22. Coke Bottle

Elisabetta was first and foremost an artist and Il Poggio was her creation.

She lived in her work of art--like an installation artist might live in a gallery demonstration--and she was always improving and experimenting with her magnum opus. 

All of the staff were her helpers and assistants--she directed the work like a sculptor or fresco artist might have a gang of assistants to do the grunt work--and for a while I was one of her staff.

There was a very good unused stone building near the main buildings and while I was there Elisabetta decided to turn it into an art gallery. I think it was some kind of farm storage building when it was first built god knows how many centuries ago--one big room was two stories high and the rest had been divided at some later time  into separate floors--floored (or ceilinged), as I mentioned, with wood from WWII ammunition crates from the USA. But the whole thing needed work. It was almost empty so not much junk had to be removed but it needed a lot of cleaning--and that was to be my job.

Our garden tools were stored in part of the building and there was a nice dry area for firewood storage. It was cool and darkish and a very nice place for me to work--I could easily visualize a great art gallery there and that is what I was going to help create.

Some of the floor was tiled and some bricked and I found one place where there was a big dressed stone block set into the tiles--I thought it looked like the first step of a stone staircase down, so I got Elisabetta's permission to spend some time digging out some of the dirt in the direction I thought a staircase to a cellar might be located--and, sure enough, there was a filled-in staircase there with stone steps going into a subterranean passage--all filled in with dirt. Aha! Maybe a treasure trove awaited me!

Removing said dirt turned out to be quite a chore and the filled-in cellar room turned out to be almost empty--but in the far corner of what had been the cellar floor I found a Coca-cola bottle of the old green glass kind. I think it had probably been left there by the workmen who filled in the cellar just after the armies had been through during the Battle of Il Poggio.

Elisabetta placed it proudly in her trophy case beside the other antique bottle I had dug up outside the main building.

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