THE WORLD was called Montefiore, as far as she knew, and from her aerie on every side all the world descended.
Like any child, she looked out and across rather than in. She was more familiar with the vistas, the promising valleys with their hidden hamlets, the scope of the future arranged in terms of hills and light.
Once a small dragon had become trapped in the bird-snaring nets slung in the uccellare. Bianca watched as the cook’s adolescent grandson tried to cut it down and release it. Her eyes were fixed on the creature, the stray impossibility of it, not on the spinney in which it was caught. How it twitched, its webbed claws a pearly chalcedony, its eyes frantic and unblinking. (Despite the boy’s efforts, it died, and his grandmother flayed it for skin with which to patch the kitchen bellows.)
Bianca regarded visitors to Montefiore with fierce attention: emissaries of the world. But the bones of her home—the house itself—remained as familiar and unregarded as her own fingernails.
Montefiore was larger than a farmer’s villa but not so imposing as a castle. Too far from anywhere important to serve as a casale—a country house—it crowned an upthrust shoulder of land, so its fortifications were natural. On all sides, the steepness of the slope was a deterrent to invaders, and anyway, Montefiore wasn’t large enough to interest the condottieri who led their small armies along the riverbank on one campaign or another.
Had Bianca an adult eye, she might have guessed from its mismatched roofs and inconsistent architectural details that many owners had lived here before her family arrived, shaping the space with a disregard for symmetry or loveliness. When its masters had had money, they’d made attempts to drill a little grandeur into the old stone hull, like crisp starched lace tied under the wet chins of a drooling nonna. A recently completed interior courtyard, handsomely done with columns and vaults in the revived archaic style, provided relief from the roaring breeze.
Except for the courtyard, though, most attempts at improvement had been abandoned in mideffort. Some windows were fitted with glass, but in most windows, squares of linen had been nailed to the shutter moldings, pale light conferring a sense of height and volume to the dark rooms. Along one retaining wall, a loggia ran unevenly, its walls inset with terrazzo putti whose faces had become bubonic with the remains of insect cocoons. For half a century the chapel had stood with a roof beam and naked struts, the old cladding and tiles having been swept away in an arrogant gale. When the January tramontana blustered in, the geese sometimes sheltered there from the wind, though they seldom took communion.
Fortunately too inaccessible to garrison an army, Montefiore was nonetheless valuable as a lookout. From time to time in its history it had been commandeered for its prospects. On a clear day one imagined one could glimpse the sea.
What child does not feel itself perched at the center of creation? Before catechisms can instill a proper humility, small children know the truth that their own existence has caused the world to bloom into being. The particular geography of home always charms, but the geography of Montefiore was unarguably pastoral. The arrangement of Tuscan and Umbrian vistas, draped from the very threshold of home through diminishing folds to the horizons, taught soft blues and browns to Bianca de Nevada. That was what they were there for; this brown, that blue; this here, that there.
These moments, more or less, had their flashing existence, circa 1500 anno Domini, though the name of a year means little to one who doesn’t yet know the name of corruption.