Sometimes life's greatest secrets are hidden right underneath our noses. All that halts us from unveiling the desired information is our own ignorance and neglect.
Nestled in the pine-dotted, sloping hills of Tuscany once resided an archaic village whose anatomy was composed of stone, whose lungs released into the atmosphere the permeating scent of a roaring Neapolitan brick-oven, and whose beating heart had existed for generations within the artisanal wines made by the Bianchi family.
The village inhabitants exhibited an unusual tendency converse to that of global communities, for not a single soul felt the compulsion to chronicle any history since the dwelling’s establishment in Medieval times. No diaries, picture albums, not even something as small as a scribbled thought could be found in the village. In fact, the inhabitants cared not even to bestow upon their place of residence a name. Despite this perplexing miasma of neglect, the Bianchi’s took it upon themselves to maintain a timeline of their village, albeit the family’s method of doing so was as intriguing as the behavior of their fellow neighbor chrono-phobes.
Underneath the small, sparsely decorated Bianchi residence once dented into the Earth a massive wine cellar. Equipped with bottles that spanned back in time to the 15th century, this cellar was no ordinary storage space: it was a historical trove appropriately labeled as “The Bianchi Archives”. Ever since the time of the patriarch Guido Bianchi, from the age of ten, the eldest son of each generation was trained by his father (who was also the eldest son) in the craft of winemaking.
And so, the eldest son came to know the grapevines of his birthplace with an incredible intimacy, and became the master keeper of the village archive. Once the mighty sun had expelled the last of its variegated reserves across the skyline, and night’s vortex of darkness had drained all color from above, the eldest son would descend into Earth’s depths.
And here, something fascinating would unravel.
From an archaic shelf, the eldest son would gently procure a golden cup. He would then roam about the archive with the sharp intelligence of a fox and curious observance of a child until he had found a certain bottle that spoke to him. Removing the time capsule with the utmost delicate maneuvers, the eldest son would then take a seat with his items, and the ancient process commenced. He would surface from his pocket a gleaming wine-opener of gold, and proceed to gently and methodically relieve the bottle of its cork. The last twist of the wrist that took all but a few seconds would expel into the atmosphere a dense fragrance of a hundred years. Carefully, the eldest son would then pour the century’s old fluid into the equivalently ancient cup, a golden artifact that spanned the Bianchi family lineage since the time of Guido. Once all was prepared, the tiniest sip of wine created a vast portal into the past realm of the village, a realm that only the mind of the eldest son of the Bianchi family had the ability to navigate. And so, for hours into the night, until the last drops of midnight red or nectar bronze had been extinguished, he would sit and drink the fruits of his ancestors, and experience thousands of memories of the village’s past. All of these past events were then stored permanently in his brain, and he could retrieve them at will.
Of course, nobody cared of the eldest son’s nearly divine abilities, nor did anyone know of them. As far as the villagers were concerned, the eldest son was a simple, bearded winemaker. And thus, when the last of the Bianchi kin ceased to exist, the archives were no more, and so the heart of the village had ceased to beat, vanishing as if it had never existed. All that remained of the village was its stone skeleton, a dead carcass as insignificant to the world as when it was first born.
And of the wines? All that remained was an ancient cellar filled with masses of Tuscan grape, whose presence nobody knew of. Thus, the cellar would remain there, underneath the humble Bianchi home, in the comfort of the Earth’s depths, until the end of time.
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