4 bedrooms country house, 112 m²

Montecatini Val di Cecina, Pisa (province)

I swear on the bread I eat: I never meant to do it. But when the master says, “It shall be done,” you bow your head and push the cart, and you do not ask why.
That night there was a full moon, and the statue of the Redeemer seemed the heaviest thing in the world. We had taken it from the oratory in the neighboring village, because the master said it would bring us good fortune for the harvest.
I carried the statue on the cart with Nanni, the other farmhand.
We reached the house at the break of dawn. The master cleared space in one of the storage rooms on the ground floor, moved the sacks of grain, and ordered us to lay it there. The two storage rooms were large and deep, with walls as thick as a man’s arms and floors worn down by the footsteps of generations. The master used to say that one day those rooms would become homes for his children, but at the time they served only to guard the fruits of hard labor.
The master’s family lived on the first floor. I slept in a little room next to the storehouse, and at night I could hear the wood creaking. Or perhaps it was the statue moving. I do not know.
Three days passed.
On the first day, the master came down to look at the statue and found it turned toward the window. We had placed it with its back to the wall, and yet now it was looking out toward the valley.
On the second day, we found it on the floor. It had not fallen; it was as if it had sat down, with its legs bent and its head bowed.
On the third day, the statue vanished.
The master shouted, cursed, and accused us of having sold it. He searched the whole house: the two storage rooms on the ground floor, the cellar dug into the rock where he kept wine and oil, the shed where the cart and mules were kept. Nothing.
Then the oldest farmhand, the wise one, said, “Master, it has gone back to where it belonged. Statues of the Redeemer are not stolen. They are welcomed.”
I never touched a statue again in all my life.
But I still remember that farmhouse clearly, those walls that sheltered a miracle for three days. On the first floor, the kitchen was the heart of the house, with the fire always burning and the smell of bread rising. The dining room was the room for celebrations, where the master welcomed the neighbors and stories were told late into the night. There were four bedrooms, large and airy, with windows opening onto the hills of Montecatini, and a study with a solid walnut desk where the master kept the accounts and wrote his letters. There was also a bathroom, which at the time was a luxury, and a pantry where provisions for the winter were kept. From the first-floor windows you could see the Metalliferous Hills, the outline of the village, and on clear days, a silver glimmer that was the sea of Cecina. It was a house made for looking out, for breathing, for living. Around it, the outbuildings spoke of daily toil: the stable with its stone feeding troughs, where the mules rested after work; the long, low barn, which once held tools and threshed grain; and the lean-to, with its roof of weathered tiles, where we stacked the hay bales that smelled of summer and sweat.
Today I know that those two storage rooms on the ground floor could become two independent apartments, refuges for those who love peace. The cellar and the garage could become workshops or aging rooms for wine. And the first floor is still there, with its four bedrooms, the study, the kitchen, and the dining room, waiting for a family to fill those rooms with voices and laughter. The farmland around it is the same land that Nanni and I hoed, planted, and harvested, the land that sweated and wept with us.
I do not know whether the story of the statue is true.
I do know that if you buy this house, you buy a piece of that night, and of all the nights that came before and after it. You buy the scent of grain in the storehouses, the coolness of the cellar, the light from the first floor falling over the hills. And if one night you hear a faint creak in the wood of the beams, do not worry. It is only the house telling its story to those who know how to listen.