Sunlight Changed Everything

Opening the shutters and letting the sunshine in changed my perspective completely. The house suddenly went from a dark, dank, creepy structure to a house with promise. I was obviously in what was originally a bedroom. How did I know? Because the bed was still in it! Funny thing about Italy…when people move, they tend to leave behind anything that they don’t want and don’t want to bother moving! Furniture, junk, trash, all sorts of stuff. I looked around the room in disbelief. Maurizio crossed over to the opposite room and opened the windows and shutters. That “room”, he explained, was a garage. It was a completely unfinished stonewalled room with concrete floors, old pallets and trash. Yikes! Okay, moving on, he proceed to move room to room opening windows and shutters throughout.

The house was laid out in what is known as a “foursquare” layout. It’s basically a house with a square design, two stories high, usually with four “boxy” rooms to a floor. Two rooms in the front and two in the back with a hallway running down the middle upstairs and down. I was starting to envision what it could be. I guess one could consider that it was four rooms on the ground floor, but two of the “rooms” were a garage and a junky old store room in the back of it. The back room behind the first bedroom was set up as a kitchen, which was confusing to me.

I climbed the old stone staircase to the second floor, following Maurizio. The upstairs made a bit more sense. Four defined rooms all with crumbling walls and concrete floors, a hallway down the middle and each separate room had a short, very old door. At the front of the hallway was a French door leading to a very small, very precarious “balcony”. I bravely stepped through the door and onto the balcony.