In Maremma. David Leavitt

      6

      BECAUSE WE HAD been living for half a dozen years in furnished or semifurnished apartments when we bought Podere Fiume, the only furniture we owned was a cornflower-blue sofa and a pair of leather library chairs, which we intended to put in the living room; a desk with chestnut legs and a top of Ligurian pietra serena; a Bokara carpet; four neo-Gustavian chairs with unupholstered seats; and a bed. This is how we came to meet Olimpia Orsini.

      An interior designer of some repute in Rome, Olimpia also owned a little shop that she refused to call a shop—it was her “studio,” she insisted—on Via del Boschetto. (She referred to herself not as a “designer” but as an “interior,” which, considered together with the fact that she had taken a degree in psychology, was appropriate.) A few months after we met her, she transferred her shop to a small street just off Via Marguta, where some of the most expensive antique stores in Rome are located, and had business cards printed on which she gave her address as “Vicolo dell’Orto di Napoli (Via Marguta).” Such a street name must have seemed an augur of good things to Olimpia, who was from Naples. Her age was difficult to determine—anywhere between forty-five and sixty, we figured. She had long dark-blond hair, wore Chanel suits in even the most inclement weather, and smoked incessantly.

      After we moved to Podere Fiume, we asked Renato, the aristocracy-obsessed owner of the antique shop at the Terme di Saturnia, if he knew her. “The Countess Orsini?” he asked excitedly. The Orsinis, he reminded us, were a noble Tuscan family; an Orsini had built the fantastic and eerie statuary garden at Bomarzo; there was an Orsini stronghold not far from us, in Pitigliano.

      To these Orsinis, Olimpia bore the same relation that Tess does to the d‘Urbervilles: that is to say, none at all. In fact, Olimpia was not her real name—it was Marilena—and even this Elizabeth had discovered only because she had happened to glimpse her carta d’identità one afternoon when it was lying on the desk of her shop. Her husband, Puccio, was a retired Alitalia pilot—“the sort of man,” Domenico said, “who always has four or five million lire in his pocket”—and such was his devotion to Olimpia that, rather than relaxing in his retirement, he spent most of his time driving around Rome on a Vespa doing commissions for her. “Puccio,” she might instruct, “take these chairs over to Luigi’s workshop.”

      “Si, bella,” he would answer, strap a pair of gilt-trimmed armchairs onto his Vespa, and zoom off. (They had a son in his early twenties whom we never saw. “I could never have a daughter,” Olimpia told us. “I like being the only hen in the coop.”)

      That Olimpia had wonderful, eclectic taste was indisputable. Her shop was always full of curious and unlikely pieces: Venetian mercury mirrors edged with seashells, bronze lamps with classical figures in high relief, chairs upon the legs of which mermen and mermaids disported themselves, panels of antique wallpaper and toile de Jouy, a leopard skin with taxidermied head draped nonchalantly across the back of a dormeuse. Olimpia upholstered all the furniture in her shop in the plainest muslin. Nothing was dark, and no wood was wood-colored. Chairs that she brought into the shop in dreadful condition, grimy from years of neglect, she would “refresh” simply by stitching some thousand-lire-a-meter cotton on to the worn cushions and slapping the wood with white paint. In her fondness for white, if in no other regard, she echoed Gigliola. Both women echoed the famous English designer Syrie Maugham. (Olimpia’s failure, however, to replace the old horsehair-and-straw stuffing in some of these chairs considerably distressed Luigi, the upholsterer, who considered them unhygienic.)

      From Olimpia, we ended up buying a couple of side tables and a derelict but magnificent eighteenth-century carved-wood-and-gesso sofa from Venice, which had managed to escape the attentions of her paintbrush only by virtue of its extraordinary color—the most subtle of gray greens. We also bought a pair of white armchairs that were intended for the winter garden—a room occupying an arcaded space where farm equipment was formerly stored. (These chairs were something of a wish fulfillment for MM, who, when being taught perspective in high school art class, had drawn, in one-point perspective, a chair in the very style of those we’d bought from Olimpia. Although the drawing was done in dark gray pencil, his mother helped him to frame it with a mat the color of one of the stripes of the fabric that covered the seat and back of the chair that had been his model.) Unfortunately, their stuffing smelled, and Tolo displayed from the very beginning a great fondness for sleeping on them. We asked Olimpia if she would buy them back or, short of that, sell them on our behalf, which she did in four days.