Tartufo

by Kira Jane Buxton

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Thurber Prize finalist and author of the beloved Hollow Kingdom returns with another fantastical and endlessly funny story featuring a cast of colorful characters in a dying Italian village and a giant truffle that changes their fate forever.

 

After nearly losing the election to a geriatric but wildly popular donkey named Maurizio, newly installed Mayor Delizia Miccuci can’t help but feel like the sun has finally set on the rural Italian village of Lazzarini Boscarino. Tourists only stop by to ask for directions, Nonna Amara’s cherished ristorante is long shuttered, and the town hall is disgustingly overrun with glis glis poo—even Postman Duccio has been disgraced. All that’s left is Bar Celebrità, a rustic establishment where weary locals gather to quibble over decades-long disputes, submit their poor stomachs to bartender Giuseppina’s volcanic espresso, and wonder what will become of the place where together they’ve spent their entire lives.
 
Little do the villagers know that, mere miles away in the forest, local truffle hunter Giovanni Scarpazza has just happened upon something that could change everything. Swollen to massive proportions, soaking the atmosphere in its pungent fumes, potentially worth six figures in certain international circles, a truffle—un tartufo, that is—sits beneath the soil with the power to either be the greatest gift or the foulest curse the village has ever seen—they’re not completely sure which since Giuseppina’s psychic was a bit unclear on the matter.
 
Tartufo is much more than a charming romp through the foothills of Tuscany. Written in the same enchanting style and raucous humor that defines Hollow Kingdom and Feral Creatures, Buxton’s newest story is a reflection on the interconnectedness of life in all its manifestations—and how holding on to harmony in the face of hardship can grow something beautiful and rare beneath the surface.

Release date: January 28, 2025

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 352

Sample

The wisest souls say that pure mountain air makes us all go a little mad. A wind—lawless and long tailed—slices through the snow-stippled Apuan Alps and the Apennines with all the wantonness of La Befana, the winter witch. Swifts catch this wind on their wings, carving up the crisp blue morning. Dipping down into the valley, the wind now worries over the murmuring blue tongue of the Serchio river on its journey to the Tyrrhenian Sea. It slips—an unseen spirit—under the Devil’s Bridge. Shivers along the great gray hunch of the Devil’s back. Hissing over every ancient stone. Rising from the river, the wind picks up speed, hastening toward the woods. Hurtling toward chestnut trees spaced like the pews of a great duomo. The wind now weaves between golden leaves. Whispering quick consonants between the branches, borrowing an autumnal aura. Sweet sighs of ripe chestnuts and shed leaves. And here—where the wind steals woodland scents—hides a curiosity. Cloistered by soil, moss, stone, and leaf litter, a thing unseen—a thing quite mysterious—lies in waiting.

A thing that sits buried, like old bones.

What lies under the soil has stayed secret. It is an underground barterer. A schemer who has set a trap in the soil. A sylvan swindler. A tormentor.

A tiny god.

Swelling to irresistible bulk, it has ripened into a knobbled fruit of corruption. And now the time has come. The tiny god releases a lusty sigh, soundlessly unfurling a phantom into the wind.

No more visible than the notes of nightingale song.

No more audible than a wordless wish.

The tiny god has released a cipher.

The breath of the tiny god is whisked away by the breeze, slipping through the damp woodland of chestnut worship. Deeper into the woods, the breath in the breeze paints the pupils of a fallow deer into great glistening lakes. Fur stiffens along a back freckled with the white of first snow. The doe salivates in answer to the call of the stranger she can smell but cannot see. Her nostrils flutter, messages flood her bloodstream. But the breath blows on.

Now a wild sow lifts her moist snout from the leaf litter and inhales a slip of the wind. Instantly intoxicated, her muddy snout snuffing. The grunting sow is aroused into a frenzy. Bristled legs stab at the soil as she arranges them to assume her stance, ready to receive the boar she smells. Turning her head toward her tail, she hunts for him, but—and here is the trick, here is the olfactory deception—there is no boar, and the breeze blows on through the woods, fanning the sensual scent along with it.

