“La vita è un sogno.” Life is a dream.

—Italian Proverb

“I had a dream last night that has filled me with foreboding, like a harbinger to unknown events in which I must somehow play a part.”

—Ross Story’s diary

For a moment, in the blurred twilight between slumber and consciousness, Ross thought his dream real. Then his senses came to him and he groaned and rolled over off his pillow. He reached to the floor and dragged his fingers across the cool tile until he found his alarm clock and lifted it to view. It was only three a.m. He rolled to his back and thought of the dream as he fell back asleep.

He had dreamt that there was a woman standing next to his bed. The Vestal Virgin from Eliana’s portrait. She was young, but ancient, clothed in a pale linen tunic partially concealed by the dark scarlet robe that draped from one shoulder. In one hand she held an oil lamp, without flame. In the other hand she held a loaf of bread.

Though he couldn’t see her face, he knew she was looking at him. It was as if a cloud masked her. He didn’t know how long she had stood there before he asked her who she was. Only then did he see her eyes—dark and fearful and sad. Then she stepped back into the shadows and vanished.

As he lay back in bed he thought about Eliana’s painting. There was a reason for every painting.

Ross woke four hours later. There were no tours for him, so he went on a run, then showered and dressed, and drove off to the ancient city of San Gimignano, riding his scooter through the winding back roads of Chianti, past Greve, west at Castellina in Chianti, to Poggibonsi and into San Gimignano—the ancient city some guidebooks called the “medieval Manhattan,” due to its abundance of bell towers. Though only thirteen of them remained, still a fair number for any town, at one time there were more than seventy bell towers in the city.

Ross quickly fell in love with the town. It was smaller than Siena, less commercial, quieter. Do tourists know that a city changes to meet them, Ross wondered, to fulfill their expectations? The very act of tourism seemed to defeat itself. As he wandered through the cobblestone streets, he stopped where a crowd of tourists stood in line, awaiting access to an exhibition. He stopped to see where they were going. Il Museo degli Strumenti di Tortura (The Museum of Torture Devices): a collection of instruments of torture, mostly remnants from the Inquisition, when men and women were tortured in the name of God. Ross turned away. After the last three years of his life he didn’t need reminders of man’s inhumanity to man. He certainly wasn’t going to pay to see it on display.