“What does Rendola mean?”

“I don’t know. It is only a name, maybe.”

A few meters past the first sign was another: “Olio di Oliva e Vino. Vendita diretta” (Olive oil and wine sold direct).

As the Punto rose over a small knoll, Ross got his first glimpse of the villa. He liked the place immediately. It was as if they had passed through a portal and emerged five centuries earlier. The villa was a majestic structure surrounded by high, amber-colored stucco walls. A small tower rose above it. It was set back on a working fattoria at the end of a long, cypress-lined driveway. On the distant hill overlooking the villa was a castle.

Luigi parked the car on a small gravel incline and they both climbed out. The landscape of the fattoria was lush with foliage. There were neatly trimmed hedges of pliable, tab-leafed bosso and sturdier, rougher hedges of laurel, dark in places and bright green where new branches grew. Luigi snapped a dark leaf off a laurel bush as they walked and crumbled it in his hand before holding it out for Ross to smell. It was sweetly fragrant. “You can cook with this,” he said. “And, of course, you can crown emperors.”

Three massive cedars of Lebanon grew around the house—symbols of a villa’s age and power. There were other trees: oak; cypress, fat bodied and spear shaped; a single walnut tree next to the villa. “A walnut tree is a companion for the house,” Luigi added, as if the villa was in danger of loneliness.

Scattered around were myriad flowers: poppies, yellow broom, irises and a dozen others Ross couldn’t put a name to.

“This is a villa that has been divided up into three apartments,” Luigi said. “The sheet on it says that there is a one-bedroom apartment available and it is furnished.”

The villa was surrounded by an eight-foot stucco wall, with a large spray of jasmine spilling over its top like a white-crested wave.

Ross pushed the gate—a large, wooden door shackled with iron hardware, nearly black with rust and age—which opened to an enclosed courtyard. They stepped inside. The ground was paved in large black-and-gray blocks of pietra serena cobblestone, which had been worn and grooved through centuries of weathering. Moss grew from the porous stone in green-and-white splatters resembling a painter’s drop cloth. To his immediate right was the back door of the villa’s stone chapel, next to a wall shrouded by a large hedge of white oleander and hyacinth. In the center of the courtyard was a stone well with a wrought iron canopy from which an oak bucket hung by a rope and a large, round pulley.

There were terra-cotta pots and grow boxes around the perimeter of the courtyard filled with red and pink geraniums. And on the west wall was a climbing rose near a stone archway that led to the garden.

“How old is this place?” Ross asked.

“It was built more than five hundred years ago. The landlord said on the phone that this used to be the country home of Machiavelli.”