AFTER LEAVING THE cemetery, the twins would have lunch with Nonna Angela at the Convertini palazzo, an imposing house that dominated the entire southern side of the square, next to the large terrace that looked out over the Itria valley. Their grandmother considered All Saints’ Day to be one of the most important dates in the calendar and, while she didn’t put out food for the dead, she did lay the table beautifully so that the living would properly remember those who were no longer with them. During those special luncheons all the Convertinis would gather, including the families of their uncles Matteo, Marco, Luca and Giovanni, who came up from Bari and Otranto. Aunt Margherita came down from Venice only for Christmas and in the summer, when they all stayed on the coast.
Giovanna always felt at home in the palazzo, among the carpets, wing chairs and velvet curtains. She’d always clung to her nonna’s skirt, from a very young age, and her grandmother surprised everyone by letting her sit with the grown-ups. She watched her out of the corner of one eye to correct her and teach her proper manners, just as one would expect of the eldest Convertini granddaughter. But little Giovanna didn’t always pay attention: she often demonstrated, just as naturally as she blended in to the family landscape, the early signs of a headstrong character.
Vitantonio, on the other hand, seemed stifled by the family gatherings. He was well-behaved and reliable, and as easy to read as he was rough around the edges. But the boy found everything at his grandmother’s palazzo too rigid, and the discipline excessive. Inside the house they weren’t allowed to run, they couldn’t play and they couldn’t shout or even speak in a loud voice. His nonna’s office, the dining room, the sitting room and the conservatory off it were reserved for the adults; children could enter only when they were called in. They were also banned from upstairs, the terrace, the attic and the roof. Before entering the dining room they had to hold out their clean hands and at the table they had to sit quietly and, above all, sit up straight. When they were eating, they had to raise their fork to their mouth, because it was very bad manners to bend over your plate. In the dining room and the sitting room, they could speak only when spoken to by an adult, and even then they couldn’t contradict them or answer too emphatically. Their grandmother kept a very firm grip on the basic forms of polite speech – please, thank you and you’re welcome – and there was no excuse for not employing them. When they were summoned by her they always had to answer, ‘What can I do for you, Nonna?’ If they forgot she pretended not to hear them and would call them again until they used the correct formula.
Vitantonio was only happy when Lady Angela opened up her office and let him rummage through the promotional calendars of the Austrian companies that supplied wood to the Convertinis. He loved the photos of snowy landscapes: forests of fir trees that looked like cotton; frozen rivers; little wooden houses with flour-dusted roofs and meadows piled high with snow that he longed to roll around in. He also could spend hours watching the electric train set that, according to family lore, Nonna had brought back from Switzerland to celebrate the twins’ birth; it was always laid out in the playroom, ready to travel round the Alpine mountains, fir forests, bridges and snowy stations. The children were allowed to watch it from a distance but only the grown-ups could turn it on.
When the weather grew warmer Vitantonio spent Sundays in the garden with his cousin Franco, Angelo’s eldest son, who was a similar age and also always came to the weekly lunch at the palazzo. The garden was filled with corners to hide in. They entered it through the kitchen door, which looked out on to two very elegant lime trees, with leaves of the softest green. From there, a path lined with a box hedge led to the service entrance, which opened directly on to the square. The side door, intended for the maid and the shopkeepers to bring their deliveries into the house, was used by the boys when they wanted to escape to play on the terrace, far from the adults’ severe gaze. Along the north side of the house, the wall was obscured by glazed ceramic planters filled with huge elephant’s ear plants, as well as acanthus, ferns and hydrangeas, the only splashes of colour in the coolest part of the garden. At one end of the planters, towards the far west of the garden, just beneath the kitchen window, there was a glazed ceramic well with an iron pump handle. Beside it was a pond that held red fish and pink water lilies.
In a region where water was very scarce – almost non-existent at times – the well and the fish pond were Nonna’s Venetian eccentricities. She had had them built on top of one of the palazzo’s two small ornamental tanks, which stored rainwater collected from the public square, according to the usage rights of the former owners of the palazzo: Angela Convertini had claimed these just for her garden. As soon as she saw a cloud formation approaching, the Lady would send her maids out to sweep the square clean to make sure that nothing would impede the rainwater as it ran through the channels to her tanks.
At the back of the palazzo, which overlooked the valley, there was a terrace accessible only from the bedroom of the lady of the house. Wisteria curled around the columns of the pergola in purple pendants and climbed up the balustrade. In September, a vine burst forth with sweet Muscat grapes. Under the pergola Nonna had placed pots filled with bright azaleas: white, pink, burgundy and red. The whole town talked about the Lady’s flowers, because no one else dared grow azaleas in such a dry, hot region. She had stubbornly created a microclimate and she’d managed to maintain it: she watered the plants three times a week and conserved the earth’s moisture by scattering over it pine-bark chips that she had delivered from the factory. She filled the pots with rusty bits of iron, too, adding minerals to the soil. Nonna was proud of the results, especially of the ‘Queen of Bellorotondo’, a deep-red azalea that was so lush and vast that not even three people in a circle could get their arms around it. When it bloomed in April, Angela would open up the garden to the entire town for a few days, inviting the women in to stroll through the ornamental borders of strongly scented flowers, which mingled with the rich perfume of the wisteria on the trellis above.
To the south, in front of the conservatory, there was a maze garden composed of neatly kept paths of box hedges. Further on, there was a close-knit group of trees: two cedars, a willow, a palm, two limes, a plane tree, three orange trees and an enormous cherry stood together. Marking the boundary between the garden proper and the vegetable patch stood a shed, the clothesline, the main water tank that collected water from the roof of the house, and two almond trees that bloomed in mid-January long before the spring arrived.
A whitewashed wall protected the garden to the south from neighbours’ prying eyes. It was covered in rose bushes that climbed up and overhung the street side of the wall. On hot summer days, the neighbours passing in front of the palazzo looked up enviously at such exuberant greenery and couldn’t help inventing all sorts of legends about the Convertinis’ private paradise.