In Maremma by David Leavitt

Cheever’s story “Clementina,” the Italian donna of an American family tells the children in her charge a folktale:
    The story they liked best was of the young farmer in Nascosta who was married to a beautiful woman named Assunta. When they had been married a year, they had a fine son with dark curls and a golden skin, but from the first he was sickly, and he cried, and they thought there was a spell on him, and they took him to the doctor in Conciliano, riding all the way there on an asino, and the doctor said the baby was dying of starvation. But how could this be, they asked, for the breasts of Assunta were so full of milkthey stained herblouse. But the doctor said to watch at night, and they went home by asino and ate their supper, and Assunta fell asleep, but the husband stayed awake to watch, and then at midnight he saw in the moonlight a great viper come over the threshold of the farmhouse and come into the bed and suck the milk from the breasts of the woman ...
    The asp was more than a meter long. After we dispatched it, Ilvo invited us over to his house for a grappa. He told us that once, many years ago, he had encountered a pregnant viper on his doorstep. No sooner had he killed it with his pitchfork than it burst open and thirteen cuccioli (babies) writhed out. Viper cuccioli are so venomous, Ilvo went on, that their mothers, in order to avoid being done in by their offspring during labor,
climbed into the trees and quite literally dropped them onto the ground or onto the heads of unlucky passersby. This was why you had to be sure to wear a hat when you took a walk in the woods.

    One windy June afternoon when we were still living in Rome, we were walking through the Forum when we found ourselves being rained upon bywhite myrtle flowers. Another afternoon in the Forum, during the winter, we had seen half of a smallbronze-colored serpent twisting furiously upon the ground. There was something in both happenings that evoked Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Was the serpent from the union of the copulating snakes that transformed Tiresias into a woman? Were the myrtle flowers transformed lovers’ tears?

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    T OLO WAS BORN in Scansano—in Maremma—on August 18, 1997, and spent the formative first months of his life in Rome. Notwithstanding his having an English father, Champion Harrowhill Hunter’s Moon, he was an Italian dog. There just were three puppies in his litter (his mother’s first)—two males and one female. Tolo’s brother died shortly after being born.
    If we had not been about to move to Maremma, we would not have felt that it was right for Tolo to come live with us—which he did on November 29, 1997. A fox terrier deserves better than life in an apartment. These dogs need scope. From The New York Times (February 9,1908):
    Inspired by the recent attempt of robbers to effect an entrance to the famous Apollo Gallery of the Louvre Museum, the Directors of that institution have decided to follow the example of the Paris police and organize a special corps of trained watch dogs... “We shall, in all probability, use fox terriers for the purpose” [said M. Homolle, Director of the National Museums], “as they seem to be the most alert and sagacious.”

    For the first few months of his life, however, life in the caput mundi was okay with Tolo. There he learned to be a cane signorile.
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    Tolo in Maremma: La Caccia (Photo by MM)

    Once we settled in the country, Tolo became the doggiest dog in the world—patrolling the olive grove, chasing wild cats up trees, barking at the sheep, fighting with weasels, murdering hedgehogs, following the shadows of butterflies across the lawn. When he was about a year old, he disappeared. We drove along every road for kilometers looking for him, called neighbors asking them to be on the qui vive, and prayed. Our greatest fear was that he had been poisoned: people who own sheep, in order to protect them from the