The Adriatic coast becomes a landscape of bereavement and uncertainty when Archimboldi’s wife dies in a remote village. The Baroness Von Zumpe travels there to learn what happened, but the people she questions can offer only a partial account: the woman drowned, her body was never found, and Archimboldi had left alone. The coast supplies no reunion or definitive resolution, only traces from which the living try to reconstruct an absence.

The Search for the Remote Village

While traveling in Italy, the Baroness Von Zumpe receives a telegram from Bubis reporting that Archimboldi’s wife has died in a remote village on the Adriatic coast. She begins to weep, then tells her Milanese hosts that she is leaving at once. The village is not identified in her travel guide, and she does not know whether the journey will require a train, bus, or taxi. A young Leftist editor from Turin, with whom she has had dalliances, offers to drive her there.

The journey takes on the character of a lament. The Baroness and the editor trade stories of dead relatives and lost friends as they cross the countryside, their account of loss growing increasingly elaborate. When they arrive exhausted, they ask the villagers about the German couple: the couple had come a few days earlier, the villagers say, and the man soon left alone because the woman had drowned.

What the Village Can Confirm

The Baroness and the editor seek further information from the village priest and the gravedigger, but neither can tell them where Archimboldi went. The gravedigger repeats that the German man left and that the German woman was not buried in the cemetery because her body was never found. The coast’s account of the death is therefore specific about the supposed drowning but incomplete about its aftermath: there is no body, grave, or trace of the widower’s destination.

Before leaving, the Baroness insists on driving up a mountain overlooking the area. From there, she sees winding paths, olive-covered hills, clusters of trees, and distant moving figures. This elevated view gives her a broad prospect but no new knowledge of Archimboldi’s whereabouts. The landscape can be surveyed; the missing people cannot be recovered from it.

Loss and Disappearance

The episode links the Adriatic coast to two absences: the wife’s unrecovered body and Archimboldi’s departure. The villagers’ testimony narrows what can be said without resolving what remains unknown. The Baroness’s grief, her journey, and the mountain overlook make the search tangible, while its failure preserves the uncertainty around the writer’s disappearance.

That uncertainty continues beyond the village. Archimboldi’s books keep selling, and four years after his disappearance Bubis receives the substantial manuscript of Inheritance. The coast episode offers no explanation of where Archimboldi has gone; instead, it places the reader at a point where reports, landscapes, and literary work survive him, while his physical presence remains out of reach.