The Search

The street leading away from the piazza descended gradually through the Contrada dell’Onda.

The noise behind us faded with every step. Restaurants gave way to shuttered windows and dark doorways. The lamps grew farther apart, and the city seemed once again to close around us.

I repeated the directions aloud.

“Follow the road almost to the Tartuca. Before it divides, turn left. Then right. Then straight until the old steps.”

Clay nodded as though repetition might make the path appear.

For several minutes, we walked quickly. I kept to the left side of the road, searching for an opening between the buildings. Clay stayed to the right, glancing into alleys and beneath arches.

The road continued.

Then continued farther.

“How long is this road?” I asked.

Clay was breathing heavily now.

“Are you sure this is the right one?”

“Positive.”

I pointed to a stone plaque fixed to a building. The street name matched the one Signora Bandinelli had given us.

We carried on.

But the farther we went, the less her directions seemed possible.

The old city began to thin. The road widened enough for cars, and a low wall appeared along the left side to keep them from tumbling down the hillside. Beyond it lay darkness.

There could be no left turn.

I stopped.

Clay stopped beside me.

“This doesn’t make any sense.”

We stood there, staring at the wall as though a hidden passage might reveal itself if we waited long enough.

Perhaps I had misunderstood her accent.

Perhaps I had confused left and right.

Perhaps the road had changed during the sixty years since she had last walked it.

We retraced our steps slowly, examining every doorway and break in the stone.

Nothing.

At one point, I found a narrow passage and rushed toward it, certain we had succeeded. It ended after a few yards at the locked entrance of a house.

Another path descended sharply, but only into a private garden.

We returned to the road.

The fountain remained hidden.

By then, my excitement had begun to harden into embarrassment. Clay had crossed an ocean that day, eaten dinner with strangers, prayed a rosary in a language he barely knew, climbed from the bottom of Siena, and followed me down a dark road in search of a fountain that might not exist.

I had led him there with complete confidence.

Now I had no idea where we were going.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Clay looked surprised.

“For what?”

“For dragging you all the way out here.”

He smiled.

“I saw Saint Catherine’s house and the most beautiful plumbing system in Europe. I think I’m doing all right.”

I laughed, though I was still disappointed.

“We’ll ask our mother tomorrow where we went wrong.”

The words felt like an admission of defeat.

We turned back toward the Piazza del Campo.

By the time we reached it, the night had changed.

The music had stopped. Most of the families had gone home. Restaurant owners stacked chairs and swept beneath tables while waiters carried the last glasses indoors.

The piazza that had seemed so alive an hour earlier now felt enormous and indifferent.

Even the tower appeared darker.

Somewhere, a television announced the final score.

France and Switzerland had drawn.

Cesare, at least, would be disappointed.

Clay and I crossed the square in silence. We were tired enough now that each step seemed to land more heavily than the one before it.

Then a burst of laughter startled me.

It came from the far edge of the piazza, loud and rough, magnified by the curved buildings and the empty space between them.

I looked up.

Three figures sat together on a stone bench built into the wall.

At first, they appeared almost carved there: three dark shapes beneath the lamps. As we drew nearer, I saw that they were elderly men.

Each wore a coppola hat, pressed trousers, and polished shoes. Two held canes between their knees. The third leaned toward them, one hand raised in the air as he finished telling a story.

The other two erupted again.

Their laughter echoed through the piazza.

They looked impossibly old to me. Perhaps eighty. Perhaps one hundred. At nineteen, the difference seemed unimportant.

What struck me was not their age.

It was their youth.

One nudged another with his elbow. The second shook his head and laughed until he had to wipe his eyes. The third began telling the story again, speaking faster now, delighted by his own success.

For a moment, I did not see three old men.

I saw three boys who had somehow remained together long enough for their hair to turn white and their bodies to bend around canes.

I wondered what they were doing there so late.

I wondered how they had crossed the steep streets to reach the piazza.

I wondered how many nights they had sat on that same bench, and how many stories they had told one another before we happened to pass.

They may have belonged to the same contrada.

They may have been rivals.

They may have known one another since childhood or found one another only in old age.

I would never know.

But they were not merely enduring the final years of their lives.

They were living them.

All at once, I missed my grandfather.

The feeling came sharply and without warning. It was not only grief. It was the wish to see him there among them, wearing a coppola of his own, laughing beneath the tower as though age had taken nothing essential from him.

Clay and I slowed as we passed.

“Buonasera,” I said.

The three men looked up.

Their faces brightened at the sight of us, two young foreigners wandering through their city long after midnight.

“Buonanotte,” one called.

The others nodded and smiled.

We continued across the piazza.

Behind us, their laughter began again.

I glanced back once.

Of everything I had seen that night—the moonlit city, Saint Catherine’s chapel, the pilgrims and their candles, the hidden waters of Fontebranda—it was the image of those three men that remained with me most clearly.

We had not found the Maiden’s Fountain.

But I no longer felt that the night had been wasted.

Clay and I returned to San Prospero without taking any further detours.

The apartment was dark when we arrived. Cesare had gone to bed, and Signora Bandinelli had left the kitchen clean, the chairs pushed neatly beneath the table.

I said goodnight to Clay and entered my room.

The long day, the journey, and the wine settled upon me all at once. I fell into bed still wearing half my clothes.

Before sleep took me, I saw the three men beneath the tower.

Then I dreamed of a fountain hidden under the city.

Its waters moved through the stone in silence, unseen by those walking above, yet sustaining them all.