And Il Rifugio wasn’t just Piero’s home. His workshop stood on the other side of the house, representing his first passion but his second business. He’d make it his only business if he could ever find a way to sell the vineyard and winery without losing this place. It was what he should have done all along – watched functional but beautiful wooden structures take shape in his hands.

He’d nearly burst an artery today when Graziella, his father’s girlfriend, had sneered, ‘Oh, your precious workshop,’ and dismissed it with a wave of her hand. Almost without taking breath, she’d moved on to emotional blackmail. ‘Family is family, Piero. Lucia and Durante are only neighbours.’

‘They’re friends, not just neighbours,’ he’d snapped, thinking of Lucia and Durante’s warm, undemanding company at the end of a long day. Rather than add, ‘And you’re not family, Graziella,’ he’d turned to Alberto Gubbiotti, the dark-suited representative of the Binotto Group, a quiet, shadowy man who Piero disliked for his unsmiling air. ‘We were promised time to consider your organisation’s offer. No one’s supposed to be exerting pressure, remember?’

Alberto Gubbiotti had inclined his head but Piero knew impassioned speeches bounced off him. He just listened as the family argued, probably calculating how long it would be before the Binotto group, impatient to diversify all over other people’s land, got its hands on what it wanted.

Moodily, Piero slammed the car door. The current turmoil was enough to make him wish his family had stayed in America. Salvatore had moved them there when Piero was two then, ten years later, had inherited the vineyard and winery of Tenuta Domenicali from a cousin. Piero and Emiliano’s mother Elvira had been alive then and had allowed herself to be persuaded by a Salvatore fired up by the prospect of a new adventure. Twelve-year-old Piero and Emiliano, fourteen, who were settled in school and speaking English as easily as Italian, hadn’t been consulted. Salvatore had just dragged the family back to Umbria, the green yet rugged heart of Italy.

He strode past his house to the edge of the rocky shelf on which it stood and gazed down into the sweep of the fertile valley, the view of Tenuta Domenicali that usually soothed his soul. Endless rows of vines sloped away dizzyingly. The breathtaking carpet of green and brown surrounded the golden stone home of his teenage self, where his father still lived, the winery buildings huddled around it like a mother dog with puppies. The Umbrian Apennine Mountains in their dusky purple and green summer clothes passed the other end of the valley like a herd of great migrating beasts. At one side of Il Rifugio the drop from the plateau was gentler and a track had once run down into the vineyard from his home, long overgrown.