See-through scarves of scent curl from the forest and swirl toward a beautiful medieval village, perched upon a peak. Its tallest point an eleventh-century bell tower with memories of steel swords and shields. The wind, pickled with flavors of the forest, ridden by the breath of the tiny god, tickles trees of olive and cypress. Until it dangles its string of little calamities above cobblestone streets and terra-cotta roof tiles.

And it settles upon the medieval village like a spell.

Down in the village, past the sleepy post office, past the boarded-up ristorante and the sixteenth-century church and the water fountain. Past the teeny-tiny grocers and a ginger tomcat slinking under an archway to go make mayhem, Nonna Amara shuffles slippers over cobblestone on her morning walk. The breeze and the mysterious thing it carries slip under her shawl, bright and invigorating, a sonnet read to her skin. Nonna Amara tightens her floral shawl, the silver cirrus of her hair aflutter. She lifts the lovely lines of her face to the sky. Squeezes her eyes shut. As she inhales, a memory whirls her off her feet, whisking her all the way back to her childhood.

She is sitting at the table in the cucina rustica of her beloved home. Blue snakes of smoke coil around young Amara, up toward the wooden ceiling beams. Some hang themselves in her hair. Her papa, Babbo, leans in, his spice of sweet smoke, the powdered sugar lingering like a second skin, his hands thick from pummeling pastry. Babbo with his feral hair and his hands and his hairy chest and his heart, oh, his heart…

“Close your eyes, sweetheart.” That voice. The rumble, the rasp.

Amara closes her eyes, makes a wish for a thing with wheels. Her papa leans close, smelling of a glossy white soap cake, sweet tobacco from his pipe. Babbo’s pipe. Babbo’s hands wrap around the waist of her summer dress and she lifts into the air with a shriek. Babbo and Amara are a two-headed creature that blunders blindly out of the cucina, through the arched doorway.

“Open!” bellows Babbo. And Amara opens her eyes to a courtyard stippled with sun. The planters popping with red geraniums. Babbo’s potted herbs and their aromatic whispers of lavender and rosemary. The old black-and-white cat staring at them from a stone wall with blatant disgust in its green-eyed glare. And a bicycle, glossy and red, with a wished-for basket in the front and a seat on the back. Amara kicks her legs and screams in delight, slipping from Babbo’s shoulders, held by those hands, held by that big, rumbling laugh, until she is running toward the bike, the sun, toward Babbo running beside her yelling, “That’s it, pedal! Keep going, piccolina, keep going!” toward Babbo holding Amara’s delicate hand so she does not fall, toward scraped knees, toward firsts and falls, heartbreaks and hurdles, all the way through time toward Amara holding Babbo’s delicate hand so he does not fall.

The breeze blows on and Nonna Amara opens her eyes. She smiles, lifting the lines she has earned with years of laughter.

“Babbo.”

She rubs her hands together and shuffles ahead, averting her eyes from the crudely nailed planks of wood boarding up the pasticceria. From cobwebs on windows. She smiles, lets in birdsong instead of sorrow.

The breeze and the breath of the tiny god, ahead of Nonna Amara now, make a mad dash down a winding cobblestone street, across a sleepy piazza, and finally—with a devious bluster—slip under the door of Bar Celebrità.

The breath of the tiny god is now, to many a nose, undetectable. Indeed, all the current inhabitants of Bar Celebrità have missed the secret cipher slithering into their midst.

All but one.

At a table by the window, nestled up to the muddied boot of her person, sits Aria, a dog-shaped burst of brown and white corkscrew curls, woolen and wiry to the touch. She peers up at Giovanni’s flatcap and thick white mustache with alert, almost-human hazel eyes. Giovanni Scarpazza gives his dog a reassuring nod—Not long now, it says—inducing a doggy yawn of excitement. Quick pink flash of a tongue.

