A Small Place in Italy Read Online Free PDF

couple of blobs of solder, a lighting system that was not at that moment working, although Signora Angiolina said she knew how to get it going.
    The only other illumination was provided by several small, homemade brass lamps, fuelled with olive oil, that looked as if they might have been looted from an Etruscan tomb.
    ‘Who has been living here?’ Wanda asked Signora Angiolina. This was the first intimation we had had that someone might already be in residence at I Castagni.
    ‘This is the room,’ Signora Angiolina said, with a certain air of surprise, as if this was something that was common knowledge, ‘in which Attilio lives.’
    ‘But who is this Attilio?’ Wanda asked. By the way she spoke I knew that she was worried. Neither of us had envisaged the existence of a sitting tenant or, even worse, a squatter.
    ‘Attilio is the brother of the wife of Signor Botti, the padrone , the owner. He is only a little man,’ she said, referring to him as an ometto – as if his smallness was some sort of recommendation. ‘ Ma lui è molto bravo . He knows how to do everything.’
    What we had already been forced to designate mentally as ‘Attilio’s Room’ – were we really going to have him as a sitting tenant, even though he was ‘molto bravo’? – was separated from the back part of the premises by a partition made from canniccio – wattle and daub. Canniccio was made with interwoven canes, the thinnest of the giant reeds that grow everywhere in this part of the world, plastered with a mixture of clay, lime, dung and chopped straw. These reeds, which grow to a great height, fifteen feet or more, were everywhere on the hillside and once established spread like wildfire. Their roots had the consistency of cast iron and in trying to eradicate them I succeeded in bending a pick.
    These canes had dozens of uses: as supports for clothes lines, for supporting vines and making pergolas, for fencing in earth closets and 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