pistola’s great-grandmother, Carla Pallavicini, mother of Nonno Mario’s wife Isabella.
Carla worked as a maid in that elegant manor house on Via Luigi Caprini. A striking beauty, she caught the eye of the squire’s son, Guido Caprini. When the squire found out, he dismissed her and forbade his son ever to see her again, threatening to cut him out of his will. The heartsore Guido married a rich young woman of his father’s choice. A childless union.
A few months after leaving her job, Carla married Gianmarco Pallavicini, who ran a small trattoria with his father. They soon had a daughter they named Isabella. Gingery-blonde and freckled. The image of Guido Caprini.
As the years went by, Guido had no contact with his daughter. Only when Carla’s husband died years later did Guido arrive at the trattoria to give Carla his condolences, and ask if he could have a few moments alone with Isabella. As she years later described it to Nonno Mario when he became her husband, it was an uneasy encounter. Admitting that he had always known she was his daughter but had never been able to be a real father to her, Guido gave her the garnet ring, along with his blessing.
On his death, however, he left Casa Caprini to his nephew, his sister’s only child Francesco de Angelis, who lives in Milan.
As it happens, Francesco de Angelis is a fossil collector well acquainted with Nonno Mario’s friend Gamba Mischi, the postman. Which is how Pistola got to spend a night in the four-poster where Garibaldi once slept. Italy’s self-appointed champion of the oppressed is his idol. He’s read everything possible on the soul-stirring exploits of this tempestuous red-bearded adventurer, and it wasn’t so much Casa Caprini’s marble magnificence that impressed him as the fact that he could sleep in the same bed as him.
Not that he’s about to share any of this with his friends. It’s a family secret.
The boys make their way out through the garden when the grape-crushing is over. While they’re filling their pockets with luscious black figs from Bepi’s heavily laden trees, they can hear a loud argument going on inside the house.
‘Too long, Mamma!’ Teresa’s voice comes wailing out through the open lounge window. ‘You want me to look like an old lady!’
Her
