Summer in Tuscany Read Online Free PDF

time to go to the movies, let alone go to Italy!
    “You know we can’t do that, Mom,” I said. “And I don’t think you should go either. You don’t even know anyone in Bella Piacere anymore. Anyhow, this has to be some kind of hoax.”
    “A priest would not lie,” she said firmly.
    “Why not just call this Don Vincenzo and ask him exactly what the property is?” Patty said.
    Nonna clutched The Letter to her heart as though she had been stabbed. “You want to take all the joy out of my surprise?”
    “Oh, sorry…No, of course not,” Patty said, bewildered.
    Nonna looked me firmly in the eye again. “We are going,” she said.
    “But I can’t go,” Livvie cried. “Besides, I don’t want to go to Italy with all those boring foreigners. Anyhow, I’ve got stuff to do, and I’ve got school…and, like, there’s this really cute guy I might be dating—”
    “We will go in your summer break.” Nonna cut her off in the middle of her protest. “And besides, it will be educational.”
    Livvie’s pretty Italian-brown eyes rolled up in her head.
    “A trip to Italy sounds pretty good to me.” Jeff tried to arbitrate. “Nonna would get to see her old home and find out what her property is, and Gemma, you and Livvie will get to know your roots. Besides,” he added, looking at me, “you could use a break.”
    “Remember me?” I said. “The single mom? I have to make a living.”
    “You haven’t taken a holiday in three years,” Patty put in. “You must have quite a few weeks’ vacation time stored up by now.”
    I glared at her. She was undermining my position. Then I said to Nonna, “The only sensible thing to do is to give this Don Vincenzo a call and find out what he’s talking about.”
    Nonna did not look at me. She didn’t look at any of us. She just got up and began removing the coffee cups from the table. She paced silently to the sink with them. Then she paced silently back again. Our eyes were fixed anxiously on her as she silently cleared the table.
    She sank back into her chair and stared reproachfully at me. She took off her glasses, and I caught the glitter of a tear. “So,” she said wearily. “So, this is how little my family thinks of me. My family. The only family I have left in the world .” Her voice dropped a tone, and she added dolefully, “Except for maybe a few cousins still in my old village of Bella Piacere, where I now have property.”
    “M-o-m.” I could hear an echo of Livvie’s exasperated whine in my own voice. But I was still absolutely firm about this. “I have responsibilities. I can’t just drop everything and go on some crazy wild-goose chase. It’s impossible. We’re not going to Italy. And that’s that.”

Chapter Seven
    So, of course, here we are in Rome. We are in a taxi on our way from the airport known as Fiumicino, with a driver who has a death wish, weaving through a tangle of traffic that beats Manhattan’s and is twice as noisy. Leaning on the horn seems to be a way of life here, and driving is a macho one-upmanship contest that has Livvie on the edge of her seat, Nonna with her eyes closed and probably praying, and me clinging to the strap as we swerve around roundabouts and dart down narrow side streets, missing other vehicles by a whisker.
    I’m beat, not only from the long journey but from the stress of having to rearrange my carefully planned life and take four weeks of my accumulated vacation days to accommodate this trip. And the only reason I am here is not because of this foolish “inheritance,” which I believe can only amount to a couple of cows in some tumbledown barn, but because I got the feeling that for some reason Nonna really wanted to visit Bella Piacere. She wanted to go home again.
    It is dusk, and Rome’s lights are switching on in a zillion sparkles, bathing the city in a golden glow, illuminating domes and ancient monuments, ruins and piazzas, and twinkling in trees full of very noisy starlings. Could that