Little Guilia

Many years ago, in a poor village high in the mountains, a little girl by the name of Guilia Pirolo dreamed of a buried bell. She claimed that if the villagers found this bell the corn would grow tall and sweet, and people would be able to buy everything they’d dreamed of: sewing machines, thick coats, sacks of fine white sugar.

No one believed her. She was only a girl, skinny, with large ears and a thatch of unruly black hair — although she excelled at locating lost objects. When she wasn’t helping her mother with the house or the chickens, she often wandered alone through the village and into the woods. She discovered the priest’s onyx rosary this way, in a patch of moss, where he had dropped it while hunting for truffles with his pig.

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