In all weather, summer and winter, it was good to go up in the hills and woods with the goats. She was glad to be out of the room, which was musty and dark if no fire was lit, and unadorned except for a rough table and chairs, a chest for bread, and her parents’ bed with a picture of San Francesco di Paola above it and sacks of chestnuts underneath. Umbertina went barefoot until the coldest weather, her skirt hoisted up into its waistband and showing her short sturdy legs. In the hills she always headed toward the stream whose waters fed the village fountain and then made its way down into the valley, where it vanished into the torrente called Corace and flowed past the old ruins of the abbey.

She sat for hours on the bank of the rushing stream looking into the depths, putting her hands in the flow and scooping up the clear, cool liquid to splash against her face, or cupping her hands to drink the pure drops. She loved the stream’s clear and rapid course downward, unfettered by obstacles. It was her companion more than the goats, who were often stupid and clumsy, and whom she taunted, calling them names and shouting after them. Or whom she watched as they mated, imagining that’s what it was like to be with a man.

Sometimes she lay in the sun and dozed; sometimes she scrambled up to the highest point she could reach, from which, in the fall when the leaves had dropped, she surveyed the country around her. All she saw were hills and woods and small clusters of houses in distant villages; but she knew from what she had heard that there was a huge lake of water, l’oceano, which could only be crossed in a journey of many weeks, so immense was it, and that it took one to a new world. The New World. It sounded to her strange and solemn—more solemn than Don Antonio’s threats—almost like life after death, it was so remote. She could not imagine the hugeness of that water. Yet she knew that Serafino the shepherd and Domenico Saccà the shoemaker of Soveria Mannelli and some others, too, had crossed it to the new land.

What was its newness, she wondered; did it not have trees and hills and streams? Or goats and mules? Or people who lived in huts and went out to work in the fields? Did they not eat bread? Was the other world new because the land hadn’t yet trembled and moved and knocked down the buildings? Down in the valley she could see the crumbling walls of the old monastery, which, it was said, was built in remote times by men from the north called Normans. It was old even before the earthquake of hundreds of years ago had split its walls and caved in the roof, and then other earthquakes had added to its ruin. Now it was only a place where the shepherds took a willing girl. To see the abbey there in the valley meant that Castagna was an old place, not a new one—that Umbertina knew.