All the Way to Italy by Flavia Brunetti

Author:Flavia Brunetti
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788833460826
Publisher: Ali Ribelli Edizioni
Published: 2018-03-19T10:24:18+00:00

TRAVELS THROUGHOUT

Chapter 14

Tivoli, Italy. Present day.

Little began her adventures, for adventures is how she was beginning to think of them, by way of the Sabine town of Tivoli. She stopped to hike the park that was Villa Gregoriana, learning firsthand how apt her aunt had been when she deemed it a fairy tale. She was soon glad that she had worn her sneakers, as the expanse of land was, in actuality, a bubble of another world, and it is always best to have on proper shoes for other worlds. The canyon was a wood, and within it she found herself walking through rampant ruins of an ancient Roman villa, scrunching down to fit through secret tunnels and then, at the other end, stretching out to look for the waterfalls. How lovely to be an element here, she thought as the wind carried a tiny spray from the waterfalls above her. She could be anything at all that she wanted to be in this place, air or water or even earth, although probably not fire, she decided, looking around at all that grew around her.

I must remember all of this, she told herself. She felt an almost-forgotten, finger-tingling, chest-filling urge to write something down. Her fingers danced on the entrance to the second stone cave, and then through the grotto she found herself at the water’s source, a bed of the Aniene River. Looking up, up, up at the leafy trees and silver-backed plants that seemed to have peaceably grown over everything, and with the thrum of the falls in her ears, she could see in the distance above her head the temples at the edge of the canyon, the ones in honor of, according to the nice guide she had encountered on the way in, mysterious deities.

“They could be to Vesta, the virgin goddess, or to Hercules, who protected the Tibur, or to the Tiburtine Sibyl,” he had exclaimed gaily, one chubby finger pointing toward the two white structures on the other side of the water. “Best if you decide for yourself.”

The ancient villa and gardens of the Emperor Hadrian, known in Italian as Villa Adriana, took her longer to reach than she had thought, mostly because she got herself thoroughly lost. Hadrian’s retreat from the city he had ruled for a time was vast, dotted with ruins and pools—no fools, the ancient emperors—and alternated between haunting and enchanting, with gnarled trees growing over the landscape and a lost temple at seemingly every turn. Little, looking at one such veneration, wondered what it must feel like to be a forgotten god.

She busied herself climbing around the ancient structures, trying to be as respectful as it is possible to be in the house of the old while also sweating profusely under a lion sun. Since there weren’t many visitors to the grounds, it was easy enough for her to pretend that she was an ancient warrior out finding her luck, seeing as she did not so much fancy the idea of being the woman who waited at home for the aforementioned warrior.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.