And then we were there: a grassy turnout, a barbed-wire gate, and a velvet green hill.
The small peak before us looked empty, peaceful. When we scrambled to the top, we found a different story: broken stone walls; caves hollowed roughly out of volcanic rock. Once this hilltop had been a fortress of the Etruscans, the mysterious ancient civilization that rivaled the power of Rome to the south. Settlers here built houses outward, jealously guarding their peak and the spring erupting from its foot. Then they vanished.
The Last Brigand clambered the hills like a goat, pointing out which leaves were edible and the pool where the wild boars drink. The place had yet more history to reveal: Centuries later, medieval Italian settlers had rebuilt the village with a square castle tower whose walls now stood jagged against the gray sky. We stepped within the outlines of a small church, still traced in stone blocks along the ground.
The Last Brigand crouched again. He reached into a thicket, and pulled out a long purple-green stalk: wild asparagus. Then another, and another. We all started hunting, and by the end the ruined village had yielded a souvenir, and it was lunch.
I had not meant to go on vacation with the Last Brigand. I thought I was spending a week in a country house. It was magnificent, and because it belonged to a friend of a friend, it was free. There would even be a caretaker, a local man named Giulio Castri.
The house was in northern Lazio, a corner of Italy that not only had I never visited, but also nobody I talked to had ever visited, even though it’s only 90 minutes from Rome. Five hundred years ago, this land was contested by powerful aristocratic families; by the 19th century it was ruled by the “briganti,’’ lone-wolf armed bandits who roamed from town to town on horseback, collecting protection money from shepherds, crossing the countryside on secret trails.
