Summer Nights at the Cinema Romanina

In those long hot summers at La Tambura, when I was about 10 years old, it was our custom to retire to the sitting room after dinner to play liar dice or charades, or just to chat. There were always so many people staying at the house that it buzzed; and there was invariably somebody with whom to talk or to persuade to join in the entertainment. Sometimes, a game of Sardines in the dense vegetation and dark shadows of the garden would be instigated by one of my brothers; or we would grab the bikes on ferociously hot nights and pedal very slowly down to the beach to skinny dip. We swam in the almost bath-temperature water, often shining with phosphorescence, under a shower of bright shooting stars, the mountains behind us decorated with apricot-coloured strings of streetlights, far up in the tiny, distant villages.