The house was situated on the green slope of the base of the highest mountain in the area, Mount Mucrone. The slope overlooks the road that leads to the industrial city and extends all the way down to the foothills. The house itself was set quite apart, some three kilometers from the village to which it was connected a by broad dirt road whose curves were reinforced with stone walls.

The area before the house was graveled and sheltered by a few maples planted along a metal fence with, on one side, a little vegetable garden. The late owner had obviously limited his gardening to keeping the paths between the beds free of weeds. On both sides of the plot the walls were buried under a thick and abundant cover of ivy and Virginia creeper. The back rooms were always dark and opened directly onto the steep hillside where grew whole bushes of faded brambles and scrub burned by the sun. Given that it would have been easy to break in through the back, the windows on that side were barred; but even without them, the slope that cut off the view made these rooms look like a freely-chosen monastic enclosure.

I chose to settle into the front room on the ground floor, the only one in which a trace of life indicated that its previous occupant had also preferred it. In the gap between two maples one could make out the valley of the Elvo and its dark green copses, the lighter stretches of fields, the red dots of roofs circling the church towers, and, on the far horizon, the pale chimneys of the castles that topped the hills.

Though spacious and comfortable, the room had but a single window, and it afforded too little light to dissipate the darkness which reigned in the room from dawn to dusk, or to dry the damp stains in its corners. The furniture was worm-eaten; the chairs and sofa were covered in shabby cracked leather; there were thick cobwebs on the mantelpiece and the book-case. The mirror over the cupboard, with its once-upon-a-time gilt frame, reflected one's face as though through a cloud of soot. All this was in perfect harmony with the Piranesi etchings on the walls. Anyone who has seen those pictures even once knows of Piranesi's love of ruins and the art with which he made them look like flesh falling from bone. In his learned essay on Piranesi's Prisonsk, Aldous Huxley says Piranesi's drawings are the expression of a complete uselessness: 'The stairs lead nowhere, the ceilings support nothing.'

Another, much smaller, etching hung over a little table by the window. It was unsigned, the artist was unknown. The etching showed a tower against a backdrop of clouds. The tower was pierced by a few narrow windows that rose from the middle of a hexagonal building, itself surrounded by a high wall. It was a landscape of death, so desolate, speaking of such silent sorrow—the stone crown of the tower rose like a fist against the dark clouds in the sky—that alongside it Piranesi seemed a bucolic painter of classical remains. On the table, between two silver candlesticks, was a dusty little book, all crumpled and spotted with wax. It was not difficult to see that it had for years been the favorite reading of the previous occupant. The book was François-Xavier de Maistre's The Leper of Aosta in an Italian translation published in an edition of fifty copies in Naples in 1828. The translator had retained the epigraph from James Thomson's Seasons: