Nonno has spent the last week in the hospital, although they say he can come home today. When we asked what was wrong, we got answers with vague medical terms that don't really translate. Valerio looked downhearted and just said, "Well, he is ninety years old, you know." Mirio, who is himself just out of the hospital, seems to have suddenly aged many years. We doubt they have told him the truth about either his own or his brother's condition, but I think he knows anyway. He tries to keep our spirits up, though. "The wine in the hospital was terrible," he said to us, twinkling. "It tasted just like water."
This is a picture of Nonno and Hugo, when they fell asleep in their chairs one afternoon last autumn while watching TV. When the old men are no more at the pub, it will be a very different place. Bar Igea, the bar down in town that I used to go to forty years ago, the place where the sculptors and marble workers used to go in their dusty clothes and battered shoes to have a glass of wine with their friends and where the old men sat all day in the shade of an ancient spreading tree and played checkers, is now a chic cocktail bar called The Black Cat that is only open at night. The big old tree was cut down to make more room for parking in the piazza. I have never been in there in its new incarnation.
There are half a dozen For Sale signs on houses on the lovely Via Capriglia now. Some of the houses have olive groves, all have majestic views of the sea. They are beautiful stone houses going cheap because people don't want to live like this anymore.
