“Yes, that’s the really hard nut to crack, isn’t it? You could never have come back to show off your superior taste if they hadn’t gotten out in the first place. And they got out to better themselves and use plastic if they want to. But when you come back, you’re sorry they’re still not what they used to be. That’s the conundrum of your trip. They advanced you to the middle-class—but you want them to stay peasants.”

“Oh, come on, Ferruccio,” she stuttered, embarrassed, because yes, that was the conundrum: How accept what she was and what they were? She was acknowledging something sterile and over-intellectualized in her life just by the fact of this strange journey back to her rude origins.

Then they turned a curve in the road and came onto an unexpected sight: Along the banks of the stream were the ruins of a monastery, Norman in origin and of the eleventh century, as Tina’s guidebook told her. It was an ivy-covered shell from whose crevices and crumbling lintels tufts of flowering weeds were thrusting and reaching. Through empty ogival windows came the sound of running water. Behind the ruin, on a height above the valley and settled into the density of trees, was the place she sought: Castagna.

“Che bello!” Tina exclaimed. She was surprised at the beauty of the place and grateful for it. Their eyes saw this, too, she thought.

“The monastery of Corazzo,” she read from the guidebook, “was built by invading Normans and shone through the eleventh and twelfth centuries as a faint beacon of enlightenment among those silent hills where the descendants of the hostile Brutii still kept to themselves.”

“Who would have thought of finding a scene like this in Calabria,” Ferruccio said, stopping the car and getting out his camera. “It’s more like Scotland.”

The road entered the upper fringe of the village, but most of Castagna descended from the road, banked along the mountain, on a prospect above the valley. Ferruccio parked in front of a bar and they went into the small, dark place where a thin man with a stubble of beard on his face stood alone and looked at them with shy wonderment.

“Is there a place to eat here?” Ferruccio asked.

“No, nothing. Only in Soveria Mannelli,” the man answered.

“Do you have postcards?” Tina asked.

He shook his head and again said the name of the larger town.

“What about these?” Tina asked, pointing to a jug on the counter. It was the classical terra-cotta amphora that could still be seen all over southern Italy, where women used it to draw water from fountains and men carried it into the fields to quench their thirst as they worked.

The man smiled shyly and repeated, “Soveria Mannelli.” Above his head the clock on the wall had stopped. That day, Tina wondered, or two weeks ago, or fifty years past?