Property Three — Via dei Bardi, Settignano12:20 PM
Settignano sat on the hill above Florence and the road up to it wound through stone walls and cypress trees and past the occasional villa set back from the street behind iron gates, and the neighbourhood at the top was the kind of quiet that came from being above the noise rather than removed from it — you could see the city below and hear nothing from it.
Via dei Bardi was a residential street of two- and three-storey buildings from the postwar decades, renovated at different times by different owners so that the street had a pleasant visual inconsistency, and the building where the third apartment sat had been recently re-rendered in cream plaster with dark green shutters and a heavy wooden entrance door that Gianfranco opened with a key that looked like it belonged to the building's original construction.
The lift was old but worked, and it took them to the second floor where a single door opened onto the landing.
