Return to Valetto: A Novel

PART ONE

1

The Saint’s Staircase hangs down from the cliffs of Valetto, spiraling into thin air. It’s all that remains of the house in Umbria where a disciple of St. Francis of Assisi lived until 1695, when a massive earthquake cleaved a third of the town into the canyons below. Because Valetto sits on a pedestal of volcanic rock—an island jutting up from the valley floor—the spiral staircase appears to float, a twist of wrought iron eerily suspended between the chestnut groves below and the twelfth-century church spire above.

Over the centuries, as Valetto has dwindled from a town of three thousand to just ten full-time residents, including my mother’s family, the staircase has become a favorite spot for reckless tourists and ruminating locals. Some have claimed otherworldly vistas from the stairs: apparitions of the medieval saint or visitations from the dead. As a boy, when I visited the town during the summers, I’d get up early to see the fog rolling up the riverine mouth of the valley, and climb down onto the bottom lip of the stairwell so I could stand sheathed inside a cloud for fifteen minutes, watching my hands slowly disappear at the railing.

But then one morning, as I descended, my throat thickened with dread as an enormous figure loomed toward me through the haze. And that feeling returned over the years. It came for me on suspension bridges and high rooftops, in an elevator stuck between floors, and in the waiting rooms of hospitals. I’d find myself descending through that fog, halfway down the stairs and filling with dread before I reminded myself that it was all a trick of light and perspective, that it wasn’t real. So many times, I told myself that figure must have been simply a shaft of early sunlight glinting down the aperture of the narrow valley, projecting and refracting my silhouette into a cloud of vapor. Still, I avoided the stairwell until one harrowing November night nearly four decades later.

I specialize in abandonment. This had always been my quip at academic conferences and faculty gatherings, but it wasn’t until I published a book about vanishing Italian towns and villages that people realized how serious I was. Famous for Dying: A Social History of Abandoned Italy was well reviewed in the journals and sparked a series of invitations from universities in Rome, Milan, and Turin. And so, after a two-year absence, I found myself preparing to return to Italy for six months in the autumn of 2011.

Between conference panels and guest lectures, I intended to revisit some of the places where I’d done my research over the course of many summers. From Craco in the south, to the hillsides of Umbria and northern Piedmont, I’d walked along empty cobblestone streets and overgrown trails, taking photographs and interviewing current and former residents, including my aunts and my grandmother. Sometimes there was a single holdout, like the hermit in Abruzzo who’d lived in a deconsecrated church for twenty-five years, and sometimes there were a few families left, or no one at all. And although the towns and villages all had their own abandonment stories—landslides, earthquakes, the ravages of time and urbanization—there was always somebody who dreamed of a comeback, a return. That hope, however naïve, is perhaps what drew me to these desolate places to begin with: the heroic idea of going up against history.

On my college campus in Michigan, my desolation book project was celebrated as its own comeback of sorts. I’d lost my wife and mother within a four-year span, and so it was said I’d written an important social history from the crucible of my own grief. Just before I flew to Rome, the dean of liberal arts, a Beowulf specialist who spoke some Italian, hosted a small going-away party for me and gave a toast that ended with in bocca al lupo!, into the mouth of the wolf! Technically, this means good luck in Italian, but leaving his mouth it took on an Anglo-Saxon menace—violent and foreboding—as if he were rallying me into the carnivorous maw of the future, as if he knew that something was waiting to swallow me whole.

That swallowing began with an email from my aunt Iris the night before my flight. My mother had died a year earlier and left me the stone cottage behind her family’s medieval villa in Umbria. For six months, Valetto and the cottage would be my home, just as it had been during my childhood summers. Iris lived in the villa with her sisters, Violet and Rose, all of them elderly and widowed, and my ninety-nine-year-old grandmother. The email’s subject line read Una Occupante Abusiva, and it took me a moment to port the phrase into English and realize it meant a squatter. A female squatter, to be precise. In her winding, academic Italian—Iris was a retired sociology professor—she explained that a middle-aged woman, a northerner, had recently shown up at the villa with some correspondence from Aldo Serafino, my maternal grandfather, and taken up residence in my mother’s cottage.

During World War II, Aldo had sympathized with the partisans—an umbrella group of Italians resisting the fascists and occupying Germans—but he went into hiding in the spring of 1944 and was never heard from again. My grandmother had attempted to find him during and after the war but eventually she gave up. The woman from the north asserted that her family had been promised the stone cottage at the back of the villa in exchange for the assistance they’d afforded Aldo, who’d joined the resistance movement in Piedmont. She intended, nearly three-quarters of a century later, to take up her family’s rightful claim.

