Chapter One

Chapter 1
Pizza with Palladio

“Signora Sally, tonight we’re going to a celebration of pizza!”

Silvana Miolo’s lilting Italian greets me as I sip my morning espresso on the south portico of Villa Cornaro. The low morning sun splashes shadows of Lombardy poplars across the lawn of the park. Swallows circle and swoop bare inches above the closely mown lawn, scooping insects from the warming air, then spiraling upward to reclaim their nests somewhere above my head. Note to diary: Birds nesting in attic? Investigate.

“Una celebrazione di pizza”? Is that what she said?

Silvana senses my puzzlement and quickly finds an alternative way to frame her news. The event, I learn upon retelling, will be a pizza party.

Silvana is a dervish of energy. Dark eyes, dramatized by thick lashes and wavy black hair, animate her face. She has been friend, Italian teacher, and villa savant since I cautiously drove the twenty miles from the Venice airport two weeks ago for my first spring

at the villa. (“Remember, the lady of a villa is called a villainess,” my husband, Carl, advised me soberly as we kissed good-bye in Atlanta.)

Carl will join me in a few weeks. I am alone for now in the

sixteenth-century villa designed by the architect Andrea Palladio that we have audaciously acquired in the village of Piombino Dese, halfway to the foothills northwest of Venice. Silvana is determined that I not feel lonely; when I arrived from the airport she sent her ten-year-old son Riccardo to keep me company while I unpacked.

Silvana’s improbable plans for the evening have me uneasy because of my own rec