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would look over my notes at the kitchen table, feeling bored and righteous. Hard as I tried to retain it all, most of the thin shell of information applied by Loretta fell away, leaving me more or less as ignorant as when I’d started.
    But the griffin. The griffin I always remembered. The monster was everywhere: carved into rocks, staring at us from frescoes, leering down from marble buildings. Its head a screeching eagle, its body a lion—stone, overpowering chest and massive haunches straining to leap. Loretta insisted that it was a majestic animal. Majestic , she kept repeating, as if we didn’t understand. Yet it didn’t seem the right word to me. Sometimes on night walks I would visit a particular rendering in front of the palace, carved in the fourteenth century. This one had a neck so realistic the sculptor had captured its furious tendons; its beak and tongue were caught in stormy mid-hiss. A beast, I thought, forever waiting. I liked to stare at it, to run my hand along its cool ankle. As if I might be able to cause it to stir from its ancient sleep.
    *   *   *
    Two days after our orientation, I moved my things into Gia and Alessandra’s cottage. Upon waking there my first morning, all I wanted to do was stay in my new little room and nest. Yet I was wary of giving the Italian girls the impression that I was some homebody who would crowd them. And so, tossing an apple and a bottle of water into my purse, I reluctantly set out into the late-August heat.
    A girl in a strange city. At first, the thought of going out alone left me squeamish, but as Jenny wasn’t answering and I didn’t yet know anyone else well enough to call other than the less than appealing Marcy, there was nothing to do but make the best of it.
    I wandered timidly at first, hesitant to venture away from the few streets I’d committed to memory. At one corner, I peered down a dark set of stairs seemingly leading nowhere. Suddenly a woman emerged from the shadows. I stepped back, for at first I thought she was a shadow herself. She looked black with soot, as if thickly painted from head to toe. Her stooped figure was wrapped in a black shawl and long skirt, despite the heat. Her eyes, too, were jet, glittering brightly as a bird’s. I couldn’t make out if she was young or old. She looked at me intently, gliding forward.
    “ Perso? ” she rasped.
    Her obsidian face cracked into a wide grin, showing red gums. Behind her I saw nothing but a dead end.
    “You get lost, you go up.”
    She gestured to the sky, then vanished.
    I squinted at where she had been standing, trembling at the thought that my dreams had extended themselves into the daylight hours. Yet what she said was true—the main piazza was, in fact, on the very top of the hill, meaning all roads sloping up would eventually lead to the correct place. Newly emboldened, I spent my morning darting back and forth into the city’s cracks like a hungry sparrow.
    By eleven o’clock the temperature gauge on my phone read 36°C. My mother used to speak of techniques to survive lethally hot weather—staying inside during the middle of the day or wearing a wet cloth on the back of the neck—but none of these sensible precautions had occurred to me that morning. I was just about to step into a restaurant to take a second breakfast just for the sake of sitting in the shade, when I saw a sign reading MUSEO ARCHEOLOGICO in front of a large stone building. Through the arched doorway, I could see a lovely green courtyard with twisting marble columns and a trickling fountain. Without further thought, I paid my four euros and slipped in.
    The building, a former cloister, housed chamber after chamber of Etruscan urns, statues, tombs, and sarcophagi. Surprisingly, I was the only one there at the moment, and, as the guard appeared to be asleep, I took my leave to run my hand over the smooth stone of the displaced graves. The air inside was cool and delicious. I looked at the urns. The writing