“I’m two different people, Jason. The Italian part, when I get back to Rome, likes civilized comforts: eating well, having Giovanna go out and do the shopping and prepare the caffè-latte for me each morning while I sleep late. Here I like to get all dressed up and go shopping or have Mauro cut my hair. I dress in blankets and clogs when I’m in the States and sometimes don’t comb my hair for days. I drive my grandmother in Gloversville crazy when I go see her because she says I’m a hippie. But in Rome I’m purely a sybarite.”

“Well, you’re not going to indulge your sybaritic side all that much with Agostini.”

“Oh, yes, I am; I know we’ll have his own chickens—the kind that peck around in the ground and not the hothouse type—and good wine, not the adulterated stuff from Frascati. And we’ll sit on his portico and look out over the campagna and he’ll be wise and witty. That’s what I mean by sybaritic. It doesn’t have to be luxury, it has to be the best in whatever circumstance.”

“Well, I can see you’d be all right as an eating companion on a Greek hike because you’d be able to smell out the right eating places, but what would you do about sleeping on the ground or in some of the hostels?”

“I’ll have to think about that,” Tina quipped. And she did. Going off with Jason? She’d like it. But how could she plan anything until she heard more from Angela?

Guido Agostini’s house was his work of art, patiently worked at little by little each summer on the land he owned that had been sheep pasture outside Rome. He had modified the original shepherd’s hut, laid out a vegetable garden, and sown a small area with grain, and had acquired beehives, herbs, a few chickens and ducks, and a pool for carp. Two stones were corded together at the door latch to clink together as a knocker.

Inside, the stone house was one large room with windows and terrace overlooking the green hills and a ladder that went up to a sleeping loft; a studio and kitchen had been added to the side. The walls were filled with mementos of civilization: musical instruments, paintings and drawings, a carefully calculated sundial that measured time by where light struck plotted lines on the wall.

“Signor Agostini and his wife are a super-refined hippie commune,” Tina said.

“They have more class than the hippies do,” Jason answered.

“That’s what I mean. They have the best of the natural world and the best of the intellect.”

“It’s a good way to live.”

“Yes, I guess that’s what we all aspire to.”