Dolci di Love Read Online Free PDF

Lil.’
    â€˜Goodbye, Rose,’ Lily said and shut the door in her face. Tipsy Tourism? What the hell was she talking about?

Chapter 4
    V ioletta and Luciana shuffled sideways out of their cramped living quarters and through the swinging door into the adjoining pasticceria like a pair of crippled crabs.
    Their family, the Ferrettis, had been making and selling their famous cantucci for hundreds of years, and very little had changed in the pastry shop in all that time.
    Their cantucci —a mouthwateringly delicious Italian cookie that could be dipped in sweet wine, dunked in coffee, or eaten for no particular reason at any time of the day or night—was made strictly to the traditional family recipe.
    They used only the finest flour, the best sugar, the freshest eggs, the plumpest hazelnuts and their secret ingredient: Ferretti fingers to hand-shape the morsels into the perfect bite-sized mouthfuls.
    The Ferretti cantucci may have been a little plain to look at but all the love and history that went into each tiny crumb made it taste like a beacon of artisan integrity and after all these years it still enjoyed the best reputation in Tuscany.
    This was something to which the sisters clung fiercely, not just because it was their birthright but because the Borsolini brothers down the hill were now selling cantucci too.
    They didn’t make it themselves, they brought it in from Milano, and it tasted like cacca according to Violetta. But the vast Borsolini family, which now extended much further than the original brothers, did a roaring trade in their store selling truckloads of this commercial confection in a variety of different flavours and colours. Green cherry and white chocolate? Crystallised ginger and pistachio? Black forest? The Borsolini cantucci might have looked dazzling but it had all the artisan integrity of an iPod. Worse, one of the younger sons had quite a flair for window dressing and displayed the family’s multicoloured wares with significant drama, changing it at least once a week.
    The Ferretti sisters did their best to ignore this, continuing to make their authentic Tuscan morning, afternoon or evening treat by hand, themselves, although in small, and getting smaller, amounts.
    Their store’s single marble counter bore a sparse collection of large fluted glass bowls inside of which were heaped piles of their homemade cookies. They had no confirmed-bachelor offspring to throw together any eye-catching displays: their window had an empty table and a single chair in it.
    On this particular morning, the morning of the ache but not the itch, Violetta pushed one of the fluted bowls aside as she leaned on the counter to catch her breath. The sisters were running late but getting anywhere seemed to take twice as long these days. Even bending over to pick up a tea towel could take half an hour if the shoulders, hips, and knees refused to line up and cooperate. Sometimes, a tea towel just had to stay on the ground until someone with better-oiled parts visited and could more easily return it to its rightful position.
    â€˜When did we get so old?’ Violetta asked her sister.
    â€˜I think it was the eighties,’ Luciana replied. ‘But who can remember?’
    They laughed, a noise which, at their age, generally sounded a lot like two desert animals fighting over a squeaky toy, but today Violetta’s chortle hit a feeble note.
    She felt her age—not far short of a century—and she was scared, yes, there it was, scared, of what lay around the corner. Ageing was not for the fainthearted. It hurt and it took a lot of time and in the end what did you get? A hole in the ground and a headstone if you were lucky. And there was still so much to be done!
    The sisters’ slow progress around the counter was interrupted by a rattle on the pasticceria door.
    â€˜Here we go,’ Violetta grumbled as two Danish backpackers clattered into the store and headed for the cantucci