The Mummies of Casteldurante

Montemonaco, a small paesetto strewn haphazardly about the upper slopes of jagged Mt. Vettore in the western Marches region of Italy, was not so much a village as a loose collection of agricultural concerns -- vineyards, olive groves, scrubby orchards of chestnut and hazel bushes, and various grazing operations. These were owned by perhaps a dozen families, all of whom had inhabited those same heights since before the time of the Romans. What organized this bucolic confusion into a community was the existence, at its epicenter, of the small stone church of Sant'Agata, which had appropriated as its own the foundation of a rustic temple to Helius, the god of the sun.

One of these dozen or so families was the Umbellini. Their rambling mud and straw farmhouse, crumbling portions of which dated back to the second century A.D., lay a brisk ten minute walk up the mountain from Sant'Agata. At the time the event in question took place Umberto Umbellino was the patriarch of the family. He was a short, bandy-legged man with a long torso -- grizzled, humorous, and notably deficient in teeth. In addition to tending to the ancient proliferation of olive trees that surrounded the house, gnarled as old men, and the small vineyard, he was a renowned hunter and trapper --wolves, whose pelts were much prized, abounded in those days, and boar and deer and martens of various sorts.

His wife Esperanza, a sturdy, blocky woman with iron gray hair that she wore in a thick braid and a face that drooped slightly on the left side, kept a prize herd of goats and sold what cheese and milk the family could not eat. Of the seven children she bore Umberto, five had survived: two teenage girls, Concetta and Mariuccia, and three younger boys, Carmine, Emilio, and Rinardo. These boys were rarely apart and functioned much like a rowdy dog pack -- they were raucous in their enthusiasm and most often perceived as a blur of motion.

The Umbellini had always been the most prosperous family in Montemonaco. Their olive grove was the largest and the best producing in the region -- the oil Umberto pressed was light and fruity and green. The verdicchio he squeezed from his grapes was known for its clarity and the mistà he distilled from the verdicchio for its extreme potency. Esperanza's goats were famous for the sweetness of their milk, the creamy tartness of their cheese and their sublime good looks -- hers was the prettiest herd of goats in all the Marches.

The Umbellini's holdings were extensive and well situated to receive the benefits of weather and their house, if rustic, was large and commodious. There could be no doubt about it; their part of the mountain was generous in its gifts -- cheese, bread and olives, grapes for wine, game that was always plentiful. They were good stewards of the land, as their forebears had also been, and they had not learned to want what it could not easily give them.

As for gold and silver, which everyone sometimes requires, there was the annual truffle hunt. In the fall, the entire village of Montemonaco mustered dogs and pigs and spread out over the limestone mountains to hunt for truffles among the scrubby woods of white oak and manna ash and hornbeam. The Umbellini, having the best pigs and the best dogs, always harvested the most and the best truffles. The men would then take the autumnal harvest of succulent, pallid fungi to the valley towns below to sell at market for a price that took their breath away. To the Montemona ci, the inhabitants of such towns -- Urbino and Casteldurante and Fossombrone -- were fools. Who else would pay such ridiculously inflated prices for things that were, after all, second cousins once removed to soil, moss and bark?

Yes, the Umbellini lacked for nothing. And there was a reason for this. For generations, indeed, since the fourth century Anno Domini, they had served as the gatekeepers to the Grotto delle Fate.

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2008/Melissa Hardy