36 Act I / Poggio al Tesoro in the Spotlight 37 Act I / Poggio al Tesoro in the Spotlight They begin to ask if all that they recall is real or merely the fruit of overheated memories due to the excitement of the moment. And time does not pass: they would like to put the problems behind them, to be on the other side of the obstacles, but instead the finish line is still far away, once surmounted with difficulty, more doubts appear, other complications, more and more difficult to overcome. Enough, enough already. They return to Bolgheri, they meet with a middle man, a deal maker who has worked up and down the entire Tyrrhenian coast from Pisa to Piombino. Houses, land, businesses, vineyards, and olive groves. He knows everyone and knows who wants to buy and who wants to sell, at what price one can buy or sell, both above and below the Bolgherese road. Marilisa and Walter listen to him carefully. There are a couple of possibilities to be investigated more thoroughly, then there is still another one, very attractive but perhaps more complicated and which requires a certain dose of patience and diplomacy. The first step is see a vineyard on the bolgherese road in a spot called Felciaino: there are seven hectares of land with a stone farmhouse and a shed for agricultural machinery and tools. The vineyard, three and half hectares (almost nine acres), is very attractive, well cultivated and maintained, planted in 1994 with nine thousand vines per hectare of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. The rest of the terrain hosts nice rows of olive trees. A hundred meters away there is another plot called le grottine, once again seven hectares in size because this was the unit farmed by sharecroppers forty to fifty years ago. Here there is no house but only a small church, bare and simple, dedicated to Saint Joseph. There are no vines, but the olive groves which must be maintained in place delimits fields sown to cereals and vegetables. It is calculated that on this bare ground four and a half hectares (over eleven acres) of vines could be planted, bringing the total to eight hectares, some twenty acres. Not a whole lot, but a good starting point, when there is already a functioning vineyard in production, available immediately. But this is not enough, it is not sufficient to satisfy Walter’s curiosity and expectations, he has a more ambitious project in mind, more important and significant. The search must go on. And at that point the middleman pulls another name out “... By now there is a certain breathlessness, emotion has begun to take over, faces have become slightly red, the palms of the hands are slightly sweaty, hearts are beating fast. ...” “... They begin to ask if all that they recall is real or merely the fruit of overheated memories due to the excitement of the moment. ...”
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