Of the regulars at the pub, Almo is by far the baby. He is 54. That may seem irrelevant, but what I am getting at here is that we -- Jonathan and I -- now live very much in a world of quite elderly men. It is not a world for the faint of heart.

Mirio is sick.

He spent all last week in the hospital and they were afraid for a while that he would never leave it. But he is out now and among us again, sweet-natured and gentle and a little repetitive in his discourse. And I would be perfectly happy to have him tell me once again how it was after the war when they were all so hungry and how he found some figs once growing on the hillside but gave them to an old man who had nothing to eat and how he began working the marble when he was 11-years-old, walking down the mountain from Capezzano Monte to Pietrasanta every morning and back again in the evening. I would be quite happy if he would show me again the pictures of his sculptures -- the one that is now is the airport in Geneva, the one in the Piazza della Signoria in Firenze. 

He is jovial enough still, but more quiet, and he leaves to go home early. He is not allowed to drink wine -- only one glass with meals, which is nothing here. Only one glass with meals is almost the same as no wine at all.

Mirio was our first friend among the "beasts" -- joining us at our table on New Year's Eve a year ago and introducing himself and showing us pictures on his phone of himself working the marble and explaining to us for the first time the story of his life. Since then, he has always been our friend.

Alice told us what the doctors have said -- Mirio has an "alarm clock" inside him and one day soon it will just go off and his time will be up. 

They have not told Nonno the truth of the matter. Nonno is 90 and Mirio is his younger brother. Mirio is 89. They have been together, side by side, since before they can remember, through all the dark days of the war and the hunger and then later the days when the modern world came here. They don't tell Nonno the truth because they know that he would worry too much about his little brother.

But Nonno is quieter now, too, like Mirio. And when everyone else is watching the evening news on the television in the bar, Nonno's eyes are focussed on something very far away.

Mirio went home early last night. But he was there for a while and he taught me how to make a hat out of newspaper like the artigiani di marmo wore when they worked in the old days. He made one for me -- a simple thing that I will keep forever.