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The Saint’s Staircase hangs down from the cliffs of Valetto, spiraling into thin air. It’s all that remains of the house in Umbria where a disciple of St. Francis of Assisi lived until 1695, when a massive earthquake cleaved a third of the town into the canyons below. Because Valetto sits on a pedestal of volcanic rock—an island jutting up from the valley floor—the spiral staircase appears to float, a twist of wrought iron eerily suspended between the chestnut groves below and the twelfth-century church spire above.
Over the centuries, as Valetto has dwindled from a town of three thousand to just ten full-time residents, including my mother’s family, the staircase has become a favorite spot for reckless tourists and ruminating locals. Some have claimed otherworldly vistas from the stairs: apparitions of the medieval saint or visitations from the dead. As a boy, when I visited the town during the summers, I’d get up early to see the fog rolling up the riverine mouth of the valley, and climb down onto the bottom lip of the stairwell so I could stand sheathed inside a cloud for fifteen minutes, watching my hands slowly disappear at the railing.
But then one morning, as I descended, my throat thickened with dread as an enormous figure loomed toward me through the haze. And that feeling returned over the years. It came for me on suspension bridges and high rooftops, in an elevator stuck between floors, and in the waiting rooms of hospitals. I’d find myself descending through that fog, halfway down the stairs and filling with dread before I reminded myself that it was all a trick of light and perspective, that it wasn’t real. So many times, I told myself that figure must have been simply a shaft of early sunlight glinting down the aperture of the narrow valley, projecting and refracting my silhouette into a cloud of vapor. Still, I avoided the stairwell until one harrowing November night nearly four decades later.
* * *
I specialize in abandonment. This had always been my quip at academic conferences and faculty gatherings, but it wasn’t until I published a book about vanishing Italian towns and villages that people realized how serious I was. Famous for Dying: A Social History of Abandoned Italy was well reviewed in the journals and sparked a series of invitations from universities in Rome, Milan, and Turin. And so, after a two-year absence, I found myself preparing to return to Italy for six months in the autumn of 2011.
Between conference panels and guest lectures, I intended to revisit some of the places where I’d done my research over the course of many summers. From Craco in the south, to the hillsides of Umbria and northern Piedmont, I’d walked along empty cobblestone streets and overgrown trails, taking photographs and interviewing current and former residents, including my aunts and my grandmother. Sometimes there was a single holdout, like the hermit in Abruzzo who’d lived in a deconsecrated church for twenty-five years, and sometimes there were a few families left, or no one at all. And although the towns and villages all had their own abandonment stories—landslides, earthquakes, the ravages of time and urbanization—there was always somebody who dreamed of a comeback, a return. That hope, however naïve, is perhaps what drew me to these desolate places to begin with: the heroic idea of going up against history.
On my college campus in Michigan, my “desolation book project” was celebrated as its own comeback of sorts. I’d lost my wife and mother within a four-year span, and so it was said I’d written an important social history from the crucible of my own grief. Just before I flew to Rome, the dean of liberal arts, a Beowulf specialist who spoke some Italian, hosted a small going-away party for me and gave a toast that ended with in bocca al lupo!, into the mouth of the wolf! Technically, this means good luck in Italian, but leaving his mouth it took on an Anglo-Saxon menace—violent and foreboding—as if he were rallying me into the carnivorous maw of the future, as if he knew that something was waiting to swallow me whole.
That swallowing began with an email from my aunt Iris the night before my flight. My mother had died a year earlier and left me the stone cottage behind her family’s medieval villa in Umbria. For six months, Valetto and the cottage would be my home, just as it had been during my childhood summers. Iris lived in the villa with her sisters, Violet and Rose, all of them elderly and widowed, and my ninety-nine-year-old grandmother. The email’s subject line read Una Occupante Abusiva, and it took me a moment to port the phrase into English and realize it meant a squatter. A female squatter, to be precise. In her winding, academic Italian—Iris was a retired sociology professor—she explained that a middle-aged woman, a northerner, had recently shown up at the villa with some correspondence from Aldo Serafino, my maternal grandfather, and taken up residence in my mother’s cottage.
During World War II, Aldo had sympathized with the partisans—an umbrella group of Italians resisting the fascists and occupying Germans—but he went into hiding in the spring of 1944 and was never heard from again. My grandmother had attempted to find him during and after the war but eventually she gave up. The woman from the north asserted that her family had been promised the stone cottage at the back of the villa in exchange for the assistance they’d afforded Aldo, who’d joined the resistance movement in Piedmont. She intended, nearly three-quarters of a century later, to take up her family’s rightful claim.
* * *
After spending a weekend in Rome with my daughter, Susan, I took the train to Orvieto, where Milo Scorza, the villa’s handyman, was scheduled to pick me up. Susan was completing a Ph.D. in England and had to get back for a conference, but she would return later in the month for my grandmother’s hundredth birthday. And so I found myself alone in my second-class car, looking out the window and occasionally paging through Luigi Barzini’s The Italians, a neglected classic that chronicled the nation’s quirks and obsessions. It was a book I hadn’t read since I was a teenager, when I was first trying to demystify my mother and her Umbrian family.
Copyright © 2023 by Dominic Smith
