Dolci di Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

bowls.
    The two sisters immediately started hissing like busted steam pipes as Luciana flapped her apron at the surprised tourists while Violetta shook her head and, muttering angrily into her chest, hobbled over to the giant Danes and gave them a shove back in the direction of the door they had just come through.
    They pretty quickly got the idea and stumbled back out onto the street where they stood for a moment, stunned, while Violetta continued to shoo them away through the glass door as though sick to death of large, good-looking, blond people trying to buy cantucci , of all things, in a cantucci shop, of all places, in their lovely hilltop town of Montevedova. Ridicolo!
    â€˜I guess we could always put the CLOSED sign up,’ suggested Luciana.
    â€˜I don’t think so! We don’t want our cantucci to be as easy to come by as that Borsolini cacca . As long as people want to buy it and we don’t let them, we have the upper hand.’
    Violetta checked that the sign still said OPEN , turned the lock so no one else could get in, then the two of them shuffled over to a set of dusty shelves at the back of the store.
    With quite some effort, they pushed and pulled at one of the shoulder-height ledges until finally the whole thing slid away, revealing a hidden stairwell behind the wall.
    â€˜Are you ready?’ Violetta asked. Luciana nodded and they started their descent, resting on each of three separate landings, then working their way along a narrow passage until they found themselves outside a large wooden door upon which Violetta performed a complicated knock before pushing it open.
    The two old ladies stepped into the warm, welcoming lamp-lit comfort of a large cozy room. Medieval tapestries hung from the dark oak walls, half-restored frescoes lurking beneath them, while at the far end of the room three lava lamps glooped and burped inside the enormous open fireplace. A table beneath one of the frescoes, remarkable only in that everyone in it—even the lambs and donkeys—had red hair, bore a carafe of sweet vin santo and a dozen small crystal glasses.
    This was the headquarters of La Lega Segreta de Rammendatrici Vedove —the Secret League of Widowed Darners.
    The sisters had initially started the League to fill the void left by the deaths of their twin husbands, Salvatore and Silvio, killed far from home in East Africa during World War II.
    As they mourned the men they had adored, they filled hole after hole in the toes and heels of various socks, and within a few months had attracted dozens of other widowed members.
    At that stage, the surviving men of Montevedova tried to muscle in on the action, turning up to meetings to get pie-eyed on grappa and telling long-winded stories about things they probably had not done on the battlefields.
    This made the widows sad that the men they had lost had been such good sorts while the men that were left behind were such a pain in the rear. They disbanded the open league, annexedthe basement beneath the cathedral while the parish was briefly between priests, and re-formed the secret league.
    They also decided that darning hose was perhaps a tiny bit boring and not worth having a league for, but that the pursuit of true love—the likes of which they had all been lucky enough to have and still treasured—was far more philanthropic. In other words, they decided to mend hearts instead of socks.
    When Violetta’s nose tingled, Luciana’s toe throbbed, and orange blossom perfume filled the air, it meant a new calzino rotto —secret code for a broken heart—was about to come their way. The trick was to identify the calzino rotto as soon as possible and get mending.
    The widows believed in love with all their hearts, and no one more than Violetta, but in recent years it seemed that happy endings were harder to come by and added to this, League numbers—thanks to natural attrition—had dwindled to an even dozen.
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