After spending a weekend in Rome with my daughter, Susan, I took the train to Orvieto, where Milo Scorza, the villa’s handyman, was scheduled to pick me up. Susan was completing a Ph.D. in England and had to get back for a conference, but she would return later in the month for my grandmother’s hundredth birthday. And so I found myself alone in my second-class car, looking out the window and occasionally paging through Luigi Barzini’s The Italians, a neglected classic that chronicled the nation’s quirks and obsessions. It was a book I hadn’t read since I was a teenager, when I was first trying to demystify my mother and her Umbrian family.

Normally, on Italian trains, I’m invisible because I resemble a vacationing Anglo-Italian librarian in a pair of scuffed Swiss alpine boots, or a semi-retired bureaucrat who makes bird feeders on the weekends. Kindly, bookish, a vaguely Roman nose. But this was November 2, il giorno dei Morti, when Italians head out to ancestral villages and gravesites to pay their respects to the dead, and so my lack of flowers drew accusatory stares from passengers cradling white and gold chrysanthemums. I pretended not to notice, glancing between my book and the landscape out the window.

The woman sitting across from me—seventies, wool skirt, silk headscarf—kept looking up from her knitting at the Polaroid I was using as a bookmark. Taken the day before, the photo showed an Italian man, dressed as a gladiator, standing between Susan and me in front of the Colosseum. He was holding a plastic sword to my throat, grinning into the camera, while Susan’s head was thrown back in laughter. I had the glassy, hangdog expression of a fish that has just been plucked from a lake.

I could see that the woman was assembling a bread-crumb trail of clues: the unmarried left hand, the photograph with the blonde in her twenties, the scuffed boots and my lack of flowers. I knew from my grandmother and my aunts that older Italian women were capable of deductions that bordered on the omniscient, that in a few lacerating eye-strikes they could infer your marital status, your religion and intestinal health, whether you slept through the night. And I felt sure that I was being regarded by this woman as a shambling drifter without morals or respect for the dead. To set her mind at ease, I looked up from my book and into her Old Testament face. Mia figlia, I said, my daughter. For good measure, I told her in Italian that I was a widower, that it had taken me the better part of five years to remove my wedding band, that Susan was getting her Ph.D. in economics at Oxford, and that I was very proud of her. This information passed through her like a muscle relaxant as she returned to knitting a tiny mauve sock.

Out the window, Orvieto came into view like some floating colossus from an ocean liner—rising a thousand feet above the plains of Umbria, its stone walls and rooftops resting on a plateau of volcanic rock. Italy is seismic, I’d written in my book, an ancient rider forever shifting in her saddle. So much of what I’d seen during my research, moving from one dwindling or emptied-out place to another, could be traced to seismology, to the honeycombing of rock and clay beneath a Bronze Age or medieval settlement. Italians have been paying homage to their geological overlords since the beginning. But somehow Orvieto stood intact and preserved, presiding over Umbria from its lofty perch. Less than an hour away, my mother’s ancestral town had been sliding into the valley for more than three centuries.

At the train station, I waited for Milo Scorza. This was the new part of Orvieto, at the base of the ancient butte, where squat apartment buildings were painted pea green and salmon pink. There were metal shutters above the windows and rusting balconies full of desiccated plants. A few old men were sitting in plastic chairs, smoking and watching the trains glint across the plains. Foreigners often want Italians to live under leafy pergolas and terra-cotta roofs, to live on rocky outcrops that overlook the shocking azure of the Mediterranean, but plenty of them live in concrete monstrosities of the post-Mussolini era, in buildings that were made quickly and cheaply in the upswing of Italy’s recovery after the war. And it’s not uncommon to see these drab apartment blocks within a quarter mile of an ornate Gothic cathedral or Romanesque church.

Across the street, the funicular—half school bus, half gondola—made its narrow-gauged ascent up the steep hillside into a tunnel of trees, ferrying people to the ancient city above. As I stood waiting, a memory overwhelmed me—a flash of standing behind the sunlit windows of the funicular one drowsy summer afternoon, between Clare and Susan, Susan still a girl, holding their hands as I watched the plains dim away. I could remember feeling Clare’s silver bracelet against the back of my thumb, the sensation somehow threaded through with the flickering light of ascending through the trees.

