Read Online Summer in Tuscany by Elizabeth Adler - Free Book Online

the skeptic, this is too cute to be true. I mean, if you had a picture postcard of the dream Tuscan village inn, this was it!
    We pushed through a bead door curtain into a long, low-beamed room with terra-cotta tiled floors and the original stone walls. To our left was a dining room, just a half-dozen tables with bright green cloths and little jugs of frilly pink carnations. On our right was a small sitting area with a beat-up green leather sofa, two hard-looking high-backed chairs, and an assortment of little tables topped with dinky lamps and a small TV set. A row of stunted cacti stood under the windows, and on the far wall we could see the iron feeding troughs from when the inn was still a cow barn.
    “Buon giorno,” Nonna called, pressing the bell near the door. It clanged loud as a fire engine in the silence, and a young girl hidden in a cubbyhole under the staircase shrieked and leaped about two feet into the air.
    She was small and skinny with round brown eyes. Her black hair was short and uneven, her skin was so pale she might never have seen the light of day, and her mouth was a small pink O of surprise. She looked exactly like an urchin in an Italian movie.
    “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.” I smiled.
    She waved her hands wildly in the air. “Prego, un momento, signore,” she cried, then shot past us and through a door at the back marked CUCINA . In a second the door flew open again, and another small round woman shot out. She was a replica of her daughter: same round dark eyes, same round little mouth, same uneven haircut. But this woman was fat, and she was very much in charge. She squeezed herself behind the pine counter under the stairs, drying her hands on her apron and looking expectantly at us. “Prego, signore?”
    Nonna frowned. She leaned over the counter to get a closer look. “Scusi, signora,” she said, “but I know your face. You must be related to the Ambrosinis. Carlino and Maria Carmen. They lived at the top of Vicolo ’Scuro.”
    “ Sì, it’s true. They were my grandparents. I’m Amalia Posoli.”
    Nonna clutched a hand to her pounding heart. “I went to school with your mother, Renata. We lived next door. I haven’t seen her since we were girls. I was Sophia Maria Lorenza Corsini then. Now, of course, I am signora Jericho, and a widow. I’ve traveled from New York to visit Bella Piacere, my old village, again. Before I die,” she added, as I noticed she always did, a hand still clutched dramatically to her breast.
    Livvie rolled her eyes at me, but Amalia thumped an enthusiastic fist on the pine counter, making it tremble. “What a surprise my mother will have to see you again, signora Jericho. Welcome home, welcome. Mamma will be so excited. She married Ricardo Posoli. Remember him?”
    “ Ricci Posoli?” Nonna beamed. “Of course I remember him, long and skinny as a string bean, and Renata was short and round.”
    Amalia laughed, because it was true. “I’ll show you to your rooms. I have the reservations right here.” She pointed to the school exercise book that was the hotel register. “Then, when you are ready, I will take you to see Mamma. She will be so excited. Madonnina mia! What a surprise it will be.”
    Nonna had a big square room with a window overlooking a grape arbor and an overgrown garden, where tiny tomatoes clung like scarlet roses to the hot stone walls, looking ready to burst with ripeness, and zucchini in rampant yellow bloom triumphed over a patch of struggling lettuces. Livvie had a cute flowery room at the front, and my own room, linked to Livvie’s by a bathroom, was all white. White walls, white lace curtains, white linen coverlet.
    Like a virgin’s room, I thought, bouncing on the bed to test it. And of course it might as well have been. I grinned as it squeaked and groaned. Nobody could lose their virginity in here without half the hotel knowing about it; I’d have to hold my breath every time I turned over for fear of waking other