Osalio Verbino
On Being Owned
Villa Verbino was not a choice of mine. The house was my grandmother’s, and when she died it became mine — not through any decision either of us reached, but because that is simply what houses do in families. One person leaves, another arrives, and the house, which has watched this happen before, carries on without comment.
Though in my case the arriving took some time. The house was mine for years before I lived in it — years in which I was elsewhere, being a writer in rented rooms, and the house was here, being patient.
I moved in three Octobers ago, and this was, in retrospect, a mercy. October in Marisòla is mild, the light is forgiving, and a house can present a flattering version of itself. I remember thinking: this is manageable. The walls need attention. The garden is overgrown. The shutters on the east side have a complicated relationship with their frames. Manageable.
Then spring came.
I am a writer. I have been a writer for twenty years, in various cities, in various rented rooms where the only maintenance ever required of me was not to damage the walls. I am not, by any reasonable measure, a handyman. My grandmother knew this. She is, wherever she is, deeply unsurprised by what followed.
What followed was that the house, released from the discipline of winter, began to show me what it needed — not all at once, which might have been considerate, but one item at a time. A door that had swollen through the rains and could no longer be reasoned with. A section of garden wall that had apparently been considering collapse for years and had only been waiting for an audience. The lemon tree, which the town calls stubborn — a word I have come to understand is the generous one.
My grandmother would have managed all of it before it became a problem. She had that quality — the ability to see what a thing needed before it began to insist. The house knew it; she and the house had an understanding. You can tell, living somewhere long enough, whether a house has been tended or merely occupied. Villa Verbino had been tended, for decades, by someone who understood it. It took me some time to see that the house was not falling apart. It was waiting to find out whether I was serious.
I have tried. The wall has been repaired, more than once, by people who know how. The door was replaced. I have learned, if not to garden, at least to reach an arrangement with people who can. Dante has made his peace with the state of things. George and Clooney have declined to involve themselves, which in cats is the highest available form of tact.
There is one room I do not touch.
Valentina, who cleans the villa, is permitted everywhere except the library — a restriction she has never accepted and reopens every Tuesday. She arrives in heels entirely unsuited to the stone stairs, surveys the shelves, and delivers the same verdict she delivered her first week: that the room is not organised. I tell her it is organised according to a system. She asks me to describe the system. I decline, on the grounds that describing it would disturb it. We have held these two positions, neither of us yielding a centimetre, for three years.
What I do not tell her is the truth, which is that the library is the only room in the house that is still my grandmother’s. The kitchen smells of my espresso now — my hours, my mornings. The garden is being slowly and imperfectly reclaimed. But the library keeps the smell of old paper and something underneath it I have never quite named — not lemon peel, not dust, something between the two that was simply the smell of her being in a room, and that no amount of Sicilian sea air has managed to move.
It was my grandmother who told me to write. I was perhaps fourteen, here for the summer as I was every summer, and she looked at something I had written — I can no longer remember what — and said, in the practical tone she used for everything: questo è il tuo lavoro.
She could fix anything she turned her mind to. What she made instead was a writer, which is only another way of saying she made me useless with a hammer. She found this funny, I am fairly sure.
The house was hers in a way I have never quite managed — not owned, exactly, so much as belonged to, which is a different arrangement, and I suspect the better one.
I am still working on finding it funny myself — at the kitchen table, with the moka she never replaced and the shutters that have never once fit, while the house settles into another Sicilian evening and goes on waiting, with what I have come to recognise as patience, to see whether I am serious yet.
Osalio Verbino
Marisòla, summer 2026
Osalio Verbino — Appunti da Marisòla Track 07: Notes Never Finished
Music: AI-generated with Suno Pro 2026
Summer People
Every July, without particular enthusiasm on either side, the summer people arrive in Marisòla. They come from the north mostly — pale, purposeful, carrying quantities of sunscreen that suggest profound distrust of the Mediterranean. They book the rooms with sea views. They eat at the trattoria at seven, when the kitchen has only just begun to think about dinner. And within twenty-four hours, someone among them finds the beach.
The beach nobody uses. La Spiaggia dei Pigri, on the old maps — beautiful, sandy, ignored.
They arrive expecting to have discovered something — a romantic view, an old abandoned village, and perhaps, in the back of their minds, the idea that one day they might buy a house here. There are no houses for sale in Marisòla. There have not been, within memory. They are inherited, or they are not, and either way nobody is asking.
You can recognise them by how they walk — slower than necessary, one hand raised against the sun, a hat that nobody in Marisòla would wear. They look at the water. They look at the sand. They take a photograph. Then they spread a towel and sit down, and something begins to trouble them, though they cannot say what.
