And it’s from here that I am writing to you. Io vengo qui con il crepuscolo. I come here with the dusk. As soon as I can smell the darkness rolling in over the fields, I pack up my sack. Sweater, shawl, some good gin in Leo’s father’s boot flask. With the sack slung across my chest, dragging my chair behind me, I meet the goats on the narrow path, high-stepping the opposite way, going home to the other side of the mountain, the silky tufts on their foreheads blown back by the wind, their bells walloping madly in the blue-black cave the darkening makes, and we greet one another. All of us en route to our own peace up here on a hill in the middle of an island. An island in the middle of a sea, in the middle of the world.
Tonight wisps of cloud dandle a March half-moon that makes a silver sea of the wheat. On the ramparts above, wolves bay and, across the precipice, small fires dance here and there. Shepherds cooking their supper. Save me and my trappings, one could hardly put a date to this georgic hill, this high place where the old gods walked and slept, perpetrating ecstasies, wielding incubus. How little have three thousand years changed us!
I settle myself among the rock roses and the cushions of wild thyme and stay long after the light goes. I have always been enchanted by the night, by the sense not of ending, but of beginning that it brings. I sit here wrapped in my shawl which still smells of him, sipping, smoking, sifting through the years.
Sometimes I reach down to touch the stone Cosimo and I placed for Leo midst tufts of Demeter’s marjoram. Like two aging picadors, we stalked the temple ruins one evening until we found a thin, worn slab of marble we knew Leo would like. Cosimo wanted to take it to the mason in the village to inscribe but I did it myself. I did not make a wonderful job of it what with my slanting, left-handed scrawl drawn with an old iron nail. Still, it looks right. It says,
* * *
LEO
The Last Prince
1912–2000
* * *
FINE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I know it’s true that to understand and to be understood makes our happiness on earth. In all my life, no one has understood more than my editor at Ballantine, Robin Rolewicz.
Intrepid, graceful, wise, Rosalie Siegel is my agent. More, she is my ideal.
Rosalia lo Forte, Dottor Gianluca Pazzaglia, Gilberto Barlozzo, Pina Pettinelli, Christine and Giorgio Crovato, Dottor Mario de Simone, Thomas Berendt, Heiner Oelman, Kristel and Elvio dal Bosco, Isis Elten, Regina Derna, Alessandra Criccomoro, Alberto Bettini, Annette Barlow, Rosalba and Marcello Mencarelli, Rosanna Giombini, Contessa Graziella Fiumi, Gioia Guidi, Doris Engleke, Sharona Guri, Franco Titocchia, Edna Tromans, Alessandro and Anna Repetto, Dottor Paolo Ceccarelli, Dottor Renzo Ceccarelli, Sergio Carli, Chiara Giacomini, Marge and Robert Feder, Diego and Linda Campanile, Roberto Anselmi.
* * *
Giancarlo Bianchini da Todi, l’ultimo vero principe.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARLENA DE BLASI is the author of three previous memoirs: A Thousand Days in Venice, A Thousand Days in Tuscany, and The Lady in the Palazzo, as well as two books on the foods of Italy. She has worked as a chef and as a food and wine consultant, and lives in Italy.
ALSO BY MARLENA DE BLASI
The Lady in the Palazzo
A Thousand Days in Tuscany
A Thousand Days in Venice
A Taste of Southern Italy
(originally published as
Regional Foods of Southern Italy)
Regional Foods of Northern Italy
That Summer in Sicily is a work of nonfiction.
Some names and identifying details have been changed.
Copyright © 2008 by Marlena de Blasi
Photograph © 2008 by Grafica, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
De Blasi, Marlena.
That summer in Sicily : a love story / Marlena de Blasi.
p. cm.
1. Sicily—Social life and customs—20th century. 2. National characteristics, Sicilian. 3. Country life—Italy—Sicily. 4. De Blasi, Marlena—Travel—Italy—Sicily. I. Title.
DG865.6D4 2008
914.5’804929092—dc22 2008002774
www.ballantinebooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-345-51333-5
v3.0
That Summer in Sicily Page 26