Giancarlo looked out to the middle of the meadow, where a young woman he had never seen before sat barefoot on a blanket, an artist’s pad resting across her legs. He speculated that she had come out there, from where he did not know, to draw the roofs of the houses below, or perhaps to sketch the mountains in the distance. Whichever the case, apparently she had just finished, for she abruptly closed the pad and got to her feet.

Giancarlo watched her intently as she gathered the blanket into her arms. Even from that distance, he could see that she was a beauty. Her figure was perfectly proportioned and her limbs lithe and graceful, like those of a ballerina. With a toss of her head, her fine dark hair sliding off her shoulder and cascading the length of her back, she started off on her way toward the village. Mesmerized as he was, Giancarlo might have stayed there, frozen in place, had Giorgio not turned and swatted him in the arm.

“Come on,” his brother whispered, and off he ran.

Not knowing what else to do, Giancarlo raced off after his brother. Giorgio led him on a circuitous route that brought them down around the far edge of the meadow and to the opposite side of the village. It was not until they raced onto the piazza and stopped near the fountain across from the top of an alley that led back out to the meadow that Giancarlo finally understood his brother’s plan. Gazing down the alley, he saw the young woman come into view as she approached the center of the village. By arriving there ahead of her, it would appear that they had encountered her by chance.

By now, Giancarlo’s mind was wild with questions, wondering who on earth the young woman could be, but whenever he tried to speak, Giorgio would tell him to keep quiet. And so the two brothers lingered by the fountain, fussing with their backpacks and pretending to tie their shoes, until the young woman came to the end of the alley and walked out onto the piazza. There she paused for a moment, clutching her artist’s pad, and glanced their way.

Giancarlo felt his legs go weak beneath him. He had never before seen anyone quite like her. Her face was even lovelier than he had imagined when he first saw her from the distance, and her dark, enigmatic eyes pierced right through him like a lance and left him dazed and bewildered. When she turned and walked away without betraying the slightest hint that she had noticed either of them, it felt as though his heart had been ripped from his chest. In that instant, Giancarlo fell helplessly and irrevocably in love with her, and he knew that his life from that day forward would never be the same.