Venice is a place of concealment and return in Benno von Archimboldi’s life: during his prolonged absence from public view, he works there as a gardener, lives with almost nothing, and receives visits from his publisher and the Baroness Von Zumpe. Its canals and winter silence become the setting for an intimate reunion, while its literary and social worlds sharpen the contrast between the celebrated company of Alberto Moravia and Archimboldi’s solitary, unsettled existence.

A hidden life in Cannaregio

Four years after Archimboldi disappeared, a manuscript of more than five hundred pages reached Bubis from Venice. It was a chaotic object, crowded with crossings-out, addenda, and long, often illegible footnotes. In an accompanying letter, Archimboldi said he had been working as a gardener. Bubis suspected a joke, reasoning that such work would be difficult to find in any Italian city, let alone Venice. He nevertheless replied at once, asked how much of an advance Archimboldi wanted, and requested a dependable address for sending the money that had accumulated during the years of silence.

Archimboldi supplied an address in Cannaregio and sent seasonal good wishes to Bubis and his wife. The address made Venice more than a convenient point of contact: it located the missing writer within the city, even as his life there remained largely inaccessible. Bubis read the manuscript during several very cold days and felt that it fulfilled hopes he could not quite explain. His satisfaction did not rest simply on Archimboldi’s productivity or storytelling, but on a harder-to-name quality that mattered to him as a publisher.

The gardener’s work, initially dismissed by Bubis as implausible, was real. Archimboldi worked either for the city in its few well-kept public parks or for private clients, including law firms, whose palazzi concealed splendid inner gardens. Venice thus offered him a living at the margins of its conspicuous architecture: the gardens existed behind walls, just as the author’s life receded from public view. He was not living as a literary celebrity among the city’s visitors and institutions, but doing practical work in private spaces.

The Baroness’s journey and visit

Because the Baroness Von Zumpe was in Italy, Bubis asked her to visit Archimboldi. He would have gone himself, but age had made travel more difficult. The baroness arrived in Venice with a younger Roman civil engineer who was her lover. After they took a room at the Danieli, she showered, changed, and went out alone without breakfast, carried by an urgency she could not explain.

Her journey through the city unfolds as a passage through competing images of literary life. She traveled by vaporetto from San Zaccaria along the Grand Canal, got off near the station, asked for directions, and continued on foot. As she walked, she compared Moravia, whom her lover admired and had introduced her to, with Archimboldi. Moravia belonged to a worldly scene of guests, writers, filmmakers, translators, students, aristocrats, and Marxists, gathered on a terrace overlooking ancient ruins. Archimboldi, by contrast, seemed to her a lower-class Germanic barbarian, an artist in a state of permanent incandescence, given to long soliloquies rather than cultivated social exchange.

The route carries her from the Lista di Spagna to Campo San Geremia, across the Ponte Guglie, and onward through the maze around the Jewish Ghetto and Cannaregio. Along the way, her thoughts turn to the possibility that Archimboldi addresses someone beyond himself: perhaps a dead man, a German demon, or one of the imagined monsters associated with the estate where he once worked. She rejects ghosts and ideologies as explanations, trusting only bodies, yet the city’s passageways and distant voices give her speculations a setting. Venice’s physical maze becomes a space in which the identity of Archimboldi’s unseen interlocutor remains open rather than resolved.

At the address on Calle Turlona, she found Archimboldi living in a small, dark apartment of two rooms divided by a plaster partition, with a tiny, recently installed bathroom. The sole window looked onto a canal flowing into the Rio della Sensa. His hair was long and tangled, his beard covered his neck, and his wool sweater and dirt-stained trousers made him an unusual sight in a city of water and stone. He recognized the baroness immediately. When she entered, she noticed his nostrils flare as if he were trying to smell her. The room where he kept his bed and clothes was dark mauve shading almost to black.

