he said. He tapped a white space on the ceiling. “Your name will go right here.”
I looked up at the Montebianco family tree, at the names of my relatives painted in a florid cursive and adorned with various coats of arms of noble houses that had, over the years, merged with the Montebianco clan. The branching off of names and dates and family connections started from two names at the top—Frederick and Isabelle—and ended at the bottom, with my grandfather Giovanni and his brother, Guillaume. With the other branches of the family included, the mural funneled up over the entire ceiling.
“We’ll need to add my parents, too,” I said. “Giuliano and Barb.”
“Giuliano must have been named after this Giuliano,” Basil said, pointing to a name. “Giuliano, Prince de Condé, a cadet branch of the House of Bourbon, a dashing rake who embarrassed the family with his voracious sexual appetite. He happened to have been married to another Alberta. There were many Albertas, all named, like you were, after the first Alberta Montebianco, born to Isabelle and Frederick in the thirteenth century.”
I glanced at the union of Alberta and Giuliano, another meeting of the Montebianco coat of arms with that of an illustrious family.
“We can have your parents painted here, and you right below,” Basil said. “Did she have a family coat of arms, your mother?”
I shook my head. “Regular people don’t have coats of arms,” I said. “Or such elaborate family trees.”
“It isn’t only about class,” Basil said. “It is about inheritance and tribal identity. The family tree as a recording device is thought to derive from biblical sources. It acted as a form of cultural identification, of course, but also was a badge of inclusion. If you recall, Jesus could trace his ancestry to the House of David, and this gave him a legitimacy that he would not have had otherwise. The practice of keeping track of genealogy was more vital to noble families. They were careful to delineate bloodlines, and to avoid mixing with undesirable families. The importance of genealogical records at that time cannot be overestimated. Now, as you very well know, everyone can create a family tree on the internet. What used to be an art is now a pastime.”
He pointed up at the top of the family tree, near Frederick and Isabelle.
“The Montebianco family begins with the creation of the House of Montebianco in the thirteenth century with the marriage of Isabelle of Savoy to Frederick. We don’t know Frederick’s original surname, as it must have been one of the common names up in these mountains. The family was christened Montebianco after the great Mont Blanc rising above the valley. There are many elements of the Montebianco origin story the family chooses to suppress. Most families of their stature were created through an association with royalty or through knighthoods. But Frederick Montebianco, the first of your family line with a noble title, was a goat herder.”
“A goat herder?” I said, astonished.
“I thought that might surprise you,” Basil said, leaning back in his chair. “It used to be that Nevenero was nothing more than an outpost for goat herders—a few shacks where they could sleep before ascending into the mountains. Before Isabelle of Savoy arrived, there were no stone houses, no shops, and very few people in the village of Nevenero, nothing at all to distinguish this piece of terrain from any of the other ramshackle outposts scattered throughout the mountains. Those poor souls had no aspiration but to survive the winter months. They made cheese from goat milk, ground corn into polenta, and crushed bitter, heavy wine from what grapes they could manage to grow. It was primitive to be sure, but safe.
“Then, one summer afternoon, a herd of ibex were grazing in a valley near the village when along came a small army of men, fifty or so soldiers on horseback, led by a nobleman with a red coat of arms on his jacket. Your ancestor, Frederick the goat herder, knew to stay away from noblemen, especially those wearing fancy labels, and so he led his ibex—those are the big mountain goats, the ones with the curved antlers, not the smaller chamois—away from the trail and into a valley, hoping to escape notice.
“As it turned out, the group came from the House of Savoy in the Piedmont, and the nobleman was Amadeo, a relation of the king of Sardinia. He was on his way to Switzerland to fight some other nobleman—I have never quite