So why shouldn’t she be humiliated, Tina told herself glumly; hadn’t she done the same, or worse, to Jason?

From the autostrada, Morano looked like a charming village perched on a mountaintop, faraway and inaccessible. But the moment they began the approach, it became another squalid town of the South. It offended Tina, as it did not in Rome, to see the still-visible effrontery of fascist rhetoric in such squalor. Along streets full of hen-shit and goat-turds, the walls proclaimed the slogans of forty years before: “Italy Above All and Over All” . . . “Obey, Believe, Fight, Win.” They drove as far into the town as they could, and where the streets became cobblestoned warrens too narrow and steep for the car, they left it and proceeded on foot to look for Luluzzo.

The apathetic and listless people standing and staring after them in the streets were like relics from a place under siege, but Ferruccio, Tina noticed, was not making any sociological observations; he was too taken with the excitement of flushing out bargains to notice where he put his expensively shod feet. The whole thing made Tina furious as she picked her way through slop and various kinds of excrement up to Luluzzo’s place. There, in the damp whitewashed rooms of the dealer’s storehouse, Ferruccio began foraging through the heaps of furniture, doors, lintels, tiles, plates, framed paintings, statues, books, marble altarpieces, whole choir-stalls, vestments, and lavabos from sacked churches. He kept up a stream of talk with the emaciated and ragged-looking Luluzzo, who silently went about gathering up the things that Ferruccio pointed out. Finally Ferruccio had chosen: some antique tiles torn from the church pavement in a remote village, a piece of handsome wood carving, a pair of gilt baroque altar candelabra, a long rustic refectory table, and an ancient faience soup tureen with “Roma” written on one side and “Venezia” on the other.

Luluzzo was asking 50,000 lire for the lot, including delivery to Rome.

“Come on, Luluzzo, what kind of price is that for an old client?” Ferruccio countered. Tina knew that in Rome he couldn’t have gotten any single item for that amount, even at the Porta Portese flea market. “For that amount you should throw in something else!”

“Everything’s getting higher,” the dealer complained. “Even up in the mountains women who can’t read or write have begun to hear that their old things are worth money and they want more when I go to buy . . . and it’s not easy to get priests to sell things from their churches anymore. They’re waiting for the dealers from Florence. But here, I can add this painting of a priest—it’s old, believe me.”

“I don’t care to have that painting in my home,” Ferruccio said sternly. “I don’t like priests.”

Luluzzo looked genuinely shocked. “If you say that about priests, what is there left to believe in?”

Ferruccio laughed, paid Luluzzo, and they left.