A car horn jolted me back to the street and I heard Milo Scorza bellowing my full name—Hugh Fisher! Hugh Fisher!—as if we hadn’t known each other for decades. Milo bundled out of his iridescent-turquoise Fiat 500, a car he’d owned since the late 1970s and whose engine he’d replaced twice. Still spry in his seventies, he left his door open and the engine running, coming toward me in his pressed jeans and an unbuttoned, postman-blue shop coat. There was a single grease pencil in his breast pocket and a leather cell phone holster on his braided belt. Even when you saw Milo buying flowers or picking up the widows’ prescriptions, you got the sense that just moments before he’d been operating a bench lathe or hoisting an engine block into position. We shook hands and he wedged my suitcase into the Fiat’s cramped trunk, amid coils of rope, handsaws, and wrenches.

And then we were driving out toward Valetto in early November sunshine. The blacktop curled between straw-colored fields, the farmhouses shuttered and set back amid stone pines and woodpiles, the church spires and bell towers of small towns flip-booking through the bare-limbed trees along the roadway. The Fiat gave out little adenoidal shunting noises whenever we climbed a hill, and Milo patted the side of his door with tender encouragement. There was no rearview mirror, but a laminated portrait of the Madonna had been glued to the sun-bleached dash for our navigation and protection. The radio was low, alternating between static, vintage romantic hits, and soccer scores. Milo’s right hand made frequent sorties between the gearbox and the tuning dial. Mysteriously, the higher gears produced more static, and therefore, above fifty kilometers an hour, the radio required vigilant recalibration.

We talked about the weather, villa repairs, the widows’ ailments. By which I mean I listened to a synopsis of wind, rising damp, and arthritis. Milo still sported the same mustache I remembered from my childhood visits—a big swooping throwback to nineteenth-century lumbermen and prospectors. Now speckled gray and white, it curled down to enclose his small, thin-lipped mouth parenthetically. This had always made sense to me, since Milo spoke in asides. He predicted weather or noted local scandal with a sense that he was briefly deviating from a main thread—by the way, tomorrow, rain is coming, or, in fact, confidentially, the mayor’s wife had a miscarriage and now suffers from fits of public crying—but the main idea never presented itself.

Milo had been working for my mother’s family since the age of eleven. His parents had been employed by the Serafinos in the 1930s, the mother to keep house and the father to apply the sort of mending, patching, jury-rigging, and unpermitted repairs that a centuries-old villa requires on a regular basis. Somewhere before the end of middle school, and after Aldo Serafino fled, Milo was apprenticed to his father as a tuttofare. Although a tuttofare is understood in Italy to be a general maid or handyman, the literal translation of everything-doer was closer to Milo’s job description: plumber, carpenter, electrician, bricklayer, messenger, forager, digger of pet graves, catcher of rats, woodcutter, driver, grocery shopper, bearer of restorative soups. My aunt Rose also called upon him to occasionally disconnect the intercom system that ran between the widows’ apartments, when the glacial silences between Iris and Violet erupted into a plague of staticky insults.

When we made it to the neighboring town of Bevona, less than a mile from Valetto, we started to see signs that read This way to the town that is dying. These signs, organized by the mayor and the Umbrian office of tourism, never ceased to infuriate Milo on his trips into town for supplies. As we drove along the narrow, cobbled streets, Milo honking into the kinked, blind approaches, he pointed out the window and scoffed, Ah yes, look at us, we’re still dying after all this time!

Milo sped along the walled-in streets, honking and waving to pedestrians he knew, gesturing profanities to shopkeepers smoking under their awnings. He left the Fiat idling—she does not like to reignite—and dashed into a few stores to buy wall putty, toilet paper, apples, and bresaola while I waited. And then we were headed down the final hill toward the footbridge that leads into Valetto. Halfway down, before the valley came into view, Milo said, In actual fact, Hugh Fisher, you have been ravaged by your losses. A wife and a mother extinguished— He ran a thumb and forefinger along the bowed perimeter of his mustache. You must swim on a tide of great sadness and I am very sorry for it.

The shoelaces of my Swiss boots, I noticed, were frayed at the ends. I remembered the word aglet to describe those little terminal sheaths that prevent fraying. Could you replace the aglet without replacing the entire lace? I heard myself gathering a response through a breath, my face out the window. "Mille grazie, Milo, I said, leveling out my voice. Molto gentile."

