“Awesome!” Joe Hardy exclaimed. He was brushing away dirt and soot that had buried the ancient Etruscan pottery fragment for ages. “I think it’s got something written on it.” He stuck his five-inch pointed trowel underneath the fragment and carefully started to pry it loose.
Joe was working about five feet from his older brother, Frank, on an archaeological dig in a suburb of Florence, Italy, called Sesto Fiorentino. Joe knew that if the small black marks painted across the tan hand-size fragment were letters, they had to have been painted sometime before 500 B.C. That was when archaeologists had determined, using radiocarbon dating, that the Etruscan building they were excavating had burned down.
“Good going, Joe,” Frank said. An inch taller than Joe but more slender, Frank walked over to see what his brother had found. “This could be important,” Frank said after he got a look.
“No kidding,” Joe said. “It’s like somebody’s trying to talk to us from a time before the rise of Rome—I mean, like, six hundred years before the Colosseum was built!”
For the past year Joe had dreamed of some day visiting the Etruscans’ magnificent underground cities of the dead, which had once been filled with fabulous hoards of treasure from all over the ancient Mediterranean world. Now he could hardly believe—even after working hard all morning in the hot summer sun—that he and Frank were actually here sifting through the soil where the Etruscans had lived and ruled thousands of years earlier.
Joe wiped the sweat from his forehead with the large red handkerchief his girlfriend, Iola, had given him before he’d left the United States, three days earlier. She had said she wanted him to think of her when he made an important discovery. So far he’d used the handkerchief only when he and Frank had had to deal with a problem with customs in the Milan airport.
Now he took the sweat-soaked cloth and, without thinking about anything except getting a better look at the writing, started rubbing the fragment.
“Joseph Hardy, stop that at once!” came a perturbed voice from behind him. It wasn’t the first time Julia Russell had yelled at Joe for unwittingly breaking the rules of the dig, but this was definitely the loudest reprimand so far.
Julia was a serious young Englishwoman getting her doctorate in archaeology at the University of Florence. She was in charge of Frank and Joe’s section—what was left of one room of a small two-room house. Another mud-brick house with three rooms had been found about thirty feet away.
Frank, Joe, Julia, and a seventeen-year-old boy from Venice named Cosimo Giannotti were now on level twelve, six feet down from ground level in their room on the western border of the complex. A fire had at some point left a layer of charcoal rubble that first appeared on level ten.
Joe hadn’t thought that a little sweat would hurt something that had survived twenty-five centuries of dirt and worms on top of a fire, but rules were rules and he understood that—now.
“It’s okay, Joe,” Julia said quietly as she approached from her section of the room, carefully picking her way past the artifacts laid out on the ground. She took off her cap and ran a hand through her short red hair. “I realize it is tempting to try to get a better look. Just remember that the conservation lab in Florence has special techniques for cleaning and preserving the fragments—and I don’t think rubbing with sweat is one of them.”
“But look, look what he found!” Cosimo said, moving closer. Like the others, he had been working from a corner toward the center of the forty- by thirty-foot room, and was now almost finished with his section.
Joe handed Cosimo the fragment. “It’s got four Greek letters and part of a drawing,” Cosimo explained. “Let us hope there are more fragments from the same pot.” Cosimo’s English was almost flawless, though he spoke with an accent. He had been studying the Etruscans since he was a small boy and knew almost as much as Julia.
“Can you read it?” Frank asked, peering over Cosimo’s shoulder at the fragment.
“Well,” replied Cosimo, “I can identify the letters, but I can’t make out the word. I think it must be Etruscan.”
“Which probably means,” Julia continued, “that not even Professor Mosca can decipher it.” Professor Mosca was Julia’s supervisor at the university and the director of the dig. “Etruscan is completely unlike all other ancient languages of Italy, and scholars have been able to translate only a small list of its words. May I have a look?”
Julia took the piece from Joe and examined it carefully. “Very nice, very nice, indeed.”
