That swallowing began with an email from my aunt Iris the night before my flight. My mother had died a year earlier and left me the stone cottage behind her family's medieval villa in Umbria. For six months, Valetto and the cottage would be my home, just as it had been during my childhood summers. Iris lived in the villa with her sisters, Violet and Rose, all of them elderly and widowed, and my ninety-nine-year-old grandmother. The email's subject line read Una Occupante Abusiva, and it took me a moment to port the phrase into English and realize it meant a squatter. A female squatter, to be precise. In her winding, academic Italian—Iris was a retired sociology professor—she explained that a middle-aged woman, a northerner, had recently shown up at the villa with some correspondence from Aldo Serafino, my maternal grandfather, and taken up residence in my mother's cottage.

During World War II, Aldo had sympathized with the partisans—an umbrella group of Italians resisting the fascists and occupying Germans—but he went into hiding in the spring of 1944 and was never heard from again. My grandmother had attempted to find him during and after the war but eventually she gave up. The woman from the north asserted that her family had been promised the stone cottage at the back of the villa in exchange for the assistance they'd afforded Aldo, who'd joined the resistance movement in Piedmont. She intended, nearly three-quarters of a century later, to take up her family's rightful claim.

* * *

After spending a weekend in Rome with my daughter, Susan, I took the train to Orvieto, where Milo Scorza, the villa's handyman, was scheduled to pick me up. Susan was completing a Ph.D. in England and had to get back for a conference, but she would return later in the month for my grandmother's hundredth birthday. And so I found myself alone in my second-class car, looking out the window and occasionally paging through Luigi Barzini's The Italians, a neglected classic that chronicled the nation's quirks and obsessions. It was a book I hadn't read since I was a teenager, when I was first trying to demystify my mother and her Umbrian family.

Excerpted from Return to Valetto by Dominic Smith. Copyright © 2023 by Dominic Smith. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.