To a foreigner there is something not quite credible about the stillness of the Italian countryside on a July afternoon. Even an American woman who had spent, as Mrs. Olivia Drew had done, a year in Italy doubted whether this suspension—it almost seemed—of life itself could be a habitual state of affairs, and she looked about her at the deserted plain as if to say, “You can’t mean this.” There was not a car to be seen except her own, not a soul, not an animal on the road or even in the driveway through whose gates she ultimately drove.

When she first lost her way on the mountain above, Mrs. Drew had seen a pair of woodsmen among the trees and stopped to ask the way. “Per Sant’Andrea, come si va?” But these country people had never heard of the village for which she was headed, though she knew it must be nearby. It was one of the woodsmen who had directed her to the house on the plain below, pointing it out from the spur where she had stopped the car. She could inquire there.

It had seemed so far off. “There’s no house nearer than that?”

No, that was the house where she could be directed. “Il Conte,” the woodsman said, pronouncing it “Honte” in his regional voice.

She had set off down the mountain, on a road of red dust that changed, from time to time, into loose pebbles or into an arrangement of stone slabs whose central prominence made her afraid for the axle. She was sure, at first, that some house or village would turn up before she got all the way down. But no, the track wound onward, downward, losing sight of the villa below but always, she knew, approaching it. The woods were very close on each side of the car, and birds sang at her open window. An occasional overgrown stone wall suggested that this land had once been cultivated, and she caught a glimpse, through trees, of a solitary ruin—the stump of a white stone castle, half covered with ivy. The single tiny clearing she came upon, however, was made around a monument, and she slowed down to read the inscription, so strange did it seem to find oneself addressed in that lonely place. A simple slab surmounted by a cross, the monument bore nineteen names in alphabetical order and a brief legend to the effect that these men (“martiri”), executed here by the Germans in 1944, had comprised the Resistance of the villages that circled the foot of the mountain.

As she drove on, the Conte’s villa came into view again. She could see, still farther off, clumps of stone houses, a Romanesque campanile—villages as distant, as tentatively suggested, as in a seventeenth-century painting. The nineteen honest men from these towns of the plain weighed on her heart as she came down the last loop of the mountain road.