I had known Milo for nearly forty years and yet we mostly spoke like neighbors or distant relatives. Outside the embrace of politics, local intrigue, weather, and family, we had little to say to each other. But as I heard my cordial tone mingle with the creeping static of the radio, I thought I sounded like I’d just thanked a kind stranger for museum directions. A thousand thanks. That’s very nice of you. I wanted, suddenly, to forge some new intimacy with Milo. In Italian, I asked him how his wife, Donata, and sons were, ashamed that I couldn’t remember the sons’ names. He answered me in his Italianized English. The older son had a commodious statale job in Rome and the younger one was a tractor meccanico. His wife still cooked and cleaned for the Serafino widows, but she suffered from la gotta and general nervousness and she spent one night a week with her sister a few towns over. "Vuole che vada in pensione, he said. She wants me to retire, but from what? This has never been work to me."

Milo’s sense of service and ceremony for the changing of lightbulbs, the building of fires, and the digging of pet graves had always baffled me. I remembered him from my childhood summers, climbing a ladder or hauling wood in his pressed jeans and shop coat, a sense of fraternal good cheer as he hummed a radio love song, a sprig of rosemary or holly in his lapel during the holidays. His affability suggested that meticulous pleasures were to be had in handsaws and wrenches, that holding a nail between your humming lips was a privilege, and I realized now that I’d never quite believed any of it was real. I’d spent years trying to uncover Milo’s deeper unhappiness, trying to debunk his cheerful industry. As we descended the hill, it seemed impossibly cynical and mean-spirited of me.

"Do you think the woman in the cottage is bonafide?" I asked him.

"Bonafide, Milo said, or malafide, yes, that is the question. He drummed his callused fingertips on the steering wheel. We will let the inquiries run their courses."

Is there going to be a royal commission?

His forehead and eyebrows suggested it was not out of the question. Your auntie Iris is very complete.

As we rounded the bend and descended from the plateau, he gestured toward Valetto, at his unlikely birthplace barnacled to a spur of rock in the middle of a valley of canyons. From a distance, the town is a faint, medieval silhouette atop a pinnacle, set against the haze of distant hill towns, their fields and slopes and church spires arranged around the edges of a blue bowl. But then, as you get closer, the colors come into relief—the pale umber walls, the surrounding moonscape of chalk-white canyons and escarpments, the fringe of chestnut and olive groves at the base of its cliffs. Still closer, it becomes a diorama of windows and terra-cotta roof tiles. In my mind, the twelfth-century campanile of the church—towering high above the other rooflines—has always resembled an obelisk of some ancient civilization, a primitive, tapering monument to fickle and vengeful gods. The skyline is beautiful but also desolate and otherworldly. It comes at you by degrees, as you descend the hill, and then suddenly you’re a diver coming upon the hulk of some ravaged galleon at the bottom of the sea.

Milo parked the Fiat near the long concrete-and-steel footbridge that connects one side of the valley to the mesa that supports the town. Wide enough for four people to walk abreast, the bridge rests on a series of reinforced piers that rise twenty feet from a rocky escarpment, the valley floor and the river a few hundred feet farther below. I helped Milo load his supplies and my luggage onto the custom rear mount of his moped and told him that I would walk across. Only Valettini can use mopeds and ATVs to cross the footbridge, and I watched as he gunned up its incline toward the main entrance, an enormous Etruscan archway. Three tourists—older women with alpine trekking poles—stood at the railing to let him pass. Valetto attracts a few intrepid, offbeat visitors, especially in the cooler months. People weary of basilicas and museums, who want to wander through a nearly empty hill town in anoraks with telescopic lenses around their necks. There hasn’t been a shop or restaurant in the town since 1971, the year of a sizable earthquake and the year my grandmother closed the restaurant she’d opened after the war to provide for her four daughters. The few tourists who come stay for an hour. They eat sandwiches and apples from their knapsacks, take pictures of the stray cats and the spiral staircase that ends in dead air, and then leave forever.

As I crossed the footbridge, I could see crumbling flakes of clay around the fluted rim of the town, where enormous pillars of earth and ashen rock had cleaved away like icebergs from a melting glacier. In settling Valetto, the Etruscans tried to elevate themselves above the malarial swamp of the river valley, but they chose a column of tufa, a shifting tower of hardened, volcanic ash, on which to build their town. I climbed the final steps, passed through the Etruscan archway, and cut across the piazza. The three tourists were photographing building façades backed by air, their roomless interiors held in place by invisible struts. It was easy to imagine people sleeping and eating in these phantom rooms for centuries, or see them standing on the intact balconies that brought to mind opera boxes with an excellent view of oblivion.

So much of Valetto is negative space, I thought as I walked along, the conjuring of imaginary forms, but then you turn a corner and see the curled Cs of a dozen sleeping cats in the piazza, the clay-potted geraniums on the edges of stone stairs, the winter rooftop gardens, or the old man in a leather apron walking to the church every hour to ring the bronze bells, and you feel certain that this town of ten will be here forever.