Aria lifts her nose to the height of the table. She reads the room in sentences of scent. First, she takes in Giovanni’s breakfast bombolone, fried dough bulging with Nutella. The pastry sits on a napkin next to a cup of strong coffee. She sniffs the spiced soil of those coffee grounds—bitter beans with a roasted raisin lilt that lifts the spirits of the humans in here. Aria smells a mist of milk as Giuseppina—carnevale incarnate and incidental human—manhandles the steam wand, yelling loud enough that all the hunting dogs of the village can hear. Aria leaves Giovanni’s side briefly to visit the neighboring table and sniff the pant leg of Leon Rosetti. A musky reek from billy goats clings to Leon’s jacket and jeans. A small map made by the urine of a young female goat dried to his boots. The farmer’s skin smells of beetles and unearthed roots. He is in good health, though filled with a sadness that smells like the resin of a sick tree. Sadness the color of crushed irises. Aria reads that Leon did not sleep well last night, smells the story of his tending to an old donkey, feeding the dogs and geese breakfast after splashing his face with freezing spring water. She reads that farmer Leon woke up alone, since Aria can no longer smell the creamy vanilla flowers of fragrance that bloom in the wake of the farmer’s wife.

“Good morning, Aria. Beautiful dog,” says the farmer. His breath glitters with sweet stars of grappa. Thick farmer fingers tousle Aria’s head curls. Fingers stained purple from harvesting grapes, a metallic tang of goat bells trailing from them. Aria pushes her head into Leon’s hand to comfort him. She knows she is very good at comforting those who need her. And she always knows who needs comforting.

Curls bouncing, Aria pads back to the table by the window, where Giovanni is biting into the bombolone. Nutella oozes out, plopping onto the napkin. Aria licks her lips, then sweeps her snout under the table and across the terra-cotta tile. She sniffs a crumpled napkin with an angry smear of arrabbiata sauce. The spot where some tangy salt-and-vinegar crisp crumbs were swept up. Peach juice poured by a colicky child. Her nose hovers just above a dried patch of cleaning agent, chemical and sharp. And a tidy trail of dried blood droplets—human in origin, spilled by a male filled with pungent rage. Things the cleaning agent did not catch. Out of sight, in the cucina behind Giuseppina and the bar, Aria smells bones bubbling in a pot to make a rich broth. Stale bread tensing on a counter. Mold violating a hunk of mozzarella. The ghost of roasted garlic. The last tomatoes of summer simmer in an earthenware pot with a green potpourri of freshly chopped herbs. On the cucina tiles, scents tracked in on the soles of shoes—cigarette butt with a sweet stamp of lipstick, gum spat hastily onto the marble church floor, a squashed scorpion. Aria smells the stacked crates of belching onions. The metallic menace of the shotgun hidden in a cupboard under the antique stone sink. A bowl of jellied cat food, partially licked by the mischievous ginger tom who was already full from hunting mice all night but just didn’t want any other cat to enjoy it.

When Aria fixes her muzzle on the table in front of her once more, just as Giovanni is swallowing the last lump of bombolone, a strange summoning from the forest holds her nose hostage. Aria’s eyes light up with longing. She gives a gummy, open-mouthed grin, her curls quaking. Her tail takes on a life of its own, thumping terra-cotta.

The breath of the tiny god is here.

An earthy burp, a miasma of cheese and funky sweat. A sweet fizz of fermented fruit. A message. This breath of new life sets her heart racing. A rush of passion strong as gunpowder. She whines, panting, placing her front paws onto Giovanni’s leg. She lifts to her hind legs to stare into gentle gray eyes.

“Calm, Aria. Wait.” Giovanni winces at the acerbity of his coffee. He pats Aria, feeling waves of vim floating from his canine companion.

