A house, a war, and a wife who had never seen the sea.
Plate v. The house, ca. 1953.
Plate vi. The Spinellis, 1954.Vincenzo Spinelli came home from the front in the autumn of nineteen forty-six and started building the house the following spring, on a piece of cliff his grandfather had bought from the village for a single goat. He had married Anna in the church at Tramonti, a girl from the inland mountains who had never, in twenty-two years, seen the sea.
He built it over eight years, by hand, with two cousins and the occasional priest. The first room was the kitchen, the second their bedroom, the third Anna’s lemon room, the fourth a chapel for the daughter they did not yet have. The house grew the way children do - slowly, sideways, with rooms appearing where they were needed.
It was a family house for sixty-two years. In two-thousand-fourteen we made it, with their blessing, into a small hotel of nine bedrooms. Today there are fourteen suites, a Michelin kitchen on the terrace where Anna used to dry her tomatoes, and two of those original cousins still in the village. The chapel is now the cellar; the priest, occasionally, still comes.
