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as an assistant coachman to his grandparents, he then became a driver, then a house waiter and when he was there the kitchen boomed with laughter.

Then I went up to my room to check that nothing had changed and from the window I looked at the river that flowed between the green banks. Leaving the garden, I ran to the Barchessa on the right where the brilliant silkworms were kept in the large rooms on the first floor, I went to greet Stefano's children, perpetually busy fixing something, Bruno the tractors and often our car, Severino the bicycles. Dirty with grease after the hugs I walked through the charming "carriage room," the hay-smelling stable. I turned the corner towards the wing where old Gigi lived to greet his wife Angelica - always dressed in black with a black handkerchief on her head, always beautiful like a queen despite her age - and the daughters called Noemi and Yole in homage to my great aunts.

I crossed the lawn and went to the left of Barchessa to greet Pieri, Gigi's son, who worked with other farmers in the immense cellar. "A drop of wine, paronsina?" Pieri said hitting a blow and laughing. I shook my head. I then passed into the other side wing to my friend Teresina whose father, sub-farmer, filled notebooks and accounting notebooks with minute signs of the blacksmith always intent on beating and forging. I rarely went to the last part, where the farmer lived: they found it too imposing and important, it intimidated me.

Of all this world there was nothing left. Only crumbling walls. Not even Stefano's little house, on one side of the garden, had been spared. Only the chapel had remained fairly intact. And the tobacco dryer, at the bottom of the garden. There, in the re-adapted drying room, we would return to live in San Michele.