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