The year and its happenings were celebrated at a christening party for Carla in the new house on the day of the Ascension. The paesani of the Hollow, and even those like the Longobardis who were beginning to venture beyond, were invited to the great stone mansion. All except the ignorant godparents of a short-lived infant born between Anna and Margherita—who, over some insignificant business having to do with a purchase at the store, had quarreled with Umbertina and earned her scorn and the ridicule of the neighborhood by saying, “Since your child died, we are no longer padrini.”

But the others came. “Weh!” breathed Cristina Muzzi as she looked about the large entrance hall and into the big rooms, “it must have been a church once. That portone looks like it was made for a church.” She pointed to the great thick heavy wood door at the entrance. “And look at these places for statues, Madonna mia!” She was looking at several arched niches recessed in the walls.

“Ma che dici,” said Umbertina irritably, annoyed as always at the ignorant Cristina, who came to every affair—christening or wedding or funeral—still dressed like a poor countrywoman with a black kerchief tied under her chin and always whining about something. Any misfortune was hers; she relished misery. La strega, the witch, Umbertina called her. Cristina’s face had become more cavernous with the years—a gauntness due, Umbertina used to say, to her being too stingy to eat properly—and her teeth were gone, so that her mouth was sunken and her nose, disproportionately large in the hollowed face, looked like a hook bending over to meet her sharp chin.

Umbertina’s prosperity showed not only in the large rooms of the mansion but in the expansiveness of the table she spread for the christening feast, replete with pastries such as chinolelli and anise biscuits that she and the older girls had been making for days. There were almond cookies, sponge cakes, ricotta pies, sweet dessert wines like Marsala, and colorful punches; there were gelati, spumoni, and biscuit tortoni; there were brandied cherries and peaches, and the pink sugar almond candies that signified the birth of a girl.