ABSTRACT
The antique armoire was opposite to the queen-size bed in the large bedroom, next to a marble lavatory. The sunlight came in through the narrow window with the smell of beech trees from the garden below, as the mountain breeze stirred up their branches. On top of the armoire stood a wooden object about four feet long. It looked like a double sledge, with two pairs of arched legs, to which two parallel boards had been nailed. The boards were about one foot apart, blackened from overheating like most of the object itself. I opened my eyes and looked at it. “Il prete,” I remembered. The building had been around for about three centuries, and in the old days, when central heating did not exist, a little before bedtime people used to place a prete between the sheets to warm their beds. I recalled its bulge under the quilt in Grandma’s bed, like a person cuddled in sleep, head buried under the blankets from the cold. Equipped with a brazier full of incandescent embers, in about fifteen minutes the prete would do its job. Then it would be refilled from the fireplace and passed on to another bed. “How come people call this a prete?” I remembered asking grandmother many years earlier, curious that people would use the Italian word for priest for these quite effective bedwarmers.
