Then the woman said something quietly to Orenzio, and it carried across the water. Gibberish, Pasquale thought at first, until he recognized it as English—American, in fact: “Pardon me, what is that man doing?”

Pasquale knew his friend was insecure about his limited English and tended to answer questions in that awful language as tersely as possible. Orenzio glanced over at Pasquale, holding a big rock for the breakwater he was building, and attempted the English word for spiaggia—beach—saying with a hint of impatience: “Bitch.” The woman cocked her head as if she hadn’t heard right. Pasquale tried to help, muttering that the bitch was for the tourists, “per i turisti.” But the beautiful American didn’t seem to hear.

It was an inheritance from his father, Pasquale’s dream of tourism. Carlo Tursi had spent the last decade of his life trying to get the five larger villages of the Cinque Terre to accept Porto Vergogna as the sixth in the string. (“How much nicer,” he used to say, “Sei Terre, the six lands. Cinque Terre is so hard on tourists’ tongues.”) But tiny Porto Vergogna lacked the charm and political pull of its five larger neighbors. So while the five were connected by telephone lines and eventually by a tunneled rail line and swelled with seasonal tourists and their money, the sixth atrophied like an extra finger. Carlo’s other fruitless ambition had been to get those vital rail lines tunneled another kilometer, to link Porto Vergogna to the larger cliff-side towns. But this never happened, and since the nearest road cut behind the terraced vineyards that backed the Cinque Terre cliffs, Porto Vergogna remained cut off, alone in its wrinkle in the black, ribbed rocks, only the sea in front and steep foot-trails descending the cliffs behind.

On the day the luminous American arrived, Pasquale’s father had been dead for eight months. Carlo’s passing had been quick and quiet, a vessel bursting in his brain while he read one of his beloved newspapers. Over and over Pasquale replayed his father’s last ten minutes: he sipped an espresso, dragged a cigarette, laughed at an item in the Milan newspaper (Pasquale’s mother saved the page but never found anything funny in it), and then slumped forward as if he were napping. Pasquale was at the University of Florence when he got news of his father’s death. After the funeral, he begged his elderly mother to move to Florence, but the very idea scandalized her. “What kind of wife would I be if I left your father simply because he is dead?” It left no question—at least in Pasquale’s mind—that he must come home and care for his frail mother.

So Pasquale moved back into his old room in the hotel. And perhaps it was guilt over having dismissed his father’s ideas when he was younger, but Pasquale could suddenly see it—his family’s small inn—through newly inherited eyes. Yes, this town could become a new kind of Italian resort—an American getaway, parasols on the rocky shore, camera shutters snapping, Kennedys everywhere! And if there was a measure of self-interest in turning the empty pensione into a world-class resort, so be it: the old hotel was his only inheritance, the sole familial advantage in a culture that required it.

The hotel was comprised of a trattoria—a three-table café—a kitchen and two small apartments on the first floor, and the six rooms of the old brothel above it. With the hotel came the responsibility of caring for its only regular tenants, le due streghe, as the fishermen called them, the two witches: Pasquale’s crippled mother, Antonia, and her wire-haired sister, Valeria, the ogre who did most of the cooking when she wasn’t yelling at the lazy fishermen and the rare guest who stumbled in.

Pasquale was nothing if not tolerant, and he abided the eccentricities of his melodramatic mamma and his crazy zia just as he put up with the crude fishermen—each morning skidding their peschereccio down to the shoreline and pushing out into the sea, the small wooden shells rocking on the waves like dirty salad bowls, thrumming with the bup-bup of their smoking outboards. Each day the fishermen netted just enough anchovies, sardines, and sea bass to sell to the markets and restaurants to the south, before coming back to drink grappa and smoke the bitter cigarettes they rolled themselves. His father had always taken great pains to separate himself and his son—descendants, Carlo claimed, of an esteemed Florentine merchant class—from these coarse fishermen. “Look at them,” he would say to Pasquale from behind one of the many newspapers that arrived weekly on the mail boat. “In a more civilized time, they would have been our servants.”

Having lost two older sons in the war, Carlo wasn’t about to let his youngest son work on the fishing boats, or in the canneries in La Spezia, or in the terraced vineyards, or in the marble quarries in the Apennines, or anywhere else a young man might learn some valuable skill and shake the feeling that he was soft and out of place in the hard world. Instead, Carlo and Antonia—already forty when Pasquale was born—raised Pasquale like a secret between them, and it was only after some pleading that his aging parents had even allowed him to go to university in Florence.

When Pasquale returned after his father’s death, the fishermen were unsure what to think of him. At first, they attributed his strange behavior—always reading, talking to himself, measuring things, dumping bags of construction sand on the rocks and raking it like a vain man combing his last wisps of hair—to grief. They strung their nets and they watched the slender twenty-one-year-old rearrange rocks in hopes of keeping storms from hauling away his beach, and their eyes dewed over with memories of the empty dreams of their own dead fathers. But soon the fishermen began to miss the good-natured ribbing they’d always given Carlo Tursi.

Finally, after watching Pasquale work on his beach for a few weeks, the fishermen could stand it no longer. One day, Tomasso the Elder tossed the young man a matchbox and called out, “Here’s a chair for your tiny beach, Pasquale!” After weeks of unnatural kindness, the gentle mockery was a relief, the bursting of storm clouds above the village. Life was back to normal. “Pasquale, I saw part of your beach yesterday at Lerici. Shall I take the rest of the sand up there or will you wait for the current to deliver it?”

But a beach was something the fishermen could at least understand; after all, there were beaches in Monterosso al Mare and in the Riviera towns to the north, where the town’s fishermen sold the bulk of their catches. When Pasquale announced his intention to carve a tennis court into a cluster of boulders in the cliffs, however, the fishermen declared Pasquale even more unhinged than his father. “The boy has lost his sense,” they said from the small piazza as they hand-rolled cigarettes and watched Pasquale scamper over the boulders marking the boundaries of his future tennis court with string. “It’s a family of pazzi. Soon he’ll be talking to cats.” With nothing but steep cliff faces to work with, Pasquale knew that a golf course was out of the question. But there was a natural shelf of three boulders near his hotel, and if he could level the tops and cantilever the rest, he thought he could build forms and pour enough concrete to connect the boulders into a flat rectangle and create—like a vision rising out of the rocky cliffs—a tennis court, announcing to visitors arriving by sea that they had come upon a first-class resort. He could close his eyes and see it: men in clean white pants lobbing balls back and forth on a stunning court projecting out from the cliffs, a glorious shelf twenty meters above the shoreline, women in dresses and summer hats sipping drinks beneath nearby parasols. So he chipped away with a pick and chisels and hammers, hoping to prepare a large enough space for a tennis court. He raked his dusting of sand. He tossed rocks in the sea. He endured the teasing of the fishermen. He peeked in on his dying mother. And he waited—as he always had—for life to come and find him.