Free Summer in Tuscany by Elizabeth Adler Page B

“unveiling.”
    I put on a pale blue linen dress that was definitely last-yearish or even older, added a dash of lipstick, and ran my fingers hastily through my hair. It stood on end as though I had been zapped by lightning, and I quickly slicked on some hair gel and brushed it into submission. I stared, dismayed, at the result in the mirror. I had put on too much gel and now every strand was clamped to my skull. Disgruntled, I grabbed my sunglasses and headed downstairs. The only reason I was going to this party was to see that darned villa. Nonna’s villa. I figured I might as well know the worst.
    Nonna and Livvie were waiting for me in the front hall. At least I thought it was Nonna. Was it? Could it be?
    She had on an elegant green silk dress with a low neckline and a cinched waist, high heels, and a big upswept hairdo. She looked like Sophia Loren at the Oscars. Even the glasses were gone, dangling on a gold chain around her neck, to be put on only when she needed to “inspect” her villa.
    “Omigod,” I said, using my daughter’s favorite line. “Mom, is it really you ?”
    Sophia Maria Lorenza Corsini—for this was who now stood before me—patted her upswept hair, smoothed her green silk skirt, and smiled at me. “Do you like the lipstick?” she asked. “The girl in the store said it was exactly right with this green.”
    I was stunned almost into speechlessness. “The lipstick is fine,” I managed. “ You are fine…. You look great …just like your picture on the sideboard when you were seventeen.”
    She smiled as she picked up the big black bag, plopped a black straw hat with a large shady brim on top of the hairdo, checked the pearls in her ears and at her neck, and said, “Let’s go, girls, we’re going to be late.”
    Livvie, who thank God still looked like Livvie, only Italian style, all legs and big feet and budding breasts in a clingy tie-dyed T-shirt, a brief little white skirt, and clunky platforms, followed meekly, and so did I. At the door Nonna turned and gave me that same up-and-down Sunday-lunchtime look she always gave me.
    “Must you wear that dress, Gemma?” she said. “Blue was never your color, and linen creases so.” And with that, the fashion-plate heiress and chatelaine of the Villa Piacere swept out the door to her silver chariot, and I, her devoted chauffeur, got behind the wheel and drove us to the party.
    It was an idyllic day with a sky bluer than my unfortunate dress. Red-tailed hawks hovered motionless as tiny kites, and a hot sun dazzled the backs of my eyes. The long, potholed sandy lane circled up the hill behind the village, past groves of gnarled old olives whose silver leaves rustled like taffeta in the breeze, all the way to a pair of tall ornamental iron gates, one of which hung drunkenly off its hinges and was embellished at the top with the initial P in a wreath of iron laurel leaves. We jolted along an overgrown driveway. And then—there it was. The Villa Piacere. And for me, it was love at first sight.
    It sat atop the crest of its hill at the end of an allée of cypresses, large and square, flanked by twin towers, and glowing like a ripe golden apricot in the sun. Its tall windows were hung with shutters whose paint had faded from blue to silver. To the left was an arcaded loggia with thin graceful columns supporting a copper roof that had weathered to a grayish-green patina. A separate building to the right was called, I remembered Don Vincenzo had told me, a limonaia, and was where they put the delicate lemon trees to protect them from the winter frosts.
    In front of the steps leading to the front doors was a massive fountain where bronze fish leaped with lions, and Neptune complete with his fork gazed at Venus arising from her shell, in a dazzle of mixed metaphors from some long-ago sculptor who had gotten carried away with his theme. Water splashed onto the gravel, and moss grew thickly over the stone pond where goldfish fluttered gauzy little