Italy serves as more than a backdrop: its towns, restaurants, and journeys bring people together, while the rhythms of travel and daily routine give their encounters a particular shape. In Lucca, a chance meeting allows the narrator to hear a former classmate’s long-held story; elsewhere, the country is recalled as part of a generation’s youthful atmosphere and its changing ideas about intimacy.

Setting and Encounters

The narrator meets his former classmate in Lucca, a quiet town in central Italy. At the time, the narrator is renting an apartment in Rome and traveling alone after his wife has returned to Japan. His route has taken him from Venice to Verona, then to Mantua and Pisa, with Lucca as a stop along the way. It is his second visit, and he remembers the town as pleasant, with an excellent restaurant on its outskirts known for mushroom dishes.

The former classmate is also traveling alone, in his case on business. He owns a furniture company that imports European furniture and is in Europe to buy stock. The two men happen to be staying at the same hotel. Their meeting offers relief from the tedium of solitary travel, which the narrator describes as more burdensome with age: scenery and other people’s voices become irritating, old memories intrude, and the practical effort of eating out or making oneself understood in a foreign language grows tiresome.

Lucca as a Storytelling Place

That evening, the men share dinner at a restaurant in Lucca, seated near a fireplace. They order an expensive bottle of red wine and a full mushroom meal: appetizers, pasta, and arrosto con funghi. The meal and the relaxed setting lead into an exchange that begins with their impressions of Italy, including its unpunctual trains and long meals.

By the time they are drinking their second bottle, the former classmate begins telling the narrator a story he seems to have wanted to share for a long time. The narrator presents the setting as part of the conditions that made the disclosure possible: without the pleasant restaurant, the small town, the fireplace, and the wine, he doubts the man would have spoken. Italy thus becomes a temporary refuge from ordinary life, creating room for an account that had remained unspoken.

The former classmate is not a fluent storyteller. His account wanders, circles back, and presents facts out of order, so the narrator says he has rearranged its fragments into a coherent narrative. The episode makes Lucca not only the site of their reunion but also the point at which an untidy personal past is shaped into a tellable story.

Italy and the Book’s Other Times and Routines

Italy also appears in the narrator’s reflections on the 1960s. He describes himself as reaching his twentieth birthday during the student movement, amid rock music and the sense that the decade’s energy and promise were unusually vivid. Looking back, he calls that period a pre-history of late-stage capitalism: a time when experience seemed more direct and cause and effect easier to grasp. His account connects the memory of youthful life and sexual norms to a wider sense of historical change, though he admits that he cannot fully explain what made the decade special.

Across the book, places and routines determine when people can meet, speak, or remain alone. Lucca’s unplanned encounter and long dinner contrast with more repetitive arrangements elsewhere: an owner receives dinner at the same hour each night, a mother and son follow a regular pattern of reading and going to the beach, and a young man waits in a dormitory lobby for a phone call. These settings show how time and habit can either constrain contact or make room for it. In Lucca, travel’s loneliness gives way, for one evening, to conversation and the recovery of a shared past.