Aria cocks her head at the window. She stares beyond the piazza at the arched outline of the Apennines. She will be very good and she will wait, as Giovanni has asked. Though they cannot and must not wait too long. Soon, she will follow her nose to show Giovanni what is out there. The cipher that is summoning her. Calling for her in chemicals. A tease. A treasure.

A story sent to her on the wings of the wind.

Struggling to keep her wiggly bottom on the ground, she stares out the window, pining. Possessed.

She will find the tiny god. She will do it before anyone else has a chance.

And it will change everything.

Since the ristorante, the best café, and the pasticceria shuttered their doors, Bar Celebrità has become the heart of Lazzarini Boscarino. A heart whose pulse could perhaps use one of the potent espressos made by its bartender, Giuseppina. Bar Celebrità—a bold name for a place that has never actually hosted a celebrity. It sits tucked behind a lonely piazza where umbrellas sing longingly of gelato in loud colors. Daffodil-yellow chairs ring rickety tables. The bar itself is nestled inside a rustic limestone building. Emerald-green shutters and potted planters. Charming vintage doors. Plaster flaking like good pastry. A bar whose stone walls glitter under the sun. Whose quaint lanterns cast it in a golden glow under the stars.

On this autumn morning, the piazza is empty but for one being. A cat—best described as a cross between a crumpled tuxedo and a well-used toilet wand—sits vigilant. Seven unplanned litters of kittens have tested her patience and her personality, so that she has matured into the kind of cat that will take a crap on the carpet before she takes crap from anyone else. The kind of cat who knows where the sensitive skin of an ankle is and how it can fell a full-grown man. The kind of cat who instills bewilderment into the heart of a mastiff. The kind of cat who is sitting next to a wine barrel holding a WELCOME! sign outside the last bar of a doomed medieval village. Ready to unleash hell upon any tourist who dares to smuggle an exposed ankle in through its door. For what is a tourist, truly, but an invader with blinding white crew socks and a selfie stick?

The cat chooses to sit out on the piazza alone to steal a moment of morning peace. And to avoid an aroma that is dogging Bar Celebrità. The smell of longing is sharper than the long-gone lemons of summer. A horrible yearning hangs in this bar. That and Giuseppina’s perfume, which could deflea even the most verminous of felines. So the cat sits outside and sniffs at maddeningly fresh mountain air.

And she realizes something is coming.

Something snarky. Sensual. A gambit.

A quiet riot.

The cat purrs in anticipation of anarchy.

It is well on its way.

Inside, Bar Celebrità is filled with the music of chiming cups and the beautiful burble of la bella lingua. On one side of the bar sit colorful shelves of Nutella, Baci chocolate, gum and Mentos, brightly colored jelly candies flavored limoncello, fruits of the forest, and CBD. On the other is a fridge filled with juices and soda. A freezer filled with long-forgotten gelato.

Giuseppina leans on the bar itself, her bosom spilling over its surface like two jellyfish in a battle for hegemony. She idly molests the bar’s wooden surface with a rag, sighing loud enough to suggest some sort of respiratory distress. Dusty bottles line shelves against the stone wall behind her, as well as a large mirror and framed photographs of various celebrities. Postcards from Milan, Florence, Rome. Big cities, where big things are happening. And, most prominently, a tacked-on flyer inviting one and all to join in the twenty-second birthday party and celebrations for Maurizio, who happens to be a donkey.

At the end of the bar, scowling over a cup of rocket fuel, is Duccio Berardinelli, somber and sporting a thin silver ponytail. He is a wet weekend of a man and the village’s disgraced postman. Some say Duccio has not smiled in seventy years, but most certainly not after his scandal.

“Giuseppina, where is my coffee?” pleads Padre Francesco, who has been languishing on a barstool in front of Giuseppina, watching her not make the coffee he ordered twenty minutes ago.

“I’ll get to it; I am very busy.”

