UNRAVELING THE MYSTERY THAT IS FREYA STARK'S ASOLO.

Byline: Thomas Swick Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

For years, Asolo was nothing to me but a name at the top of letters in a book. The dates that followed it - 7 August 1930, 24 April 1933 - were as distant, as foreign, as the place seemed to be. It was somewhere in Italy, that's all I knew, and the home of Freya Stark, the author of the letters. But you didn't read Freya to learn of Italy; you read her - in "Baghdad Sketches," "Beyond Euphrates," "East Is West" - to dream about Arabia.

Then, before a recent trip to Venice, I picked up "Beyond Euphrates" and was stopped by a line: "There in the foreground was beloved Asolo, its castle and small hills like the stitching on a sampler, and the Dolomites behind it - all within sight of the campanile of St. Mark's in Venice on a clear autumn day." I got out my atlas to have a look. And the little town of Asolo went from being an address on a letter to a dot on the map, a stop on my itinerary.

It was raining in Verona the morning I got the train to Vicenza. Outside the station I found the bus to Bassano del Grappa where, an hour later in a noisy cafe, I bought another bus ticket and a glorious cheese sandwich. We sailed past gas stations and classical villas.

I was dropped at a major intersection. It didn't look like much. I stood with my bag, wondering why I had come. At least it had stopped raining. In the roadside restaurant a waitress told me a bus would be by in about five minutes, to take me up the hill.

It was a jitney, really, filled with schoolkids. The road climbed past trees and brushed stone walls. A Roman archway crowned our arrival, still rising, into an enclosing whirl of narrow streets etched by gothic arcades topped with dark green shutters. Flowers dripped from lofty balconies. I stepped out onto a fine sloped square and looked around.

A kind woman directed me across the square to the Hotel Duse, where my room gleamed with modern fixtures and featured a bowl of candy, a dish of potpourri and a view of the cathedral.

But the town, now made real, was still a mystery, a maze of shadowy arcades and unintelligible inhabitants. I went out hoping to use Freya as my key.

Freya Stark came to Asolo before she turned 1 - her father, visiting on a recommendation from Robert Browning's son, had bought a house from the local cure - and she died here two years ago at the age of 100. In the years between she traveled widely, especially in the Arab world, and wrote nearly a dozen books. Her heart, however, was always in these hills.

"So you want to know about Freya," Giuseppe Kamenar said, laughing as if at the impossibility of my request. "I knew her for 30 years. Come sit down. I will tell you only 20 percent of what I know. The other 80 percent, you understand, I cannot tell anyone. It is like a doctor and his patient."

The general manager of the Hotel Villa Cipriani led me to some chairs in the high-ceilinged lobby. Tall, spotless windows looked out onto the garden, which was hidden from the street by a high stone wall. At the other side it dipped down to a grove of olive trees that overlooked a verdant valley.

"Freya helped design the garden," Signore Kamenar said. "One day she came, took a disapproving look, and said: 'Peppino,' - she called me Peppino - 'you need some red here.' "

She was a terrifying driver. "I eventually convinced her to move to an apartment just up the street, so she could walk to lunch." He spoke with great fondness of the presents they exchanged twice a year - at Christmas and on the Feast of the Assumption - and of her books, which he kept at home, all signed with loving dedications. And he told of how she had become a writer:

"She said that one day, when she was a little girl, she came back from an outing and her father asked her what she had done. 'We went to Bassano,' she said. 'That's not good enough,' he said to her. 'What did you do there? What did you see? What were the people wearing?' And the next day she went out again and when she came home she had a detailed report."

Before I left, Signore Kamenar showed me to the dining room and led me to the glassed-in terrace where Freya ate lunch almost every day during her last 10 years. It levitated at the far end of the garden, its wide, geranium-boxed windows framing a masterful landscape of cypress-spiked hills and distant dark mountains wreathed in cloud. A rose-colored turret punctuated the center. Added to the perfection of the view was the thought that it had been enjoyed by probably the last survivor from the age when artists could consciously, and successfully, surround themselves with beauty.

Leaving the Cipriani, I continued down the street away from town till I came to Santa Anna Church. The cemetery sat to the side, on a hill overlooking a silent valley walled in the north by misty mountains. Even in death, beauty. The stone over her tomb was engraved:

Freya Stark

Writer and Traveller

1893-1993.

Back in town, I entered a stationer's shop. Its glass cases were filled with antique pens, ink bottles, blotting paper, period boxes with whimsical logos. The preserved aesthetics of the pre-computer age. I asked if Freya Stark had been a customer.

"No," the young man said. But he knew her, of course, everyone in town did. "She was the last person of really big culture," he said, with an awe that startled me. "And free. Other people always have politics, prejudices. Freya Stark was of all the people I know the most free."

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Photo This view of Asolo is seen from travel writer Freya Stark's old table on the Hotel Cipriani's terrace. Tom Swick/Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel