Turin is the principal setting for Piero Morini’s life outside the international travels of the four Archimboldians: a university city where he teaches German literature, returns by train to his apartment, and eventually builds a shared home with Liz Norton. Its appearances connect intellectual work and disability to friendship, illness, absence, and reunion, making the city less a backdrop than the place where the group’s long-distance bonds acquire everyday form.

Academic and Personal Home

By 1991, Morini was teaching German literature at the University of Turin. His work on Benno von Archimboldi had already taken him beyond the classroom: after translating Bifucaria Bifurcata, he published two studies in journals in Milan and Palermo, examining fate in Railroad Perfection and conscience and guilt in Lethaea and Bitzius. His advocacy helped overcome the limited interest Archimboldi’s work attracted among Italian readers, and Morini’s translation of Saint Thomas appeared in Italy in 1991. Turin therefore anchors a career that combines scholarship, translation, and the effort to make a little-known writer legible to a new readership.

That professional life coexists with a profound change in Morini’s circumstances. Doctors diagnosed him with multiple sclerosis, and a strange, spectacular accident left him permanently dependent on a wheelchair. The narrative does not reduce his life in Turin to this diagnosis: it shows the practical arrangements that make movement possible, including ticket collectors who help him onto the train platform when he travels back from Avignon. His disability is part of his daily experience, not merely a label; travel and ordinary access depend at times on other people’s assistance.

The City as a Point of Return

On the train from Avignon to Turin, Morini reads the cultural supplement of Il Manifesto and then sleeps until ticket collectors tell him they have arrived. The short journey ends in a familiar city and a familiar routine, but his place within the group is changing. Pelletier and Espinoza have imagined him through the figure of Eurylochus in the Odyssey: a loyal companion whose story carries both caution and danger. Their unspoken, instinctive fear that Morini might be lost gives the friendship a shadow, even while the four Archimboldians remain close and keep personal desires in the background.

Turin also becomes a place where Morini’s illness remains difficult to discuss. In conversation, he considers telling Norton about it, but bitterly decides he never will. The withheld disclosure marks a limit in the intimacy among the friends: affection and loyalty do not automatically make vulnerability speakable. The city’s private interior, like the friendships surrounding it, holds both care and silence.

Absence and Search

When Morini vanishes, Turin is first approached through the gaps in communication. Pelletier and Espinoza call his apartment from Geneva airport and reach only the answering machine. Back in Madrid, Espinoza and Pelletier leave increasingly hopeless messages; for days they weigh whether to fly to Turin and contact the authorities, but hesitate, unwilling to act rashly or appear foolish. Their delay turns the city into the absent center of their efforts: Morini’s home is known, yet it yields no explanation of where he is.

On the fourth day Pelletier calls the University of Turin. The attempt to locate Morini through his German department produces only uncertainty: a temporary Austrian worker says the secretary has gone out for breakfast, and Espinoza later reaches a German literature student who says the department is empty. The calls are mundane and increasingly exasperating, but their failure makes the disappearance more tangible. The university that represents Morini’s professional identity cannot tell his friends where he is.

A Shared Home with Norton

The later account of Norton’s return gives Turin a different meaning. After tidying her London apartment, finding herself unable to reconstruct the plot or cast of a film she has just watched, and spending a restless night, she goes to the airport without a ticket and books the next flight to Italy. She flies to Milan and continues by train to Turin. At Morini’s door, she says she has come to stay and leaves him to decide whether she should go to a hotel or remain with him. He does not answer verbally; he moves his wheelchair aside and lets her in.

Their reunion takes shape through small acts of welcome. Morini makes tea and offers three biscuits filled with pistachio and fig paste; they talk for hours about politics, immigration, fascism, and other troubling subjects. Norton says the conversation makes her feel better, and when she asks for another biscuit, Morini instead arranges dinner at a restaurant in Turin. The city becomes the setting for a relationship sustained not by grand declarations but by conversation, hospitality, and shared routines.

Norton’s letter later says that she does not know how long they will remain together, but that she and Morini love one another and are happy. Turin thus holds an ending that is neither a permanent promise nor a mere pause: it is where Norton chooses to stay and where the two make a life together, while accepting that its duration is uncertain.

Narrative Function

Across the novel’s shifting geography, Turin gathers several kinds of return. It is Morini’s workplace and home, the destination of his journeys, the place his friends call when he disappears, and the city to which Norton travels to begin living with him. Those roles place the ordinary structures of life—an apartment door, a university department, a train arrival, tea and dinner—beside the story’s larger uncertainties about friendship, bodily change, and absence.

The city’s significance depends on this contrast. It offers neither a complete explanation for Morini’s private silence nor certainty about the future of his relationship with Norton. Instead, Turin provides a concrete setting in which care can be practiced even when knowledge is incomplete: friends keep calling, colleagues try to locate him, and Norton arrives prepared to stay without demanding an immediate answer. The city’s recurring function is to turn distance into attempted contact, and attempted contact into shared daily life.