From the novel
The house at Santissima.
In La Resa dei Conti nel Giardino della Serenissima, Isabella reaches Polcenigo after fleeing Sacile and disappears into a discreet network connected to the Diocese of Concordia. Her refuge becomes a house overlooking the springs, near the church of Santissima.
Here she changes identity. She becomes Maddalena da Polcenigo, lives as a healer and uses Livenza water to distil plant spirits, prepare elixirs and treat local people. Maria and Lucrezia share the house with her while the village slowly begins to suspect that this woman knows far more than herbs.
Gold betrays her. Impossible ornaments and traces of transformed metal lead the Illegitimate to the springs. In the cellar he finds blackened iron, golden flakes and the remains of experiments, enough to understand that Isabella truly worked there.
“Where the valley narrows to a breath of grass.”
Places in the story
Water, sanctuary, mill.
Santissima is not merely scenery. The novel places Isabella's home among the springs, close to the church and the small convent.
When she flees towards Sacile, she takes a hidden path behind the mill, a precise detail that binds the real landscape to the movement of the characters.
Identifying the fictional house with a specific present-day ruin remains literary geography, not a documented historical fact. The page therefore keeps the real place and its fictional transformation clearly separate.
In the author’s narrative geography, the old mill at the Santissima becomes the physical reference for Isabella’s house. This is not a historical claim about the building: it is a literary choice that overlays the alchemist’s imagined home onto a real place crossed by water.
The narrative section comes from the novel manuscript; historical and geographical information is kept distinct from fiction.
