Of course my amore, Keri, and my children: Jenna, Allyson, Abigail, McKenna and Michael. And my Italy daughter, Cammy. Thank you for embracing a new life as well as a new country. You are my reason.

And “Eliana”—the woman by the pool.

PROLOGUE

“Who has been in Italy can forget all other regions. Who has been in heaven does not desire the earth.”

—Gogol

Italians think of God as a fellow countryman, and walking a gravel incline alongside a Chianti vineyard, I wonder if they might not be right. The early sun in Tuscany paints the landscape with a different palette than the rest of the world, gilding the hills and vineyard trellises in a rose-gold hue and the otherwise drab, finger-leafed olive trees in silver so that they glitter in the dawn wind like a school of herring.

It’s early in the morning, before the first bells of the San Donato Tower, quiet, except for the occasional, distant pop of rifles echoing through the Valdarno Valley. The men are out hunting cinghiale—the wild boar. In my wanderings through the countryside I’ve encountered neither of them, hunter nor beast. But I hear the shots fired every morning, popping like corks off wine bottles, sometimes in my dreams.

I woke at four this morning, even before the hunters, and lay in bed for nearly an hour. Then I dressed and went out to walk. My wife is used to me crawling out of bed at all hours of night like an obstetrician. It’s an appropriate metaphor, I think. Stories, like babies, don’t often wait for decent hours to be born. I’ve been thinking all night about a story that has come to me.

Some stories are crafted as if by blueprint, built line by line and brick by brick. There are stories born of angst, wrung painfully from an author’s mind onto pages that, in the end, are more of bandage than paper. Then there are those stories that seek the writer, drifting through time and space like thistle seed, until they find fertile ground on which to land and take root. This is one such story. It found me during my second week in Italy.

I met her at the poolside of an Italian country club called Ugolino, about nine kilometers southwest of Florence. She looked thirtyish, slender, attractive. She was wearing a peach-colored bikini, luminous against her bronze skin, with a sheer, pastel wraparound skirt. Her hair was nearly black with a few strands of honey-colored highlights, though where it fell back over her shoulders the sun revealed a natural brown-gold tint. What I noticed first was her eyes. They were exotic and teardrop shaped.

She was reclined in a lounge chair reading a paperback romanzo and doing her best to ignore the stream of Italian men who paraded in front of her to ogle and drop lines that could be understood even without knowing the language.

It was a sweltering hot day. Solleone, the Florentines call it—lion sun. The pool area was mobbed with children playing noisily in the water while the adults stretched out on the white plastic lounge chairs that surrounded the tiled perimeter of the pool.