I remember the last time I was here. I loved this place so. Damn you, Henry McCoy, for being so incredibly boring that I didn’t listen to you talk about time travel.
Secret Avengers #20 introduces another place of living for Natasha, after we went through a whole ongoing volume without seeing her apartment. This is a villa in Trieste, Italy, decorated largely traditionally. It exists isolated on its own small island off-shore, and has stockpiles of money, weapons and documents hidden in the basement.
Natasha doesn’t really have a Batcave, a regular HQ, which is in part because she’s only sporadically published solo. This villa serves as one for the four months or so the SA #20 mission takes, and, as she explains, she loves this house, or did. Trieste lies on the border between Italy and (once-communist) Slovenia, and has a history of changing hands, being independent, and being annexed.
In any case, Natasha describes it as a place she could love, a place she did love, once. So it’s fitting that she’s the one who destroys it in the course of the issue, a necessity of her long life and an occupation that means she must be forever moving on.
From Secret Avengers #20, by Warren Ellis and Alex Maleev.
