‘That’s up in the north,’ Giacomo reassured her. ‘Turin, Milan, Genoa. Not here.’
‘The Anglo-Americans bombed Naples the other day,’ she interjected. ‘I heard about it on the radio. Who’s to say they won’t bomb Florence too?’
‘The day may come, of course, when they do bomb Florence, but it has no real strategic importance. The Allies’ chief targets are our troops fighting in Russia and North Africa, plus our industrial heartlands in the north.’
‘How can you be so calm?’ Luisa snapped.
‘What is the point of becoming exercised?’ Giacomo said, glancing at her over the top of his newspaper. ‘Our government is intent on a mad strategy which is doomed to failure. I sincerely hope the whole fiasco will be over soon – before too many young men are sacrificed on the altar of Mussolini’s ego.’
Luisa slumped back down into her cane chair, her dark brown eyes filling with tears. Giacomo patiently folded his newspaper, laid it on the side table, and crossed over to her. He knelt down at Luisa’s side and took her hands in his.
‘Look, my darling. If things do get bad in Florence we can always move back here to the villa. But, in the meantime, let the girl continue her education.’
Luisa, who was not to be so easily placated, changed tack. ‘And another thing – who will look after Alberto if we go away? You know how helpless your father is.’
‘Angela will take care of him,’ Giacomo suggested sensibly, as he sat back down again.
‘She’s getting too old,’ Luisa insisted. ‘And her cooking is appalling… and Gino’s is no better.’ Gino was Angela’s elderly husband who tended the gardens of the villa.
‘Well,’ said Giacomo, finally becoming exasperated, ‘if you really don’t want to come, you can stay in the country with my father, and Livia and I will live in the city alone. I’m sure we’ll manage.’
‘What a ridiculous idea!’ Luisa protested. ‘You are as bad as Alberto – incapable of looking after yourself. And Livia is just a young girl; she needs her mother.’
‘So we are agreed then,’ said Giacomo smiling, ‘we shall all live in Florence together.’
Luisa could see any further argument was pointless. Over the following days, she resentfully packed various essentials: suitcases filled with clothes and extra linen for the beds, along with her sewing basket, cooking utensils and supplies from the larder. Finally, with their possessions safely stowed in Giacomo’s old black Lancia, they gathered outside the villa, Luisa tearfully hugging her father-in-law and offering last-minute instructions to Angela and Gino, before they climbed into the car and drove away down the winding road to Florence.
They arrived outside the apartment building late in the afternoon. It was an exceptionally hot day and the city throbbed with late summer heat. Luisa sweated slightly beneath her summer straw hat, and as they unloaded their suitcases and baskets of provisions, piling them up in the entrance hall on the ground floor of the building, Livia braced herself for her mother’s inevitable outburst.
‘Oh Giacomo, why have we come here?’ Luisa complained, leaning against the cool walls of the lobby, removing her hat and wiping her brow with a lace handkerchief she kept in her sleeve. ‘It’s so hot in the city, and these stairs to the apartment will kill me.’ She gazed up at the staircase winding its way inexorably to the top of the building. ‘Five flights – how are we to manage? I can’t think why your family didn’t buy an apartment on the ground floor. Perhaps we should have stayed in the country after all.’
Giacomo put down a large brown leather suitcase and cupped her face in his hands. ‘Luisa my dear, we’re here for Livia, remember. Come… give me your case to carry. Let’s get everything upstairs.’
With their belongings in an untidy pile on the landing outside the apartment, Giacomo wrestled with the multiple locks on the heavy chestnut door. As the last of them gave way, the family almost fell into the tiny entrance hall. Sunlight filtered through a pair of glazed double doors that led to the sitting room, illuminating the dust-filled atmosphere.
Giacomo dropped their bags on the floor, and walked purposefully through to the sitting room, where he opened the windows and unlocked the shutters. The room flooded with air and light, revealing a charmingly proportioned room ideal for a small family. A long biscuit-coloured linen sofa stood against one wall, opposite two armchairs with cane backs, upholstered in dark-red velvet. A pair of dark, impressive portraits of Giacomo’s grandparents hung on the wall between the two windows.
While her mother began to unload baskets of provisions in the small kitchen, Livia walked down the corridor, inspecting the rest of the apartment. A bathroom stood on the left-hand side. It was dark, tiled and entirely functional. Next to this stood her father’s bedroom. It had none of the femininity of her parents’ bedroom in the villa, with its painted furniture and flowered linens. Standing in the doorway, Livia noted the small double bed covered with a dull green bedcover and a bedside table, on which stood an untidy pile of papers, jostling for position with a reading lamp. The only other furniture was a wardrobe. Opening it, Livia found it contained nothing more than a spare dark suit, some items of underwear, and a handful of shirts still in their wrapping from the laundry. She carried on down the corridor towards her father’s study. This room, which overlooked the street below, would now be her bedroom. Beneath the shuttered window stood Giacomo’s desk. It was covered with books and papers, and a bookcase along one long wall was filled with legal textbooks – so much so, that it had virtually collapsed under their weight. Further books stood in tottering piles on the floor. A tiny daybed, where Livia would now sleep, was wedged against the opposite wall, covered in a dark-red toile fabric that seemed strangely out of keeping with the rest of the apartment; Livia presumed her mother, or possibly her long-dead grandmother, had chosen it. She laid her suitcase on the bed and began to hang up her clothes in the wardrobe.
Those first few days in the apartment were a whirlwind of cleaning and sorting. Livia and Luisa stripped the beds and made them up with the fresh linen brought from the villa. Slowly a pile of dirty washing accumulated on the kitchen floor.
‘Before the war, I had an arrangement with a laundry round the corner,’ Luisa sighed. ‘Your father would drop his shirts in to them on his way to work – and once a fortnight they’d wash his sheets. But the thought of staggering down all those stairs carrying all of this seems impossible.’ She gazed down at the untidy mountain of washing. ‘I think it would be easier if we washed it ourselves.’
‘But where will we dry it all?’ Livia asked sensibly. ‘Should we hang a line across the front of the house, between the windows?’ On their way through the outskirts of the city, she had noticed how people strung up their washing lines between apartments.
‘Absolutely not!’ her mother retorted. ‘What a disgraceful suggestion – we are not peasants, Livia. No, we shall dry the laundry on the roof terrace.’
‘Do we have a roof terrace?’ Livia asked.
Her mother took a set of keys from a kitchen cabinet, and unlocked a narrow door at one end of the hall. Livia had assumed this was merely a cleaning cupboard, but as Luisa opened the door, Livia was surprised to find a set of steep stone steps leading upwards.