Livia Moretti came into the hall from the garden, barefoot, wearing a light-blue summer dress. The villa was cool after the intense heat of the terrace. The stone floors felt soft beneath her feet as she padded across to her father’s study. The only sounds were the ticking of the clock, her grandfather Alberto snoring quietly in the sitting room, and the distant chatter of her mother, Luisa, and the housekeeper in the kitchen. In her hand, Livia carried a letter confirming her a place at the University of Florence. It had arrived a few days before, and she was anxious to show it to her father, Giacomo. He had driven up earlier that day from Florence, where he had a legal practice. During the week he lived in a small apartment in the city, only returning to his family at weekends.
Livia was about to knock on his study door, but could hear him talking on the telephone. Reluctant to interrupt his work, she slipped the letter back into her dress pocket, and retreated to the terrace. Giacomo had been enthusiastic about the idea of his eighteen-year-old daughter attending university, but Livia knew that her mother did not see the point of girls receiving an education. She feared there would be an argument, but hoped they could resolve the matter amicably over dinner.
This large airy villa deep in the Tuscan countryside, and a small apartment in Florence were all that was left of the family’s estate, after decades of financial mismanagement. Giacomo was the first generation of his family to work for a living, but he was untouched by the loss of their fortune.
‘Money,’ he often said to Livia, ‘can be a curse as well as a comfort. Better to spend your life making a difference to people’s lives, rather than counting coins in a vault.’
In spite of their reduced circumstances, the family were nevertheless comfortably off. As a young girl, Livia had been educated at home by a German governess, Fräulein Schneider. A strict disciplinarian, she insisted on her charge becoming fluent in German, French and English – something the child had railed against at the time. She had also emphasised the importance of perfect posture, and employed a technique of inserting a board down the back of her pupil’s dress, requiring her to sit bolt upright when working at her lessons, or eating her meals. This torturous training had given Livia a sense of rebellion against figures of authority, but it had also produced the desired effect. She now had a grace and elegance – her head always held high, her neck elongated, her shoulders square – that drew admiring glances from everyone she passed.
At the age of eleven, Livia was sent to boarding school on the southern outskirts of Florence. Here she flourished, excelling at foreign languages and the arts. The pupils rarely went unaccompanied into the city itself; instead access was limited to supervised trips to art galleries, or guided tours of the major sites. Crocodiles of little girls were led around the centre of the city, before being shepherded back onto a bus or the train, and returning to school in time for supper.
Occasionally, at the start or end of term, her mother would venture into the city and take Livia shopping at one of the big department stores such as La Rinascente in the Piazza della Repubblica. After lunch in one of the grander hotels, they would visit the Boboli Gardens to escape the crowds, or if it was raining go to the cinema. The films they usually saw were innocent, light-hearted stories of love and romance. Known colloquially as Telefoni Bianchi or ‘White Telephone films’, they were set in opulent Art Deco surroundings, and featured the glamorous stars of the day – Doris Duranti, Elsa Merlini and Isabella Bellucci – starring opposite tall handsome men like Vittorio De Sica and Osvaldo Valenti. For Livia, who had been brought up in the countryside in a rambling farmhouse filled with ancient furniture and crumbling infrastructure, the sight of these men and women, living in extravagant modern homes, wearing beautiful clothes, was as far removed from her own life as she could imagine.
Clutching her letter of acceptance, Livia waited anxiously on the terrace for her father to emerge from his study. It was his habit to join the family before dinner, where he would sit beneath the vine that rambled over the pergola, a glass of wine in hand, his newspaper placed conveniently on a small