“Maybe we’ll find the key to the whole language in this pot,” Joe enthused. He knelt down and began digging for more fragments.
“I’m not certain about that, Joe. But do slow down, please,” Julia said anxiously. “Before we go any deeper, we’ve got to get this section ready for the photographer.”
Even when something exciting happens, Joe thought, we still have to follow the same old procedures.
They had spent the day before learning these procedures at Professor Mosca’s multilingual orientation program.
The idea was to loosen soil with a pick and then carefully break it up with a trowel, probing carefully for artifacts. If something was found, the loose soil was swept away with a brush. Then, finally, the artifact could be dislodged.
Small fragments were caught by sifting the loose soil over a bucket with a sieve. Then the full buckets of dirt were raised to ground level and emptied out in piles.
When the six-inch-deep layer had been fully excavated across the whole room, a photograph would be taken of all the pieces laid out close to where they had been found.
The sun was now directly overhead, making the room they were in feel like an oven. “This place smells worse than Joe’s locker,” Frank joked.
“That’s because it has your feet in it,” Joe shot back.
“Well, here’s one person who likes having the sun beat straight down into our lovely little hovel,” Julia said, staring up at Armando, the photographer. He was holding a large camera mounted on a tripod.
“Buon giorno, signorina,” he said, smiling down at Julia. He had a flowing mustache and a full head of wavy black hair peppered with gray.
She raised her head to Armando and said, in Italian, that they’d be ready for the shoot in five minutes.
“You boys empty the buckets and I’ll get Professor Mosca, so we can show him Joe’s find before he leaves,” she said, heading up the ladder.
Joe carefully returned his fragment to the ground and climbed the wooden ladder to empty Frank and Cosimo’s buckets. After dumping the first one, he saw Julia returning with the professor.
The old man was mostly bald, except for a wisp of gray hair on the top of his suntanned scalp. He and Julia were walking briskly, and Joe could see that the professor was excited.
“This is the young man who found the painted fragment, sir,” Julia said.
Joe nodded and smiled, and was surprised when the professor asked, in English, if Joe’s last name wasn’t Hardy.
“Yes, I remember. Very nice, it is. We have the same word, ardito. I like it very much.” He grabbed Joe by the elbow and directed him to the ladder that led down into the room. “You to show me, please.”
The professor went down first, and went on talking in his quick, animated way about Joe’s name. “So, are you very brave and daring, as your name says? If so, I will call you Signore Ardito.”
“Yes, sir,” Joe replied, “but, um . . . ”
“Now, where is the fragment?”
Joe steered the professor to the site where he had extracted his fragment.
Professor Mosca dropped to his knees and took out a handkerchief. He spit on the fragment and began rubbing away the dirt, just as Joe had done twenty minutes earlier.
“Is spit better than sweat?” Joe asked Julia. She had followed them down the ladder and now was standing close by. She smiled and shrugged, as though to say, “Well, he’s the boss.”
The professor began speaking excitedly to Julia in Italian, forgetting about Joe. Soon he and Julia had clambered up the ladder and were out of sight. Joe was about to ask Cosimo what the professor had said when the lunch bell rang. The small brass bell summoned everyone to the grand three-story stucco building at the northern perimeter of the lush garden. This was the huge Renaissance villa where all the students were staying in a wing as guests of the owner, Count Vincenzo Ruffino.
Without saying a word, Joe started for the ladder. “Wait a minute, Joe,” Frank said. “We’ve got another load of dirt to unload before Armando can take the picture.”
Joe said he’d dump it, and climbed the ladder while Frank attached the bucket to the rope. Once up at ground level, Joe looked down and was satisfied that they had made the floor of the room a nearly flat surface. The artifacts, mostly gray-black potsherds of the most common Etruscan pottery called buchero, were scattered across it with Joe’s find gleaming in the noonday sun. The tip of the iceberg, he thought to himself. Joe reeled up the bucket and then gave Armando the go-ahead: “Va bene, Armando, vai.”
