When Dreams Start Coming True

I just bought a very special cellar.

This month’s trip to Narni was a whirlwind, not least of which because I spent most of it on unglamorous tasks like getting an Italian e-SIM for my phone. That particular endeavor took about ten tries, first online with various cell companies that wouldn’t accept my Dutch or American credit cards, then a little corner store that only did top-ups, then two shops that were closed for the summer holiday, and finally a kiosk inside a big box electronics store at a mall in Terni, where I was called upon to record a video of myself saying in Italian for identity-verification purposes, “I am Sarah, and I choose Iliad,” with no warning or chance to practice my pronunciation beforehand.

Unsurprisingly, I received an email a few hours later informing me that my identity had been rejected. They gave me a chance to re-record, and this time I nailed it. It’s been ten years since I moved abroad, so I may have forgotten all the minutiae that come with setting up your life in a whole new country. I’d also forgotten that jolt of pure euphoria that hits with the accomplishment of any small bureaucratic task in Italy.

All of which, I suppose, is jumping ahead a bit.

I AM MOVING TO ITALY. But in slow motion, over the next year or so. And perhaps the most significant step in that journey happened the first week of July, when my husband and I purchased a darling little house on the beautiful street I fell in love with two years ago. To wit:

Yes, that’s me sitting on the front step, holding the keys to our new house. And below the staircase, just visible, is a metal door leading to the unfinished cellar that visits me in my dreams.

The house itself is a delight, with stone arches, an attached 12th-century tower, wood-shuttered windows, and not a single right angle to be found in the entire place. I’ll show you pictures of that too, eventually. But I think my realtor was unprepared for my raptures over the cellar. You may also be unprepared, since it's in a bit of a state at the moment. And this is AFTER the previous tenants spent a couple of weekends very kindly clearing the place out, so that mostly what’s left are extra tiles for the house upstairs and various bits of forgotten small detritus.

But just in case you’re like me—a dreamer who can look at a place like this and see in their mind’s eye the perfect tiny bookshop complete with a rolling ladder up against that arched 16-foot wall—here’s your first glimpse of what will become Italy’s newest independent bookshop.

Obviously, I have a vivid imagination. But it has potential, right? And good bones too. This place has stood for centuries. Look at that beam! Which now has an even more massive concrete beam next to it to make the whole place earthquake safe. This is what “up to code” looks like in Italy.

Many years ago, the tower attached to the house served as a granary for a wealthy Narnian family. (And yes, up at the top that is exactly what it looks like: a small, enterprising fig tree that has managed to attach itself to the drainpipe and seems to be thriving, with possible consequences to the integrity of the tower roof sometime in the next decade or so.)

The door on the back of the tower was walled up at some point. Suffice it to say no marauders will be entering the bookshop from that side. For its part, the cellar held a bakery. If you squint, you can still see the outlines of the oven on the much-repaired back wall.

And if you look back at the previous photo of the beam, you’ll see soot marks on the ceiling from that same wood-fired oven. There was so much soot in some parts that my husband and I were sure at first those were long-desiccated bats hanging above us. Quite a spooky place to do your laundry, which was exactly what the previous tenants used the cellar for, besides storage.

I have much grander plans for it. Can I picture myself as the proprietor of a magical bookshop beneath those stairs? Yes, yes I can.

As C.S. Lewis wrote, and somebody translated into Italian for that wall, “Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia.” And once a bookseller too, I think.

This is me again, rewarding myself with gelato for some other quotidian task: setting up utilities, perhaps, or buying sheets. There’s so much still to be done, and doubtless a few bumps in the road ahead, but I can’t wait to get to work! And I can’t wait to get back to Narni, and maybe someday see you there too, across the counter of that quaint little bookshop that for now exists only in my dreams. In the meantime, we’ll meet again here soon. Farewell for the moment. May all your dreams be haunted just as sweetly by fantasy worlds that just might turn out to be real.