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Giulio the singing fascist came to pick me up from the little airport in his Jeep He made sure to come round and hold my door open from the outside Giulio was best known in Spura for his powerful bass voice and the persistent rumours that he went out looking for illegal immigrants in the Tuscan hills We made a point of not asking him about his beliefs because he was the only neighbour under sixty with whom my Grandmother had not yet argued He saw it as his duty as a Christian to help her with tasks that required lifting and driving My grandfather had always done such things for her We rattled away from the dusty airstrip, to join the autostrada I had seen it so many times from the vantage of Spura’s walls that I always thought of the roads as rivulets of magma spreading out across the plain We passed half-finished tennis courts and artisanal handbag depots, punctuated by the occasional red-brown jogger Two millennia ago, Hannibal had routed the Romans nearby, hiding his army in the forest and sending out men to light fires that made them look farther away than they really were Many here still felt themselves closer to Etruria than Rome, which explained the numerous local restaurants named after Hannibal’s favourite elephant, Surus As he drove with one hand and gesticulated with the other, Giulio told me about his battle with Communist mayor of Spura, who objected to him taking groups of Finnish hunters up into the hills without all the proper licenses He was still adding to his collection of antique rifles and offered to take me along next time he went to shoot the wild boar He apologised that he could not let me have a try myself, as it had been so long since I last fired a gun The only dangerous boar, if you could follow a trail like Giulio, were the mothers, who tended to be unpredictable and instinctively violent More wolves had been coming into Italy from Slovenia and found this region to