“Grazie, amico,” Armando replied. “Sarà una bella foto.”
Yes, thought Joe, it will be a beautiful picture. “Hey, guys,” he said to Frank and Cosimo as they came up the ladder. “Let’s get some chow.”
“What is ‘chow’?” Cosimo asked.
“It’s what cowboys call food in Western movies. I guess all this dirt and dust makes me feel a little like a cowboy.”
“Ah, Westerns,” Cosimo said. “I love them. If only they weren’t always dubbed on Italian TV—I never get to hear the English. You must teach me some more words, va bene?”
“Va bene, pardner,” Joe said as they reached the grassy area outside the dining hall, where a croquet game had been set up.
They were in the dining hall now, having gone in through one of the large glass doors. It was a huge room with tall windows and three glass doors. All twenty students and a dozen or so of the staff could sit comfortably at the three long tables that were set in the middle of the room. Some were already seated, but most were still waiting in line at the buffet.
Joe concentrated on seeing what was for lunch. There was chicken, spaghetti with tomato sauce, and some kind of deep-fried vegetable.
“Stupendo!” Cosimo said.
Joe looked at Cosimo and smiled. “You said it, Cosimo. This is the life, isn’t it?”
Cosimo straightened his tall, thin frame and took a deep breath. “I think perhaps so,” he said. “Cooking as good as Mama’s, but no mama to tell me how to eat it.” His black curly hair and matching black-rimmed glasses added to his look of bookish intelligence.
Joe turned around and saw that Frank was back at the glass door talking to the count’s daughter, Francesca, who usually ate with her father in their dining room.
“What’s she doing in here?” Joe asked Cosimo.
“I don’t know,” Cosimo answered, “but I think your brother might need our help.”
“Just what I was thinking,” Joe said as they stepped out of the buffet line.
Francesca was about seventeen and wearing blue jeans and a simple blouse. Her beautiful almond-shaped eyes seemed to be reeling Frank in.
Never very subtle when it came to flirting with girls, Joe walked over and planted himself right between Frank and Francesca and smiled at Francesca. “Now I see why Frank forgot he was hungry.”
Francesca smiled back and looked down.
“Forgive my brother,” Frank said, pretending to be more annoyed than he was. “He tends to forget his manners on an empty stomach.” Frank politely introduced Joe and Cosimo to Francesca.
“So you’re the one who just discovered the painted fragment,” she said to Joe. “I was just coming to congratulate you.”
“Thanks,” Joe said. “I’m hoping there’s more where that came from,” he said.
“I know there will be,” she said.
“Are you interested in archaeology?” Cosimo asked in English.
“As a matter of fact,” Francesca said as Joe ushered them all toward the buffet, “I was the one who first recognized the Etruscan wall in the garden.” She turned and looked around the room for someone or something, revealing the long, dark hair that hung down her back. “Ah, there he is. Bruno! Vièni qua.”
A short, tan, smiling man in his fifties got up from his meal and walked over to Francesca. “This is Bruno, the gardener, everyone,” she said. “He is a genius with flowers—but he’s not much on archaeology. Cosimo, ask him what he thought his digging had exposed the day he uncovered the Etruscan wall.”
After hearing Cosimo’s question, Bruno pinched his nose and mimed the answer.
“He thought it was an old sewer,” Cosimo explained, laughing. Bruno then whispered something in Cosimo’s ear. “And he wishes it had been a sewer. This dig is ruining his garden.”
“Sì, è vero,” Francesca said to Bruno, nodding that it was true. Then she turned toward Cosimo and the Hardys and spoke in a low voice. “But it will all be worth it. My psychic has told me that she feels great forces emerging from the site.”
“You had a psychic come out here?” Joe asked, hardly able to believe his ears.
“You are a skeptic, I take it?” she asked, challenging him.
“Well, uh,” Joe muttered.
“Just wait and see,” Francesca said. Abrubtly she turned and walked back outside.
“Weird!” Frank exclaimed, after she was gone.