Padre Francesco is a plump man of God, blessed with biblical black eyebrows like two Pekingese guarding the temples of his bald head. He looks around the bar in bafflement. The current patrons of Bar Celebrità—hunter Giovanni with his dog at the table by the window; Duccio, the ex-postman, brooding at the end of the bar; Leon, the forlorn farmer—are all grimacing as they sip potent coffee. Giuseppina flaps dismissively at Padre with arms so tanned she could camouflage against the coffee grounds with which she has carpeted Bar Celebrità. This particular tan was born at the Versilia seaside at the end of summer, where she faced the ocean eating a bowl of cacciucco—tangy tomato-and-white-wine stew with mussels, cuttlefish, squid, and prawns the size of puppies. Seafood as sweet as the sea. Between sips of a velvet Chianti, she savored the salt breeze stinging her lips, a kiss of coconut from someone’s sunbaked skin. She abandoned her clothes, running toward waves. A skinny dip in a cerulean sea. After bobbing in Tyrrhenian salt water, she took a lengthy nap on the sand, breasts sunny-side up, thighs and buttocks achieving the reddish searing every chef worth his salt wants for a bistecca alla Fiorentina.

Giuseppina turns to the mirror, jostling the warring jellyfish in her beige bra. She is wearing a floral singlet and a plethora of emotions where a sleeve would be if she was not wearing a singlet.

“I could be famous, Padre,” she states. Sure, Giuseppina has had a healthy serving of hardships, but she is not one to wallow in the wet sands of nostalgia. As a young woman, she was self-conscious of her curves, of every eye tracing her silhouette. At fifty-three, she couldn’t give a flying fig about what any eye is up to. She has honed her keen nose for nonsense. Let them feast upon every fabulous feature.

She manages Bar Celebrità. Took over for owner Lorenzo as he and his beloved wife traveled all over Italy for her career in veterinary medicine. And now he has returned under the saddest of circumstances. Giuseppina stepped in because she loves this village. She grew up here. Met a Boscarini man and married him at the little church. Had her daughter, Elisabetta, and raised her in this beautiful medieval village where a sunset turns the stone walls pink. Where a labyrinth of lovely cobblestone streets are patrolled by old-age pensioners and an inordinate number of cats.

Giuseppina inhales the ambrosia of life, sweet as all the seafood in a perfect bowl of cacciucco. Her passion for the making of merriment and love, for the smell of a storm and the shimmer of summer heat, for everything, cannot be contained. She wants to share all of it, just not with Padre right now.

In the mirror she is met with a goddess. Giuseppina admires her adventurous eye makeup. She does not hold back with a brush, not with her tongue, not with living her life out loud.

Still, she is tortured.

She wants to see her village thrive. In her younger years, she was entangled in the thrill of ambition, forever running a rat race. But the demanding days of accomplishment and accumulation are gone. As the years go by, she wants to take less and appreciate more—all the tiny miracles she missed in her youth. Slow down and savor the fragrance of every flower. Giuseppina just wants everyone to fall for the charm of Lazzarini Boscarino. For the magic and beauty in the simplicity of small village life.

But everyone leaves. All the children. Giuseppina’s own daughter, Elisabetta. Grown and gone. Mayor Benigno—gone to heaven. Farmer Leon’s wife, Sofia, who has, she suspects, run away with a lover. Her husband—no grazie, she won’t think about him.

If only everyone could see what she sees in Lazzarini Boscarino.

If only everyone would stop leaving her.

She piles her supernova of hair—bottle blonde in a fight with five inches of black root—on her head. Padre Francesco waits, quite saintlike, for her to be less busy. He clears his throat, swipes a hand over those consecrated eyebrows. He will not complain. He has no intention of angering Giuseppina after the incident in church all those Sundays ago, so he stands by the bar and sweats as silently as possible.

From the mirror, Giuseppina’s eyes float to the postcards she’d tacked to the wall. She snorts. Why do all the tourists flock to these overpopulated places like foolish flamingos? Elisabetta told her that hotels in Venice are issuing tourists tiny orange water pistols to spritz seagulls who keep swooping down to steal their sandwiches. Orange is apparently a very offensive color to the gull comune.