An old story says the beach is cursed. Nobody has been able to explain this satisfactorily, including Don Pino, who has tried. It is a useful story. It keeps people away, and Marisòla has never seen a reason to correct it.
At some point, one of the summer people asks a local why the beach is empty. The local considers this the way you consider a question that contains a wrong assumption — carefully, briefly, and then not at all. È sempre così, they say, which is accurate but explains nothing. The tourist nods as though something has been clarified.
The only people in Marisòla who genuinely welcome the summer people are Tonino, who keeps the bar, and Rosa, who runs the trattoria. Tonino remembers their names, refills their water without being asked, and does not visibly judge them for ordering cappuccino after noon. Rosa steers them to a table before they have made a decision and fills their glasses before they have formed an opinion. In a town of approximately three thousand people, this warmth is statistically unusual. Both Tonino and Rosa benefit economically from the summer people’s arrival, which may explain it entirely.
The tourists who venture toward the harbour sometimes consider asking Peppè or Calòggero about a boat tour. They have usually been warned by then — there is a rule in Marisòla, unwritten but well understood, about not placing yourself between those two. They do not ask.
The trouble, I think, is that they came expecting the beach to perform. A beautiful place, in their experience, is a place that knows it is beautiful — that has organized itself around being found, offers sunbeds and a bar, reflects their arrival back at them as confirmation of good taste. This beach does none of those things. It is simply there, as it has always been, water arriving and receding with the particular indifference of things that have been doing the same thing for a very long time.
By the afternoon they have usually gone back to the town. The beach resumes whatever it was doing before, which appears to be nothing. Dante, my dog, who has no opinion on the beach’s reputation, goes into the water. The cats — George and Clooney — observe from a distance they consider appropriate. I sit on the same stone I have been sitting on since I was eleven, in the summers I spent at my grandmother’s villa, and watch the sea do what the sea does.
There is a version of this that becomes a lesson — something about how beauty does not require an audience, how the best places are the ones that resist becoming destinations. I am aware of this version and I am choosing not to write it. The beach is not a lesson. It is a beach. It has been here longer than Marisòla and will be here long after the last summer person has found somewhere more accommodating to spend their two weeks.
Maybe they will come back next July. They will find it again. They will sit down, feel the same unnamed unease, and leave before they understand what it was.
The beach will not mind. Neither will I.
Osalio Verbino
Marisòla, summer 2026
Osalio Verbino — Appunti da Marisòla Track 02: The Beach Nobody Uses
Music: AI-generated with Suno Pro 2026
The Art of Small Repairs
The shutter on the east side of Villa Verbino has been broken since March. Not this March. The one before.
I have been meaning to fix it.
In that time, I have thought about fixing it on approximately forty separate occasions, which is, by my calculation, forty more times than I have actually fixed it. The gap it leaves is three centimeters wide. I know this because I measured it last August, during a period when I had convinced myself that measuring was a reasonable substitute for doing something.
The cats have begun sleeping directly in the stripe of light it produces each morning. They arrange themselves with a precision that suggests they consider this feature intentional, and designed for them. I have not corrected this impression.
There is a man in Marisòla named Caruso who repairs things, and only God knows what kind of things. His workshop is near the station and smells of oil and a particular kind of patience that cannot be manufactured. On the shelves: chairs waiting, clocks disassembled, and one radio that has been there since at least 1960. I have asked about the radio twice. Both times, Caruso looked at it for a long moment and said only, “It’s coming along.”
Last spring I brought him a pair of old shoes. The sole of the left one had separated from the upper and produced a faint slapping sound with each step — not loud, but loud enough that Peppe u Sardu noticed it from across Piazza delle Erbe and called out an observation that I will not repeat here.
Caruso held the shoe and tilted it in the light. Then he said: “These are good shoes.”
I said yes, even though I disagreed with him.
“People throw away good shoes,” he said. He was not talking to me. He was talking to the shoe. Which is completely normal to do.
He resoled them. When I came to collect them he told me, without looking up, that he had also restitched the heel lining, replaced a small metal eyelet that was beginning to corrode, and conditioned the leather. None of this was discussed or agreed upon in advance. I did not raise the matter. The shoes are now, objectively, better than they were when I bought them, which raises questions about the original manufacturer that I have chosen not to pursue.
We replace things because we say we have no time to repair them. This is probably true. It is also, I suspect, not entirely the point.
A new shoe knows nothing about you. It has no memory of the particular way you walk, the route you have taken every morning for eleven years, the slight unevenness of the cobblestones outside Bar del Corso. A resoled shoe has been there. It has formed views and made history.
