I’M THANKFUL FOR THE 2018 NEA Literature Fellowship that allowed me to travel to Italy and explore abandoned and semi-abandoned towns and villages. Although Valetto is a fictional town in Umbria, it draws some of its history, culture and geology from the real town of Civita di Bagnoregio in Lazio. Special thanks to Nancy Josephson and Stephen Day of the Civita Institute for helping me gain access to the town and its history, and to Tony Costa-Heywood, who has lived in Civita since the 1960s and was generous enough to share his memories and experiences with me. Nancy Josephson was also an attentive early reader, as were Michael Parker and Karen Olsson—thank you! Gratitude to Malena Villegas, who brought her Italian translation skills to the page during copyedits. I’m so thankful for my incredible editors—Jenna Johnson at FSG and Jane Palfreyman at Allen & Unwin—and for my trusted agents, Emily Forland and Gaby Naher. Your continued guidance and belief in my work means so much to me.
As someone who grew up with three sisters, I was first inspired to write about a ‘sistership’ when I read this line in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn: ‘Frederick was born in Lowestoft in 1906 (far too late, as he once observed to me) and grew up there amidst the care and attention of his three sisters Violet, Iris and Rose.’ As a nod to this inspiration, I decided to use the same names for three of the invented Serafino sisters.
I’m indebted to a large number of books and articles I read as part of my research, especially:
Pellegrino Artusi, trans. Murtha Baca and Stephen Sartarelli, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (1891; repr., University of Toronto Press, 2003).
Luigi Barzini, The Italians (1964; repr., Touchstone, 1996).
Maria de Blasio Wilhelm, The Other Italy: The Italian Resistance in World War II (Norton, 1988).
Italo Calvino, trans. Archibald Colquhoun and Martin McLaughlin, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (1947, rev. 1964; trans. of rev. ed., Ecco, 2000).
Iris Origo, War in Val D’Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943–1944 (New York Review Books Classics, 2018).
John Seabrook, ‘Renaissance Pears’, The New Yorker, 5 September 2005.
Alec Wilkinson, ‘The Serial-Killer Detector’, The New Yorker, 20 November 2017.
Finally, a profound thank you to my wife, Emily, for her tireless patience, love and support, and to my two daughters, Mikaila and Gemma, who are inseparable sisters in their own right.