“Here in our little medieval village, we have staggering mountains,” she thinks out loud. “In Rome, what they have is staggering mountains of trash. Che schifo!”

And as well as sinking, Venice is also suffering a plague of ghosts, including the late painter Lorenzo Luzzo, who committed suicide over a doomed love affair and now wafts about the palace Casino degli Spiriti on the Canale Grande, quite unalive. Not to mention the dead of the mental asylum who wander about Poveglia Island in the Venetian Lagoon and are said to have thrown the doctor who tortured them plunging from a tower to his death. There is even a house on the canal—Palazzo Dario—that murders people! A homicidal house! And Milan, well, her Elisabetta is in Milan, so it had better behave itself or it will have Giuseppina to contend with. Giuseppina makes the sign of the cross. Padre Francesco instinctively copies her and crosses himself without knowing why; he needs very little provocation.

Giuseppina ignores Padre’s woeful sigh of a man who is being deprived of coffee. She stares at the celebrity photographs; Virna Lisi sandwiched between Sophia Loren, Monica Bellucci, and her favorite—the late Raffaella Carrà. She swims into a daydream—silken and warm as the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is summer. She envisions Bar Celebrità teeming with tourists all the way out to the piazza. All in beautiful beach ball colors and straw hats stippled with sun. Aperol spritzes flank bright yellow bowls of crisps and salted peanuts. Sophia Loren walks into Bar Celebrità, smelling of sunflowers and giant sacks of money. Giuseppina regales i turisti with a tale of the time an eight-year-old Elisabetta stole cash from her father, smuggling it in a Christmas panettone. How she was only discovered because Dante—hunter Ugo’s dog and agent of chaos—stole the panettone sitting on this very table here at Bar Celebrità and tore around the village with it, lira notes fluttering behind him. Nonna Amara has made pasta fritta with stracchino cheese, the salted dough glistening with hot oil. Now Giuseppina is serving glasses of L’Orso, the village of Lazzarini Boscarino’s very own liquor. Farmer Leon gets out his guitar and sings and Lorenzo is fatter and Duccio is nowhere to be seen and we dance and dance. Beyond the beautiful village, cypress trees are propped against the horizon, golden hills of smiling sunflowers rolling into an ocean of olive groves. It is a Tuscan summer of wine and sun and sex, lungs breathless with laughter, sweat beading between breasts, everyone warmed by sunshine that sweetens the tomatoes and many a soul.

Giuseppina’s daydream dissolves and she is back to the present, Padre staring at her like one of Leon’s goats. She is struck by the painful pang of desire, of longing for the fortunes of the village to be different.

The terrible loneliness of being left behind.

Thoughts of Nonna Amara’s pasta fritta and creamy smears of stracchino cheese have made her hungry. She plucks a Kinder Bueno from the sweet shelf next to the bar, tucking the chocolate into her cheek.

“Giuseppina!” Lorenzo Micucci has emerged from the cucina of Bar Celebrità, standing with both hands thrust into the air.

“What! I’m wasting away!” She slaps both thighs eight times for emphasis.

Lorenzo Micucci rubs his forehead in exasperation. Sleepless nights have left him feeling hollow. Lately, when he glimpses his reflection in the bar windows, he thinks of carrion. Of a carcass picked over by vultures. He will tell no one, but there is a tightness in his fifty-year-old heart. His very veins feel like sucked straws. Funny to think about his body. He has given all of it to this bar since he moved back here, has he not? Certainly his blood, sweat, and tears. But he is the owner of Bar Celebrità, the last bar of the village. The survival of this bar, and therefore the village, falls on his shoulders.

Everyone is alerted to commotion outside Bar Celebrità. On the road across from the piazza, a blue bus coughs up the hill with a belly full of tourists. Everyone in Bar Celebrità—with the exclusion of a fly who has just fallen into a glass of Chianti—holds their breath as the bus slows.

