What if, instead of leaving at week's end, you could make this Tuscan view—this life—your own? André Aciman has a dream

I count the days. I know that I shouldn't. And I try not to. But I do it all the same, because I'm superstitious and need to dampen the magic each time I'm ready to let go and embrace this dreamy Tuscan landscape whose peculiar spell is to make you think that it's yours forever. That you're here to stay. That time actually stopped the moment you left the highway and drove down a pine-flanked road that steals your breath each time you spot the house whose sole purpose on earth, it seems, is to compress in the space of seven days the miracle of a lifetime. Like a lover who knows he's in way over his head, I niggle and fuss and am all too hasty to find fault with the small things, because the large ones can, with just a few colors and a few tones and the toll of bells all over the valley, easily shame my puny attempts to rehearse the wake-up call that is to take everything away.

So I count the days. Two down, five to go. By this time tomorrow, it'll be three down and four to go. Mustn't forget to plan for the day when I'll have spent more days here than I'll have days left to stay. On that morning, I'll brace myself and remember standing outside this very gatehouse with the gardener while stealing a few seconds from our improvised chat to think of the end. From every hour that goes by, I waste a few seconds to invoke my last day here, the way the ancients tipped their goblets and spilled some of their wine when the harvest was plentiful—to keep the envious gods quiet. Thus, I shoo the unavoidable by staring at it all the time. It is also my way of picking up the pieces I'll be putting together in the weeks ahead. This view of the valley outside Lucca. These candlelit dinners in the garden. And the litany of names that never seems to end: Monticchiello, Montepulciano, Montalcino, Montefiroalle—Monte-this and Monte-that, a lifetime of Montes.

It seems ages ago that we sat in our living room one Sunday evening in New York and leafed through endless catalogs of farmhouses, which for weeks kept streaming into our mailbox, courtesy of villasitalia.com. Houses with or without swimming pool, with or without cook, with or without vineyard and/or olive grove, with or without vista panoramica—we wanted vista panoramica. And we wanted the cypresses and the ocher-tiled roofs and the faded-brown doors and rusted hinges, and we wanted a brook—must have a brook—and all around we wanted pomodori (tomatoes) and girasoli (sunflowers) and fattened zucche (squash), the whole thing bathed in steaming parched fields of rosemary and oregano. We wanted a swimming pool that looks out straight into infinity. And we wanted to see the adjoining hills and fields through half-opened windows whose frames themselves are part of the picture.

The villas came in lavish centerfolds, with informal, whimsical names, each promising bliss by stoking timeless dreamscapes of an inner Tuscany that all of us, especially those who have read the Romantics and Post-Romantics, secretly cradle in ourselves. A reader's Tuscany. Eternal.