Winter intimacy and silence

The baroness did not return to the Danieli that night. Her engineer, left behind, drank quietly at the hotel bar but did not go to the police: he feared making himself ridiculous and sensed that she would emerge from the situation without needing to plead or demand anything. His anxious imaginings of Venetian disappearances and sexual danger remain his own; the visit itself is presented as a private encounter between the baroness and Archimboldi. They talked and made love, with more of the latter than the former, and the engineer’s fears did not come to pass.

During the visit, they discussed the cold, which Archimboldi resisted by wrapping himself in blankets; American authors published by Bubis, whom Archimboldi had never heard of or read; and Hugo Halder, the baroness’s vanished cousin. They also spoke about Archimboldi’s family, whom he had finally found. When she was about to ask where and how he had found them, he got out of bed and asked her to listen. She heard only silence. Archimboldi called that silence the point of it, then opened the window and leaned half his body outside—not to throw himself into the canal, despite the appearance of the gesture. He brought the baroness to the window, and together they watched snow falling over Venice.

The episode turns the city’s winter weather into an encounter with what cannot be explained or fully heard. Archimboldi does not answer the baroness’s question about his family; instead, he offers silence, the open window, and the snow. The scene does not disclose what he means by silence, but makes the gap itself central to their exchange. Venice is at once a lived place—with cold rooms, a canal, and a window—and a setting for an intimacy that leaves essential knowledge unspoken.

Return, work, and the limits of home

More than a year after Bubis’s death, another novel, The Return, arrived at the publishing house from Archimboldi, who was living in Italy again. The Baroness Von Zumpe did not want to read the manuscript herself; she gave it to the copy editor and ordered it prepared for publication in three months. She then telegraphed the return address and traveled by plane to Milan, catching a train to Venice from the airport. That evening she met Archimboldi in a Cannaregio trattoria and gave him a check covering the advance and royalties from his earlier books.

Archimboldi put the respectable sum in his pocket without comment. They ate Venetian sardines with slices of semolina, drank white wine, and walked through the city. Their meeting took place in early fall, when the weather was mild enough for a light sweater, not in the snowbound winter of their earlier encounter. The baroness admitted she had not returned to Venice since then. Archimboldi said he had been there only a short time; he still lived in Cannaregio, though no longer on Calle Turlona. He planned to head south. The city offered a renewed meeting, but not a settled homecoming.

For years Archimboldi’s belongings amounted to a suitcase holding clothes, a ream of paper, and the two or three books he was reading, along with the typewriter Bubis had given him, carried separately in his other hand. He discarded clothes when they wore out and gave away or abandoned books after reading them. His mobile existence complicates the idea of Venice as a permanent refuge: it is one address in a life organized around movement and few possessions. He eventually bought a computer after laptops appeared, learned to use it, and later spent hours online searching for obscure news, forgotten names, and vanished events. He ultimately threw Bubis’s typewriter from a cliff onto rocks, a material severing of his connection to the instrument that had accompanied his earlier writing life.

Literary society and the city’s contrast

Venice gathers sharply different versions of literary existence. Through the baroness’s recollection of Moravia’s apartment and terrace, it is linked to cultivated sociability, artistic prestige, and a broad circle of cultural company. Archimboldi’s Venice is smaller and more precarious: a gardener’s work, a dark apartment, a few possessions, and conversations that move between family history and silence. The contrast is not simply between two writers, but between public literary life and an existence that repeatedly withdraws from it.

The city’s canals, palazzi, hidden gardens, narrow streets, and seasonal changes give that contrast material form. Its routes carry the baroness from the Danieli into the obscure address of a missing author; its winter snow frames their encounter with silence; its autumn streets permit a later reunion that acknowledges both continuity and departure. Venice does not solve Archimboldi’s disappearance or explain his inward life. Instead, it makes his intermittent presence tangible: a return address, a gardener’s job, a window above a canal, a meal shared with the publisher’s widow, and then the intention to go south.