This is how we came to meet Olimpia Orsini. An interior designer of some repute in Rome, Olimpia also owned a little shop that she refused to call a shop—it was her “studio,” she insisted—on Via del Boschetto. (She referred to herself not as a “designer” but as an “interior,” which, considered together with the fact that she had taken a degree in psychology, was appropriate.) A few months after we met her, she transferred her shop to a small street just off Via Marguta, where some of the most expensive antique stores in Rome are located, and had business cards printed on which she gave her address as “Vicolo dell’Orto di Napoli (Via Marguta).” Such a street name must have seemed an augur of good things to Olimpia, who was from Naples. Her age was difficult to determine—anywhere between forty-five and sixty, we figured. She had long dark-blond hair, wore Chanel suits in even the most inclement weather, and smoked incessantly. After we moved to Podere Fiume, we asked Renato, the aristocracy-obsessed owner of the antique shop at the Terme di Saturnia, if he knew her.
