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Carla’s Point of View
The three of us were set upon by lawyers and the Vatican land agent’s team from Southern Italy. We wanted an agreement in place quickly — they wanted it even more quickly, which surprised me. Twelve people and three of us in a glass-walled conference room, somewhere in the bowels of the most revered building in the world.
The room hummed with paper. Two clerks laid out documents in neat stacks along the table while a woman in a charcoal suit unrolled a cadastral map of the coastline I’d swum since I was five. She weighted the corners with coffee cups.
Someone had drawn the concession zones in blue pencil and numbered them one through nine, the sequence running from the headland to the village bay in an order that told me they’d already studied the topography. The diocesan land agent — a thin man from Catania with a leather portfolio older than I was — sat beside Ferretti and made notes in a hand so small I couldn’t read them from across the table.