It stops in front of the piazza.

“Lorenzo! I turisti!” Giuseppina yells, as if he is not standing next to her.

Giuseppina leaps over the bar, barely catching herself on her wedge sandals to sprint out the front door of Bar Celebrità. She runs across the piazza, performing her own stunts by flying over cobblestones, dodging tables and chairs, and then coming to an abrupt halt to wave frantically at the blue bus. The bus lets out a haughty hiss. It shudders. Rattles. Convulsing now, the bus is spluttering out clouds of exhaust, passing the piazza, starting its melt back down the mountainside. Giuseppina yanks down her singlet and bra to flash a busload of wide-eyed tourists, her answer to holding up a save us sign from the desolate island of Lazzarini Boscarino. She tosses her head and harrumphs. One might argue that she has given them an alternate vista of the Apennines.

Giuseppina walks quietly back into Bar Celebrità, adjusting her singlet and her brass-blonde bun. Giovanni Scarpazza shakes his head, grimacing at his final poisonous sip of coffee—a feat; very few make it to the bottom of the cup. His dog Aria ducks under the table to avoid the contrails of perfume trailing from Giuseppina. Her very particular perfume reads as an olfactory scream for sex, flowers wilting in her wake.

“We don’t need tourists. We have never needed anyone infiltrating our village,” says disgraced postman Duccio with a great deal of spite.

“Silenzio, Duccio, or I will banish you from Bar Celebrità forever!”

Lorenzo pokes his head out momentarily from the cucina. “No, that’s not a thing, you can’t do that!”

Giuseppina ignores him.

“I think Al Pacino is pregnant again,” she announces. Giovanni shakes his head. When is Al Pacino not knocked up? The poor cat had been a peace offering from Giuseppina’s husband. Perhaps also a portent of things to come. Her husband had assured Giuseppina the kitten was a pedigreed purebred (though which breed, he never said). He said the cat would grow to be a magnificent tom. Under these false pretenses, cinephile Giuseppina named the kitten Al Pacino. But the odd cluster of fur grew less into a tomcat than a female cat who identified as a dog. Her name stuck despite an evidential number of feline pregnancies. Disburdening a little misplaced maternal instinct, Giuseppina overindulged the cat, who became accustomed to being spoiled and one might say was ultimately spoiled. And who could blame the little cat who had no firm hand to guide her while she held her own among all the village hunting dogs? Who took her guard duties so seriously she developed both stress-induced alopecia and dermatitis. Al Pacino does the best she can under the circumstances, valiantly tackling the terrorism of tourists while generously spreading her spawn over all of Tuscany in an army of cats often mistaken for weasels.

Lorenzo suddenly appears from the cucina again, looking haggard. He is a gentleman and a gentle man, Lorenzo, a long-suffering peacekeeper who gets along with everyone. Well, almost everyone. And being the peacekeeper of a town like Lazzarini Boscarino is a little like being a tiny orange water pistol up against all the seagulls of Venice. Duccio and Giuseppina register the fumes of exhaustion lifting from Lorenzo’s head. His checkered shirt looks baggy, the skin around his eyes gray.

“Giuseppina, not more little Al Pacinos! Why do you let that cat out, she is undiluted chaos! Keep her inside; she terrifies the tourists.”

“Lorenzo, keep her inside! What balls! You can’t tell her what to do! She needs to be free to be herself, to love, to make her own decisions, to live an authentic life and be celebrated for who she is and the gifts that only she can share with the world!”

“The cat needs that, does she?” Lorenzo heads back into the cucina. Giuseppina minces after him. Duccio studies them suspiciously, only his eyes moving like one of Caravaggio’s creepier portraits.

Lorenzo trips over the crate of onions aging on the floor. He recovers, snatching up a spoon of the ragù alla bolognese sauce, a garlic and meat medley of steam swirling ar. . .