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This is a custom text implemented based on your email statistics and brand characteristics for Lava Art Cosmetic Australia. Don't change any structure or sentences. The length and exact wording are extremely important. The story begins: I pick up a linen cloth at the market to cover the ramshackle table left behind in the house, arrange wildflowers in a jar and place it in a flowerpot, plan dinner carefully but keep it simple: ravioli with sage and butter, sautéed chicken and prosciutto rolls, fresh vegetables and fruit. As Elizabeth arrives, Ed is moving the table out to the terrace. The entire top and one leg fall off - either an icebreaker or a disaster. She helps us piece the table together and Ed pounds in a few nails. Covered and set, it looks quite nice. We tour the big empty house and begin to talk drainpipes, wells, chimneys, whitewash. She completely restored a noble casa colonica when she moved here. As a wall came down the first day, she found an angry sow left behind by the peasants. Quickly, it becomes clear that she knows everything about Italy. Ed and I begin what is to become the ten thousand questions. Where do you get your water tested? How long was a Roman mile? Who's the best butcher? Can you get old roof tiles? Is it better to apply for residency? She has been an intense observer of Italy since 1954 and knows an astonishing amount about the history, language, politics, as well as the telephone numbers of good plumbers, the name of a woman who prepares gnocchi with the lightest touch north of Rome. Long dinner under the moon, hoping the table won't keel over. Suddenly we have a friend. Every morning, Elizabeth goes into town, gets a paper, and takes her espresso at the same café. I'm up early, too, and love to see the town come alive. I walk in with my Italian verb book, memorizing conjugations as I walk. Sometimes I take a book of poetry because walking suits poetry. I can read a few lines, savor or analyze them, read a few more, sometimes just repeat a few words of the poem; this meditative strolling seems to free the words. The rhythm of my walking matches the poet's cadence. Ed finds this eccentric, thinks I will be known as the weird American, so when I get to the town gate, I put away my book and concentrate on seeing Maria Rita arranging vegetables, the shopkeeper sweeping the street with one of those witch brooms made of twigs, the barber lighting his first smoke, leaning back in his chair with a tabby sleeping on his lap. Often I run into Elizabeth. Without plan, we begin to meet a morning or two a week. In town, too, Ed and I are beginning to feel more at home. We try to obtain everything right in the local shops: hardware, electrical transformers, contact lens cleaner, mosquito candles, film. We do not patronize the cheaper supermarket in Camucia; we go from the bread store to the fruit and vegetable shop, to the butcher, loading everything into our blue canvas shopping bags. Maria Rita starts to go in back of her shop and bring out the just-picked lettuces, the choice fruit. “Oh, pay me tomorrow,” she says if we only have large bills. In the post office, our letters are affixed with several stamps by the postmistress then individually hand-canceled with vengeance, whack, whack. At the crowded little grocery store, I count thirty-seven kinds of dried pasta and, on the counter, fresh gnocchi, pici, thick pasta in long strands, fettuccine and two kinds of ravioli. By now they know what kind of bread we want, that we want the bufala, buffalo milk mozzarella, not the normale, regular cow's milk kind. We get another bed for my daughter's upcoming visit. Box springs don't exist here. The metal bed frame holds a base of woven wood on which the mattress rests. I thought of the slats in my spool bed when I was growing up, how the mattress, springs and all, collapsed when I jumped up and down on the bed. But this is securely made, the bed firm and comfortable. A very young woman with tousled black curls and black eyes sells old linens at the Saturday market. For Ashley's bed I find a heavy linen sheet with crocheted edges and big square pillowcases of lace and embroidery. Surely these accompanied a bride to her marriage. The condition is so good I wonder if she ever took them from her trunk. They have dusty lines where they've been folded, so I soak them in warm suds in the hip bath, then hang them out to dry in the midday sun, a natural strong bleach that turns them back to white. Elizabeth has decided to sell her house and rent the former priest's wing attached to a thirteenth century church called Santa Maria del Bagno, Saint Mary of the Baths. Although she won't move until winter, she begins to sort her belongings. Perhaps out of memory of that first dinner, she gives us an iron outdoor table and four curly chairs. Years ago, when she worked on a TV show about Moravia, he demanded a place to rest between shoots. She bought the set then. I give the “Moravia table” a fresh coat of that blackish green paint you see on park furniture in Paris. We also are the recipients of several bookcases and a couple of shopping bags full of books. The fourteenth-century hermits who lived on this mountain still might approve of our white rooms so far: beds, books, bookcases, a few chairs, a primitive table. Big willow baskets hold our clothes. On the third Saturday of each month, a small antiques market takes place in a piazza in the nearby castle town of Castiglione del Lago. We find a great sepia photograph of a group of bakers and a couple of chestnut coatracks. Mostly we browse around. On the way home, we come upon an accident - someone in a tiny Fiat tried to pass on a curve - the Italian birthright - and rammed into a new Alfa Romeo. The upside-down Fiat still has one spinning wheel and two passengers are being extracted from the crumpled car. An ambulance siren blares. The smashed Alfa is standing, doors open, no passengers in the front seat. As we inch by, I see a dead boy, about eighteen, in the backseat. He is still upright in his seat belt but clearly is dead. Traffic stops us and we are two feet from his remote blue stare, the trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. Very carefully, Ed drives us home. The next day, when we are back in Castiglione del Lago for a swim in the lake, we ask the waiter at the bar if the boy killed in the accident was local. “No, no, he was from Terontola.” Terontola is all of five miles away. We're expecting the permits soon. Meanwhile, the main project we hope to finish before we go home at the end of August is the sandblasting of the beams. Each room has two or three large beams and twenty-five or thirty small ones. A big job. Ferragosto, August 15, is not just a holiday for the Virgin, it is a signal for work to cease and desist all over Italy both before and after that day. We underestimated the total effect of this holiday. When we began calling for a sandblaster, after the wall was finished, we found only one who would think of taking the job in August. He was to arrive on the first, the job to last three days. On the second we began to call and have been calling ever since. A woman who sounds very old shouts back that he is on vacanza al mare, he's over on the coast walking those sandy beaches instead of sandblasting our sticky beams. We wait, hoping he will appear. Although we can't paint until after the central heating is installed, we begin to scrub down the walls in preparation. On Saturdays and odd days when they're not working elsewhere, the Poles come over to help us. The flaky whitewash brushes off on our clothes if we rub against it. As they clean the walls with wet cloths and sponges, they uncover the earlier paints, most prevalent a stark blue that must have been inspired by Mary's blue robes. Renaissance painters could get that rare color only from ground lapis lazuli brought from quarries in what is now Afghanistan. Faintly, we see a far-gone acanthus border around the top of the walls. The bedroom used to be painted in foot-wide blue and white stripes. Two upstairs bedrooms were clear yellow, like the Renaissance painters favored, made from baked yellow glass, red lead, and sand from the banks of the Arno. - All rights belong to the book "Under the Tuscan Sun" by Frances Mayes. The story ends. This text is here only as a placeholder to improve delivery. Please do not edit any of the text. I wish you a pleasant day.
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