There is a Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with gold — making the damage visible, even beautiful. I have always found this idea slightly excessive in its optimism, but I understand the instinct behind it. The repaired thing is not pretending. It has been broken and it knows it. Just like many of us.
I fixed the shutter last Tuesday (hurray for me). It took forty minutes, and I have been thinking about it for over a year. A piece of wood the size of my thumb and a screw I found in a bowl in the kitchen that has been collecting unidentified hardware since 2021. Hardware you don’t know anything about, but it’s always good to have.
The cats are furious. Or what passes for furious in cats, which is mostly indistinguishable from how they always look, but with slightly more intention. They sat in the place where the stripe of light used to fall and stared at the wall for some time, as if waiting for it to reconsider. Confused and angry, they went to sleep in the neighbour’s house.
I met Caruso the other day, and told him that I had managed it by myself. He nodded and said, “Bene, bene. Now you know things can be fixed.”
Then, after a long pause, he said: “The radio is almost done.”
And I thought, miracles do happen, even in Marisòla.
Osalio Verbino
Marisòla, summer 2026
Osalio Verbino — Appunti da Marisòla, Track 10: Nothing Urgent Here
Music: AI-generated with Suno Pro 2026
On Keeping Things
There is a drawer in my kitchen that I have not fully opened since 2019. Not because it is stuck — it opens perhaps fifteen centimetres before something inside prevents further movement. I have chosen not to investigate. Whatever is in there has earned its privacy.
I mention this because my neighbour Giuseppina came by last week and suggested, not for the first time, that I should declutter the villa. She used the word “declutter” with the confidence of someone who has recently read a book about it, and I’m quite sure that she has. I offered her coffee. She accepted, which she took as a sign that the conversation was over.
It was not over, for me yes, not for her.
According to Giuseppina, I own too many things. This is probably true. It is also, I suspect, not entirely her business. The villa contains: books I have read, books I intend to read, books I keep to remember who gave them to me, and books I keep because getting rid of them feels like a small cruelty. There are expired train tickets in a bowl by the door. Three notebooks with identical covers that I can no longer tell apart. A biscuit tin that belonged to my grandmother, full of buttons that have outlived their coats, their shirts, their original purpose. And a fountain pen with a cracked nib that has not written a legible sentence in several years.
Giuseppina pointed at the pen. “That hasn’t worked for years,” she said.
I told her I was aware of this.
“So why keep it?” Good question I refuse to answer.
Anyhow I considered the question seriously for a moment, which I think surprised her. The pen worked when I wrote my first published essay. It worked, and then it didn’t, and somehow that transition seems important to record. Not everything that stops working should disappear. We do not, after all, throw away photographs of people who have died.
Giuseppina looked at the pen for a moment. Then she drank her coffee in silence.
The button tin is more complicated to explain.
My grandmother kept it on the second shelf in her kitchen, next to the olive oil and a small ceramic saint whose name nobody could remember. The tin had my name on it, which I never understood and never asked about, and now it is too late to ask. When I was small I would sit on her floor and sort the buttons by colour, then by size, then by some private system of my own that made complete sense at the time and that I can no longer reconstruct.
She never threw a button away. “You never know,” she’d say, which is what people say in Marisòla when they mean: this came from somewhere and that somewhere still matters. Maybe a neighbour will come by and ask for a specific button, which I hardly believed.
The tin is here now, on my desk. It rattles when I move it, like a small, contained ocean. I have no use for buttons. I keep it anyway, which I think would have pleased her, and which Giuseppina would consider a problem.
There is a difference between hoarding and remembering. The hoarder keeps everything because letting go feels dangerous. The rememberer keeps certain things because they hold a shape that nothing new can replicate. My broken pen holds the particular weight of ten years of writing. The button tin holds my grandmother’s voice saying you never know in a kitchen that no longer exists.
Giuseppina keeps a spotless house. Everything in it is functional, recent, and replaceable. When I visited last Christmas it felt like a waiting room for a train that runs on time. Very clean. Nothing rattling. I don’t feel at home at her place, and always fear that I will break something by accident.
I walked home and opened the biscuit tin for no reason, and the buttons made their small ocean sound, and the cats came to investigate, and the dog put his head on my knee, and I thought: yes. This is the right amount of clutter.
Some things stay broken on purpose.
Osalio Verbino Marisòla, summer 2026
Osalio Verbino — Appunti da Marisòla Track 01: The Lighthouse Works When It Wants
Music: AI-generated with Suno Pro 2026