The Villa

Pozzo di San Patrizio, the well of St. Patrick, symbolizes the role of History, Haunting, and Houses in the novel, suggesting how living spaces are living, holding, and preserving memories. The well itself is a deep shaft, that reaches into the bowels of the earth in Orvieto. Surrounded by a double helix staircase, the well is accessible by those who come up and go down without these groups ever meeting. According to the guidebook a tourist gives to Emily and Chess, “Pozzo di San Patrizio is a marvel of Renaissance engineering. Double helix staircases allowed for easier access and constant traffic both down into the well and up from the well” (114). This staircase conveys how the villa itself works as place haunted by the past: Emily and Mari can sit in the same place in the house, separated by 50 years, yet contact between seems possible: Mari’s diary saves Emily from Matt, and Emily seems to hear the echo of Mari’s visit to the well decades earlier, as she compares Mari’s inclusion of St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Lilith Rising to her own visit. Like St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Ireland, the well exists as a dark and foreboding place, a fitting