Page 179 of Marcello

Then I explored some more.

There wasn’t anything particularly exciting. It just seemed like a part of the passageway that had been walled off for some reason or another.

I was hoping for a chest of golden coins –

Or the skeleton of a pirate –

Or anything like what I’d seen in The Goonies.

No such luck.

But I still had a grand old time.

For about two weeks, the secret passageway was my own private gateway to Narnia.

A very grimy Narnia.

It was filled with cobwebs. Thank goodness there weren’t any living spiders. I guess no insects got back there, so there was no food for them.

And there were no rats, either. Just a lot of dust and cobwebs.

After I came out of the passageway a couple hours later, I saw myself in a mirror and froze in shock.

My face was covered in dust, and my hair was tangled with cobwebs.

My first thought was, That’s SO COOL!

But I knew my parents would kill me if they saw me like that – or at least board up the passageway and make sure I never went in it again – so I ran off and took a bath before going down to dinner.

I was a very clean child for the next two weeks.

“Why do you take so many baths?” Maria asked me at one point.

“I like being clean,” I lied.

But eventually the tunnel got boring like everything else, and I stopped playing in it.

I didn’t go in there again for 14 years.

55

Having searched every inch of the castle’s interior when I was seven years old, I now applied the same determination to mapping the grounds of the estate.

Despite my father’s paranoia about Camorra snipers, I insisted on strolling around the gardens of the estate in full daylight.

Shocking, I know. A grown-ass woman daring to walk around her own backyard!

Even more shocking: nobody shot me!

I enjoyed it immensely. The gardens were beautiful, with flowers and manicured plants of all types. There was a fountain and lots of ancient statues scattered along the paths.

But mostly I paid attention to the stone walls enclosing the estate.

Unfortunately, the walls were fifteen feet tall with smooth, unscalable surfaces. Even if I could have climbed them, the tops of the walls were visible to every single foot soldier patrolling the grounds. I would have been caught immediately.

The main entrance at the front of the estate had a guardhouse that was manned 24/7, so that was a no-go.

The only other way out of the compound was an exit in the back wall of the gardens – but it had its own problems.