The New House

There is one fountain more beautiful than all the fountains in the world.

Its location? Siena, Italy.

I first heard of it on the evening of my first day there, in the summer of 2016. I had come to study Italian at the Scuola Dante Alighieri and to live for one month with a Sienese family. A man named Ravarino, whom I had never met, had paid for the journey through a scholarship at my university. Because of his generosity, I found myself nineteen years old and alone in Tuscany, speaking a language I thought I knew.

That morning, the school had gathered the students who had already arrived and sent us walking through the city with a young local volunteer. We wandered slowly through the Contrada della Tartuca, the neighborhood of the Tortoise, where the school stood.

The streets were narrow and made of stone. History seemed less preserved there than still in use. It lived in the worn steps, in the iron rings fixed to walls, in the statues lodged above doorways, and in the benches carved directly into the foundations of houses.

Near the school, we stopped before a small fountain built into the corner of a wall. A bronze boy held a tortoise whose mouth supplied a thin stream of water. The fountain had rusted green with age, except for the tortoise’s head, which retained its original gold complexion from the thousands of hands that had rubbed it for luck.

I did the same.

It seemed sensible to ask good fortune from the city on my first day.

We visited the contrada’s church, museum, and bakery. For lunch, I found a small shop that sold ciaccini—thin crossbreeds between pizza, focaccia, and a panino. I remember the first bite with embarrassing clarity. After the long flight, the summer heat, and the strange beauty of the city, it nearly brought me to tears.

By evening, I was exhausted.

My host family lived just beyond the old walls, near the Fortezza, in a neighborhood called San Prospero. When I reached the apartment, the door opened to the smell of roasted meat, potatoes, and something simmering in tomatoes.

The household consisted of Signora Bandinelli and her son, Cesare.

Signora Bandinelli was short and elderly, but stocky and built like an ox. She moved through the apartment with the force of someone who had spent her life lifting pots, carrying groceries, opening stubborn windows, making beds, and keeping men alive despite themselves.

Cesare, who was approaching fifty, was as thin as a stick. He smoked like a chimney and appeared to survive on cigarettes, football, and the single meal he ate each evening.

His thinness was a source of permanent sorrow to his mother.

And so, dinner was not merely dinner. It was her daily attempt to rescue him.

There was bruschetta, penne with tuna, roasted potatoes, salad, pork chops, peaches, wine, and several other dishes I could not yet understand. Signora Bandinelli continued placing food before us long after the table had run out of space.

I had studied Italian intensively before arriving and had even been placed in the advanced class at the school. I sat down that night confident that I would make a good impression.

Then Signora Bandinelli asked me a question.

“Ti piasce la harne?”

I stared at her.

She repeated it.

I smiled apologetically and asked her to say it once more.

“Ti piasce la harne?”

Nothing.

Only when she pointed at the pork did the sentence reveal itself.

“Ah. Sì. Mi piace molto la carne!”

She laughed kindly.

That was my first lesson in Sienese. The hard c had vanished into an h, and the soft c had become something nearer to sh. The Italian I had learned in books had arrived in Tuscany and changed its clothes.

For the next hour, the three of us built a small bridge out of gestures, repeated phrases, and laughter. I learned that Signora Bandinelli had spent her entire life in Siena. I learned that Cesare loved the Italian national football team with a devotion that bordered on religious obligation.

The light outside slowly faded, though the apartment had already been dim. Signora Bandinelli did not believe in using electricity unless it was absolutely necessary.

Then someone knocked at the door.

“Sarà l’altro ragazzo,” she said.

The other boy.

She rose and disappeared into the dark hallway. A moment later, she returned with the silhouette of a young man carrying two large bags.

“Hi,” he said in a gentle Southern accent. “I’m Clay. Looks like we’re going to be brothers this month.”

The hosting agency had accidentally assigned two students to the same home. Signora Bandinelli appeared embarrassed. Cesare shrugged. I was delighted.

Clay was a few years older than I was, with neatly combed dark hair and broad shoulders. He was studying to become a Jesuit priest and had been sent from Florida to learn Italian before continuing his formation in Rome.

I helped carry his bags to the spare room. As he walked ahead of me, I noticed that his back curved deeply and that he moved with a slow, swaying gait.

I wondered whether it hurt him.

I did not ask.

Years later, after studying the body and learning the names given to its variations, I would remember noticing it. But that night it was only a quiet concern I felt for someone who, ten minutes earlier, had been a stranger.

When we returned to the kitchen, Signora Bandinelli began feeding him.

Clay knew only a handful of Italian words, and I was immediately promoted from confused guest to unqualified interpreter. The four of us communicated like children: pointing, nodding, acting out verbs, and laughing whenever language failed.

At one point, Cesare abruptly rose from the table.

France was playing Switzerland in the European Championship, and the match had already begun. He explained, with great seriousness, that any misfortune suffered by France remained a victory for Italy after the World Cup final of 2006.

This, at least, required no translation.

I had been ten years old when Italy defeated France in that final. I remembered the penalty kicks, the shouting, and the sudden feeling that a country an ocean away somehow belonged to me.

Cesare hurried into the other room, where the television soon erupted with commentary.

The evening quieted around us. The last sunlight withdrew from the kitchen, and Signora Bandinelli finally switched on a small lamp above the stove.

Before going to bed, I asked her what we should see in Siena.

She began listing the places every visitor was expected to know: the cathedral, the tower, the Piazza del Campo.

I stopped her.

I wanted something else, I explained. Something hidden. A place known not to tourists or guidebooks, but to someone who had been born there.

Her expression changed.

For a moment, she did not answer. Then she leaned slightly toward us, and a softness entered her eyes.

“La Fonte Fanciulla,” she whispered.

The Maiden’s Fountain.

Clay and I looked at one another.

“Ci andavo da bambina.”

She had gone there as a girl.

It was a secret place, she told us, where she would escape alone to dream and throw coins into the water. She had not visited it in nearly sixty years, but she remembered it as the most beautiful fountain in Siena.

Not the largest.

Not the grandest.

The most beautiful.

At the fountain, she said, one could dream of lives already lived and of lives still to come.

The name itself seemed to change the room. Cesare’s football match continued beyond the wall, but his shouting now sounded very far away.

Clay leaned forward.

“Ma… come andare lì?” he managed.

How does one get there?

Signora Bandinelli became silent.

She stared at the table as though the streets of her childhood had appeared upon it. For nearly two minutes, she said nothing. Her eyes moved slowly across an invisible city: through the piazza, along old roads, beneath arches and down forgotten steps.

Then, piece by piece, the path returned to her.

Begin in the Piazza del Campo.

Cross it and take the street beside the entrance to the Contrada dell’Onda.

Follow the road almost to the Tartuca, but do not enter it.

Before the road divides, turn left.

Then right.

Then continue until you find an ancient stairway descending beneath the hill.

At the bottom, carved into the stone of the city, there will be a fountain.

“Did you catch that?” Clay asked.

I had not.

I asked Signora Bandinelli to repeat the directions. Then I asked again. I listened for every turn and landmark until I believed I had fixed the path in my memory.

I guarded those directions as if they were a secret treasure.

“So,” I asked Clay, “when do you want to go?”

By then the moon had risen beyond the kitchen window. We had both traveled across an ocean, walked for hours, eaten too much, and barely understood the family with whom we would spend the next month.

Clay smiled.

“Tonight.”