by Marzia Volpones

"Can I read your hand, Sir?" Time is suspended in the demanding eyes and soft tinkling of the earrings while she is approaching him, her palm gently lifted up. Strange feeling, strange look.

She would have been taken for a Gypsy in England, but here you can feel the antique Etruscan with its untangled mysteries to which is added the indefinable glance of the Witch.

She was born in the heart of the unsurpassingly wild and romantic scenery, amid cliffs, headlong torrents, wild oak and walnut woods, and old legendary castles which the Malatesta Seignory is rich in and endowed with.

Legends say that no woman can become a witch just by a wink of the eye in Romagna. This woman is from a Witch family, or one whose members had, from time to immemorial, told fortunes, repeated ancient legends, gathered incantations, and learned how to intone them, prepared enchanted medicines, filters, or spells.

"Strega cattiva" an ugly, evil-eyed old woman with malign power or " Strega buona, a " white witch", brought up to believe in her destiny as a sorceress, and taught her in the furthest woods of the inland, afar from human ear, to chant in strange prescribed tones, incantations or evocations to the ancient gods of the earth, water, air, fire under the names but little change, now known as folletti (spirits), gnomi (gnomes), lari (household goblins).

"Let me read your hand!" She insisted almost caressing his palm with her fingertip. Strange secrets and magic power in the warm night up the walled hilltop village of San Giovanni in Marignano "the grananry "of the Malatesta Seignory, halfway in the meandering Marecchia valley.

"Let me see. You'll have..." The green talisman was whirling in smaller and smaller circles above his palm as it was getting closer to his left hand line of love where it suddenly stood still. He felt as if being trapped in a bewildering green stone and dark eyes.

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