A few days after they returned from Italy, in Anne Merry’s studio, Nico was looking over her shoulder at the now finished music box. On the sides were the six small images that she had painted. Now -- inspired by recollection of scenes they observed on a drive from Lucca to the top of Lake Garda -- enclosed in glass, on the top was a diorama of a ruined castle or monastery half-hidden in the Apennine Mountains.

"My original idea was to model the castle that my Mother saw in a recurring childhood dream. In this dream, my Mother was in a boat on a foggy day -- floating past miles of fields, until the boat came to a place where on the banks of the river, there were houses and people. Suddenly, high on the riverbank, the fog lifted. The sun came out; a castle emerged. It was this dream that my Mother remembered when she first opened the book my Father sent her from a World War II battlefield.

"The story -- I have told you this story before -- is that when my Mother first opened it, the book of hours fell open to the middle. There, on the banks of a painted river where boats sailed, was a familiar image of a many turreted castle."

leonado: Amboise "The Chateau d'Amboise, high above the Loire River", Nico said. It was he who had identified the castle that appeared in the book of hours. He had been there one memorable summer, when his family toured the Loire River Valley. To Anne Merry, Nicolas St. Denis had also shown a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's sketch of Chateau d'Amboise, possibly the last work Leonardo created before he died nearby in Château du Clos Luce.

"There is no space now to include this castle on the surface of the music box. It was only a dream," Anne Merry said to her husband.

"But when you put the book of hours inside the music box, that castle will always be there," he replied.
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