What if we went to Italy...

What if we went to Italy..

A suitcase of books, and one bag a piece for the summer…

                                                           Mary Chapin Carpenter

Years ago I read an article about a group of travelers who rented a Tuscan villa for no other reason than to read books.  They took turns with cooking, relaxed and read.  The article showed typically idyllic pictures of an old stone villa, complete with grapevines draping a roomy outdoor terrace.  I thought at the time Tuscany might be one of the most beautiful places to visit in Italy. I filed that article under “dreams for someday.”  Now a chance viewing of a little ad for an Umbria property in a real estate agency Italy posting revived those dreams, forcing a decision for me between risky adventure and status quo.  Little did I realize then that the best places in Italy weren’t necessarily in Tuscany.

Only a month later we are in Umbria, climbing steep winding roads on the way to view this prospective little Italian flat.  The decision to do this was wild, maybe bordering on crazy, but we took the plunge and while it still wasn’t too late to back out, we really wanted this to work.  A faintly nagging angst, (later to become a constant companion) deepened as we traveled further up the mountain. This lonely road was obviously not one of the most visited places in Italy.   I felt a bit concerned, as we’d just left the village of Sant’ Anatolia di Narco, and now seemed to be heading nowhere.

 “Over there is your apartment.”  Stephania, our realtor, pointed across a great gorge, thick with green trees, to a cluster of stone buildings perched on the edge of a mountain.  It sat alone, barely visible in the distance, and seemed impossible to reach from where we were.





Our Village Way in the Distance

 

We continued climbing, the road snaking around the edge of the mountain.  But after rounding several curves, crossing at least two bridges and passing a grassy meadow, I still saw no village.

Our Italian Apartment!

Suddenly, we turned off to our right on an unmarked narrow road which angled steeply downward.  Soon a hodgepodge of buildings appeared along a tree lined parking terrace, but we turned away from it, following vertical switchbacks that wound down below the buildings, finally arriving at the lower end of the hamlet where a stone road hugged a high medieval wall.  As we drove up this narrow road, I took a small intake of breath for I recognized the outside of the apartment as shown in the realtors’ photos.  The same high stone wall that lined the road we entered surrounded the hamlet, also forming the base of the apartment.  Between a gap in this wall, wide stone steps curved up to a covered passageway. 
I knew these steps, had climbed them many times in my mind.  They would lead


I Know These Steps

us into a tunnel, and to the two small steps below the front door, emerging again into the sunlight and parallel to the stone terrace belonging to the apartment.

When viewing these photos from home, I imagined a possibility of damp stone odors in the dark areas and I worried then if it permeated the inside as well. Also of concern was the many worn doors nearby that appeared rotted with disuse. 
 



Anybody Home?

We’d been assured there were no abandoned apartments in the hamlet, but the weathered doors, broken shutters and tall weeds flourishing near the steps clearly challenged that. 

We parked along two open storage rooms, one containing hay bales and odd junk.  Ahead of us steel poles and tin roofing jutted out into the road alongside a rusty burning bin.  Clumps of something, not dirt - likely manure, was carelessly strewn across the road.
 

I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn't this kind of curb appeal.  The tidy part of me fought disillusionment.

It was when we emerged from the car that I first noticed it.

Silence.  No village noises, cars, even conversations.  Only the constant whizzing of a breeze careening through the canyon broke the silence.  I looked around.  There was nothing, not a single other village in sight.