“It’s never been restored.” The Contessa lifted a fold of the curtains to show the work. “The other pieces have been touched up from time to time, but the bed never.”

“This is the furniture you spoke of, from your family?”

“This is the bed I slept in as a girl.” The old lady hesitated.

“But we bought it only last year!” the Conte finished.

His wife smiled. “You see—I was brought up in a big house.” She named one of the great villas of the Veneto. “It had a famous series of these beds that were commissioned from embroiderers in the seventeen-fifties—a red one, a rose one, a gold one, green one, and so on, in connecting rooms. Seven in all, for the seven children of the house at that time. The villa was sold by my brother before the war, and sold again a few years ago—I knew all that, naturally, but I hadn’t been near the house for thirty years. Then, last year, my husband and I were in Venice and went by chance to a furniture exhibition at the Palazzo Rezzonico. There were exhibits of rooms from various periods—you know the sort of thing—and all at once I came through a doorway and found myself in my own room, with this bed and furniture I hadn’t seen since I was a girl.”

The Conte held up his hands. “What a scene!”

“Nonsense,” said the Contessa, smiling still. “Only a few tears. But it was too much. I’d given up even my memories of that time, and there was the room come to find me. We discovered that the present owner of the villa had sold off all the other beds years ago, and this was the last one. So we rescued it. We couldn’t afford the rest of the room—besides, I already had these other chests and chairs from the time of my marriage—but I got my bed back again. There was no room for it in our place in Perugia, so we broke our rule about this house and made a Venetian room here.” They walked around the bed; with its enclosure of draperies, it was like a small chamber in itself.

The bedroom opened on the far side to the landing of another, smaller staircase.

“We can go down to the garden this way, through the chapel,” the Conte told Mrs. Drew, leading her down. “Then you can see the house from the other side.”

The chapel was tiny, full of flowers.

“The Mass was given here regularly,” the Contessa told her, “when we had a real staff, and contadini. The chapel is so small that half the congregation had to stand outside, around the door. When our daughter was married here, the guests stood right up to her elbow.”