rendering the user invisible to the vulgar gaze, for picking fruit from tall trees (by attaching a little net to the end of one of them). And when they finally rotted and broke they made good kindling. Meanwhile, unless ruthlessly controlled, they devastated the countryside.
Now the whole of this partition wall was riddled with wood-worm and was beginning to fall apart. A ruinous door in its left hand side opened into what had been another cowshed. It was difficult to imagine domestic animals, however domesticated, walking through one’s kitchen/living room on their way in from the fields in the evening to their sleeping quarters and each morning going the other way, back into the open air, but this was presumably what had happened.
This cowshed was also cobbled. It was also completely windowless. These downstairs rooms were so dark that I began to wonder if the inhabitants had been spiritualists. What was good news was that the floorboards overhead and the beams that supported them were in quite good condition.
The key that opened the door of the room at the top of the outside staircase was the most complex and beautiful of all the keys and the easiest to use. There was no juggling or jiggling necessary. The Signora inserted it the right way up and it opened first time.
Inside there were two rooms, back and front, divided from one another by a less ruinous version of the partition wall on the ground floor but reinforced with wooden uprights that gave it a slightly olde-Englishe, half-timbered appearance. To the left of it, another rickety, lockless door, similar to the one on the ground floor, separated the two rooms, front and back, both of which had two windows. All four were minute. It was obvious that if we were going to be able to read in either one of them, even in broad daylight, we would have to have bigger windows and these walls would take some excavating as all of them were composed of large stones and were more than two feet thick.
The roof itself appeared to be more or less sound but the main beam which supported it, a really hefty piece of chestnut, would have been more reassuring if it hadn’t had a great crack in it.
Looking at it, as I already had at numerous other beams and boards during this tour of inspection, I found it difficult to decide whether I Castagni might be good for another hundred years, or might collapse altogether in the course of the next couple of hours.
The view from the outside balcony of this upper floor was terrific. Here we were about eight hundred feet above the sea. It was a beautiful afternoon and the sun shone from a cloudless sky, flooding the front of the house with a brilliant golden light.
To the west, beyond the house, the grassy track that led past the front of it from the torrent, gradually descended a hundred yards or so beyond it between lines of vines to a pretty two-storeyed building, a smaller version of I Castagni; and some fifteen miles or so beyond it were the mountains of the Cinque Terre beyond La Spezia, behind which the sun was now beginning to sink, like a huge orange.
Far below to the south-west was the Plain of Luni, with its innumerable small holdings and market gardens. And beyond them were the wooded heights that rose steeply above the far, right bank of the Magra, here running down through its final reach before entering the Ligurian Sea.
It was at this moment that I took a black-and-white photograph of the house which, when it was printed, had more of the quality of an engraving than a photograph, a magical effect, but one that I was never able to emulate, however hard I tried.
Down on the ground floor, at the foot of the outside staircase, next to the front door and at right angles to it, there was another door that opened into what was a miniature, protruding wing of the house. This part of it was almost completely severed from the main part of the building by a frightful fissure that ran from top to bottom of it.
According to Signora Angiolina, who had been living in the neighbourhood when it occurred, it had been caused by the great earthquake of 1921, which had damaged or destroyed a number of houses in the region. Again I had the feeling that yet another part of the building might be about to collapse.
This was the only room in the house to which Signora Angiolina did not have a key, apart from the one that opened the door to the loft at the back of the house, the one that was going to need a ladder to get to it.
The only way one could see into this little room was through a heavily barred window; fortunately the wooden shutters were open.
It was a very small room, freshly whitewashed and lit by the same sort of oil lamps we had seen in the kitchen. The few bits of furniture, which almost completely filled it, consisted of a large, old single bed of polished wood with a high back inlaid with mother-of-pearl; made up with clean white linen sheets which were turned back, ready to receive whoever was going to sleep between them. Alongside the bed there was a little stool covered with a worn fragment of carpet, and on the wall next to the bed there was a crucifix and an oleograph of La Santissima Vergine del Rosario di Fontanellato, Wanda’s village near Parma, where I had been a prisoner-of-war in 1943, and below it there was a small, circular, marble-topped table, which it later transpired contained a vaso da notte, a chamber pot.
On the other side of the bed there was a very old wooden chest. Overhead the whitewashed ceiling looked decidedly wonky, with big patches of damp where the rain had penetrated; but in spite of this the room was a lap of luxury compared with the rest of the house, and the only part remotely ready for occupation.
‘And who sleeps in this room?’ Wanda asked superfluously. Like me she already knew the answer before Signora Angiolina confirmed that this was the bedchamber of Attilio. It was also unnecessary to ask who washed and ironed his sheets.‘Sta arrivando adesso, Attilio,’ she said. ‘He is coming now.’
Emerging from the deep shadow cast by the trees on the banks of the torrent we could see a small figure travelling towards us across the grass at a tremendous rate, rather like one of those gompa lamas who move across the Tibetan plateau at high speed, negotiating what would seem to be impossible obstacles on the way. A method of progression made possible only because they are in a trance state.
Soon we could see him clearly. A tiny, wizened man, bent by a lifetime of toil, toothless so that in profile his mouth looked like a new moon. He was old, how old it was impossible to say, anything between seventy and eighty, quite possibly even more.
As he drew near we could hear him talking to himself in an animated way, and occasionally laughing at some private joke. He was certainly nothing like a gompa lama, more like a benevolent gnome.
He was dressed in a pale-coloured jacket, baggy trousers, a white, open-necked shirt and on his head he wore a big, palecoloured cap that looked a bit like an unbaked sponge cake. Everything about him was very clean looking.
Now he was abreast of us and I prepared to welcome him, or for him to welcome Signora Angiolina, or welcome the three of us. But he did none of these things. Instead, he looked at us benevolently, cackled a bit while fishing a modest sized key from a pocket, said something that sounded like ‘Bisogna vedere un po’, the equivalent of ‘I’ll have to think this out a bit’, then opened the door to ‘Attilio’s Bedroom’, took the key out of the lock and went in and shut the door, still continuing to chuckle away on the other side of it.
I was completely bowled over by this encounter. I was sure I had met him before on two occasions in 1943, after the German occupation of Italy.
The man I remembered had looked more or less the same age and that was twenty-four years ago. Then I had thought of him as being very old, I suppose because
