The Quarringtons, like most North American tourists, were not immune to the meretricious charms of the Cinque Terre. They were relieved of their euros by knowing street vendors and shopkeepers whose humble ancestors had scrabbled for a living from an unforgiving terrain and a capricious sea. Few would blame the hotelier or dispenser of gelato for charging what the market would bear. The couple happily discussed vinoculture with an Australian winemaker beside the glittering sea, a uniformed waiter hovering obligingly in the background; they later managed a fractured conversation in Italian with some good-natured students on a cycling holiday, and even paid their bar bill for them.
On the third morning of their stay, the Quarringtons lingered over their breakfast in the long, low, airy conservatory at the bottom of the walled garden at Casa Stefania, where Anna, the daughter of the owner, brought them focaccia and cappuccino. As the other guests had already left, they paid more attention to their surroundings. Anna told them the Casa had been built by her great-grandfather, whose son had been forced to sell half the house, a step which led eventually to the painful decision by his own widowed daughter to convert the cellar of what remained into a series of four small camere or guest-house lodgings, each with a minuscule bathroom and kitchen, and accessible only by a high garden gate of green steel. The compact dimensions of every one of these was mitigated by the patio doors at their entrances, which opened on a long, narrow garden of bewitching beauty and unparalleled luxuriance, where flourished three dwarf palms, kiwi vines, lime trees, grapevines heavy with fruit, rhododendron bushes, azaleas, camellias, bella notte, frangipani, and plants and flowers unfamiliar to the couple. There was a herb garden and adjoining vegetable plots; statuary, fountains, ceramic amphoras and pottery urns were everywhere, and the centre was dominated by a blue and white shrine to Madonna and child with a missing plaque at its base. All of this, Anna acknowledged, she tended in her spare time. It troubled her, she said, that she had yet to replace the missing plaque.
Anna seemed to be in her mid-twenties, a pale-skinned, dark-haired beauty with arched eyebrows, whose severity of aspect could be softened by a radiant smile. Fluent in three languages, she showed the Quarringtons where to park and shop, changed dollars into euros for them, refusing to take a commission, and apologized for the lack of proper soundproofing in the camere. All of their questions she treated with a grave, focused attention. Nothing was too much trouble for her. ‘It is the service of the Casa,’ she would say simply. She was solicitous with a handicapped elderly guest, and handled the thankless and unending daily bed-and-breakfast responsibilities single-handedly in the absence of her mother, who seldom appeared. At first, Ralph and Marian were taken aback by her lack of enthusiasm for the Cinque Terre, but in an attempt to convince them they would see more of Italy by seeing less of their compatriots, she lent them bicycles and persuaded them to ride through Levanto and along the abandoned railway right-of-way to Framura, six kilometres distant in the opposite direction.
Until last year, Anna told them, she had been a language student at the University of Genoa, where she had studied the work of Alcuin of York, medieval scholar and tutor to Charlemagne. Her characteristic reserve gave way to smiling animation when she spoke of her student days.