I passed into the narrow alleyways behind the main square, where my grandmother’s defunct restaurant and a series of empty stone houses rose from slabs of basaltina. On my boyhood visits, I was forbidden from entering the abandoned restaurant and shuttered houses, but, as with the Saint’s Staircase, the allure was too hard to resist. Some of the buildings had been abandoned after the ’71 earthquake, their rooms and furnishings frozen in time, and some had been packed up and left vacant years before or later, when their owners emigrated to another town or country. I spent countless afternoons wandering through these spaces, looking for clues about the lives that had once animated them.

In one house, it looked as if the inhabitants had fled in the middle of dinner. The table set with tarnished silverware, china plates stippled with blue-green mold, a vase of ossified flowers. In another house, the living room ceiling had collapsed, the floor strewn with broken terra-cotta roof tiles, but in the bedrooms there were clothes still hanging in the wardrobes and sheets on the beds, the fabrics filigreed by moths. And there were tins of food in the kitchen, towels and a bar of soap and a razor in the bathroom, a shoebox in a linen closet filled with photographs and children’s school certificates for good conduct. In my grandmother’s restaurant, which she’d opened in 1947 and named Il Ritorno, The Return, a rafter had fallen into the dining room, and the caned chairs were tumbled about, but the tablecloths were still on the tables, along with a few tattered menus and dusty green wine bottles. All these rooms had a damp mineral smell that made me light-headed and that I have always associated with the sorrows of the past.

To some extent, I became a historian within those mildew-blotched walls, on those secret afternoons when I inventoried what remained of those who had fled. In the restaurant, I studied the tattered menus, imagined what people had been eating when the tremor shook the town, who had ordered the donzelline aromatiche, the little damsels with herbs, right as the windows began to rattle, and I went into the kitchen to count plates, saucepans, and silverware, because a precise tally of the past seemed important. I never quite understood why no one had cleaned up the ruins or rescued what was still intact, but I’ve since seen the same thing in dozens of abandoned places—a barrage of objects people left behind, a monument to the day and the hour when everything changed.

I felt a wave of fondness when I caught my first glimpse of the villa at the very back of the town. I hadn’t seen it in two years and it looked exactly as I remembered—presiding over the terraced hillside of pruned gardens and umbrella pines, the pale ravines dropping away to the valley floor below. With my eyes, I followed the footpath that led down to the tangled olive and chestnut groves and then back up again to the house. It has never been the classical Italian villa of coffee-table books. There are no porticoed courtyards or turrets or loggias. Instead, Villa Serafino is a cobbled-together, brick-and-stone bulwark designed to keep marauders from the river valley at bay. A beleaguered, slightly charming fortress against the world.

The ground floor is set with wide archways, now bricked over, where animals once wintered in their pens, and there’s a series of deeply recessed windows that resemble tiny grottos. The second and third floors, where adjacent rooms were converted into the aunts’ apartments, are blue-shuttered, iron-balconied, and gray-stuccoed. The stone cottage sits at the edge of the terraced gardens, less than fifty feet from the ravine, and the caretaker’s house—little more than a woodshed with a terra-cotta roof—stands all by itself in a clearing at the back of the property. Milo and Donata raised two sons in this tiny house.

On my approach that November afternoon, I almost laughed aloud when I saw a flutter of white pillowcases and hand towels from Violet’s rusting iron balcony on the top floor, a longtime source of tension with Iris, one floor below, who routinely told her that only peasants still hung their laundry out to dry on balconies. There was, after all, a laundry room on the ground floor and a clothesline out back. From the five consecutive summers I spent at the villa until I was thirteen, during the implosion of my parents’ marriage, I remembered that Violet liked to flaunt her drying petticoats and underwear from the balcony whenever she could, her brassieres flapping like carnival pennants, and it was surely to infuriate Iris, the sociologist who’d taught at universities in Rome and Milan.

From the top of the stone passageway, I could also see the rooftop terrace where Rose, the diplomat and go-between of the Serafino sisters, spent many of her summer afternoons in the 1970s, listening to opera from a small transistor radio and reading fashion magazines under a beach umbrella. There was always a tall glass of Aperol spritz beside her, an orange wedge floating on top, the glass full of ice and beading with condensation. She would routinely call me up there and have me read passages aloud from Italian Vogue. I could remember her enjoying my narration of Milanese or Florentine scandal, the ice cubes gently hitting her teeth when she laughed into her