nothing.”

“Ha,” blurted Vincenzo, “what a pleasant surprise! Besides, the laws that govern premarital carnality care not of the coupling’s mutuality. The law is the law and the law is with Giuseppe. And as we, his kinsmen, shall abide his word, let Giuseppe be heard.”

Still in his tomato-stained shirt and seeming much the maligned father, Giuseppe slowly stood up. “Tomorrow,” he said without passion or menace, “a militia’s to be raised to exact the penance: she’s to a nunnery and the Ebreo from Tuscany to Venice.” And then Giuseppe snatched up Vincenzo’s shoe and hurled it directly and squarely into the face of the Cheese Maker.

The sound startled Cosimo and put the fear of God into his belly. He had never heard the awful cracking sound of a nose breaking.

19 A papal edict written in 1299, and adopted by much of Europe, that governed sexual behavior, improprieties and punishments.

In which We Learn

How Michelangelo Dealt with

Sadness, or How Pizza Came to Be, Part I

Nonno sliced the cheese, ladled some tomato sauce from a pot on the stove into a small bowl and cut a piece from the focaccia he’d brought back from Pitigliano. It was the only food they had in the house. Though it was of little solace, Nonno knew for certain that Davido had gone and made an additional pot of sauce. He’d been there in the evening as Davido made it. At least Nonno had that to comfort him, that his grandson had the decency not to serve the villagers the tomato sauce in which he and the girl had made love. Nonno set the food upon a tray. Davido had not eaten since morning. He’d not even wiped the blood from his face. He’d done nothing but sulk before the fire for hours. Though Nonno wanted to berate the boy for his utter stupidity, he figured food would do his grandson more good. They would be leaving at tomorrow’s dawn—the whole clan, all thirteen of them, leaving for Pitigliano.

This was the kind of thing that Ebrei were killed over and Nonno couldn’t risk that. Had it been Spain, Davido never would have made it out of the market alive. They would spend the autumn, maybe even the winter, in Pitigliano. Nonno didn’t believe that any of these villagers would come looking for Davido there, but he couldn’t imagine the farm a safe place, at least for the time being. After the new year, Nonno would send a messenger to the Good Padre to gauge the sentiment of the villagers. If the Good Padre reported back that it was safe and the farm had not been razed, then, and only then, would Nonno and his kin return. Davido, however, would not. He would be sent to Florence, to marry and live out the next few years in the ghetto.

How could he have been so stupid? thought Nonno. There wasn’t an Ebreo in all of Europe who didn’t know better. This was why Nonno didn’t chastise his grandson, because he knew that Davido did not act from lust or stupidity, or any base desire, but from love. It was plain to see. The girl was beautiful and brave, and Nonno was not so out of touch with the idea of youth to discount the notion that, as a young man, if he’d met such a girl, she would have surely stolen his heart too. Indeed, in Il Nuovo Mundo, Nonno had met such a girl when he was but a few years older than Davido, and that, like this, did not end well. It was all painfully evocative of the love he’d lost a half century ago. And the way his grandson and the girl called after each other, it was enough to break his heart. But it was a love that never could be and certainly was not worth dying over and Nonno knew that from his own experience.

Nonno did not believe in dying for a cause, but rather in living for one, and he always looked at the numbers. That’s the horrible lesson he’d learned in Spain, the thing Torquemada 20 had taught him: Ebrei, no matter where they lived or how assimilated, were but a minority, and, whether by rancor or whim, if sentiment turned against them their only salvation was to flee. This was the thing, Nonno believed, that an Ebreo must accept—that his Davido must accept: there were certain forces an Ebreo couldn’t resist, certain battles an Ebreo couldn’t fight, certain loves he couldn’t have,