Giovanni took Jess on a whirlwind exploration of the castle, explaining when each wall and tower had been built, what battles had been fought and won. They stopped in at the kitchens first, where he explained they only had evening staff for three nights a week, usually for the guests. He mostly cooked his own food.
Then he took her on a quick march around the periphery of the outer walls, through the olive groves, pointing out the vineyards that stretched down the sides of the mountain. Olive oil was still an important family business, he said, as well as the wine that the estate produced. From there they went down below, into the catacombs of the wine cellars, ancient Etruscan caves carved out thousands of years ago. For three thousand years, he said, the caves had withstood every earthquake and disaster Mother Nature threw at them.
They ended the tour at the southwest corner, the highest point where the top of the castle walls met the peak of the mountain. They climbed up through one of the tunnels to a ledge, then up a ladder to the top. A cable stretched across the small valley to the next property, a much smaller castello on the side of a hill opposite, so that a small cable car could be ferried across. Below, the town of Saline nestled in the foothills. The view to the west was breathtaking, the flat plains of Tuscany stretching into the distance, the Mediterranean visible as a blue line on the horizon forty miles away.
“Is that your property as well?” Jess asked, squinting down the length of the cable that strung across the valley, looking at the smaller castello on the opposite side.
“No,” Giovanni replied, then corrected himself. “Well, yes, it is, but much more recent. We’ve only owned it for a hundred years.” He grinned. “A new addition. We built the cable car to connect them.”
“A new addition?” Jess held one hand over her eyes to shield the sun, taking a closer look at the structure on the other side of the gorge. “What, you bought it?”
The grin evaporated from Giovanni’s face. “Not exactly, it was…” He looked away, exhaling, then looked back at Jess. “It was a rival family, but they left.”
Jess glanced at him, noticed a strange look in his eyes. “Like a feud?”
“Yes, like that.”
“Huh.” Jess shook her head, not sure what to say. She shifted her gaze down the cliff wall under the cable car shack where they’d come from. It was thirty feet of sheer rock, with a large grassy ledge at least twenty feet across, then a drop of a few hundred feet beyond that. “Great for rock climbing,” she observed.
“Jessica, I do have another confession.”
She was still staring down the rock wall, her mind constructing possible routes for climbing up it. “What’s that?”
“Yesterday, at the museum, I overheard you telling your mother that your boyfriend hit you, that you needed money.”
Lifting her head up from looking down the cliff face, Jess shielded her eyes again from the setting sun. “Is that why you’re being so nice to me?”
“Partly.” Giovanni nodded.
“And the other part?”
Giovanni looked uncomfortable. “The videos of you on YouTube, the famous American girl, BASE jumping, sky diving and rock climbing, the…” His voice faltered.
“What, the cripple?” Jess finished the sentence for him. Her cheeks flushed, and she struggled to keep her temper from flaring. He was being nice. He didn’t mean anything.
“Sorry, I don’t know—”
“It’s okay. Disabled, that would be the right word. But I’m not a cripple. I don’t need any special treatment.”
Shaking his head, Giovanni agreed, “No, you are no cripple. I was so surprised when I saw you here. You are magnificent, beautiful.” He winced. “Sorry, my English is a little rusty, perhaps not the right words?”
Jess laughed, her flash of temper burning into one of embarrassment. “No, those are nice words.”
Giovanni’s smile returned. “I was wondering if you might do me a favor.”
Squinting into the sun, Jess took a long look at him. “What did you have in mind?”
“If you might give my little Hector a rock climbing lesson, perhaps?”
She looked down the rock face. “What, now?”
Giovanni looked down. “Yes. I have all the equipment. We could set a top rope, no?”
She looked down at the rock face. “Sure, we could do that. One thing though.”
The Baron looked at her. “Anything.”
“If we’re going to be friends, call me Jess, okay?”
Giovanni stored his climbing equipment just inside the doorway of a tunnel carved into the side of the rock face, on the twenty-foot-wide ledge of grass below the cable car station. While he went to fetch Hector and Nico, Jess set up two ropes from a metal gantry sticking out from the top of the cliff face, and having enough cord, she also rigged a rope swing from the cable car platform to let someone drop from there to the grassy ledge thirty feet below.