THE PATIENT WAIT OF THE STONES

Charming memoir of life in a tiny Italian town that hasn’t been overrun by tourists—yet.

One-time teacher and bookseller Romani’s memoir isn’t overly long, but he packs a great deal into it. One storyline concerns his arrival with his wife and partner in translating Italian poetry in a forgotten corner of Tuscany and making a home in a decrepit, all but abandoned house. “When we learned that the price of the house was compatible with our meager finances, we let enthusiasm prevail,” Romani writes, an enthusiasm that soon found him rebuilding collapsed stone walls and making the home habitable. That building stood in the shadow of an old borgo, or castle, that itself had been partially rehabilitated by an eccentric man known as the Professor, who tells the newcomers, “I was a doctor, pharmacologist, university professor, industrial manager—did you know this?” The Professor had also walked away from it all to spend the rest of his days rebuilding his castle and amassing a huge library of books that, he says in a lovely moment, rebuilt him “as though they were stones and rocks making of me their monument.” The stones of the title figure in many ways, from Romani’s slow education in the art of stonemasonry to the headstones that will come to mark the passage of the Professor—and in time the author—to the next realm: “My ashes will find a resting place at the foot of my stone wall, patiently waiting.” While portions of the book are given over to meditations on death, Romani also writes of the delightful rebirth of his small town with the arrival of expats—“Dutch, Russian, French, Belgian”—who, with Romani, are “forming a new community” with lessons for the world.

A life-affirming account of reinvention, learning, books, love, death—and, of course, plenty of stones.