Lucca

Lucca, a quiet town in central Italy, is the setting for a chance reunion between an unnamed narrator and a former classmate. The town’s calm atmosphere, their shared hotel, and an unhurried dinner create the conditions for the classmate to tell a story he has apparently kept to himself for a long time; Lucca thus becomes not merely a stop on a journey but the place where recollection is finally given a listener.

Setting and Visit

The narrator is staying in an apartment in Rome while his wife is back in Japan. Traveling alone, he takes a leisurely train trip from Venice through Verona and Mantua to Pisa, stopping in Lucca for a second visit. He describes the town as quiet and pleasant, and notes a restaurant on its outskirts known for mushroom dishes. His former classmate is also in Lucca, on a business trip, and the two discover that they are staying at the same hotel.

Reunion and Dinner

Both men are traveling alone and bored, so encountering one another comes as a relief. They arrange dinner at a restaurant near a fireplace, order an expensive bottle of red wine, and share a full mushroom course: appetizers, pasta, and arrosto con funghi. The classmate works for a successful company importing European furniture, though he describes it modestly as a small business. Their conversation begins with impressions of Italy, including its late trains and lengthy meals.

A Place for Telling

By the time they are into their second bottle of wine, the former classmate has begun recounting his past. The narrator suggests that the pleasant restaurant in Lucca, the fireplace, and the mellow 1983 Coltibuono helped make the disclosure possible; without that particular setting, he doubts the story would have been told. Lucca therefore marks a shift from travel talk to personal testimony, as the former classmate speaks about having lived cautiously within a sense of boundaries.

Narrative Significance

The narrator presents the classmate as an ineffective storyteller who loses track of details and arranges events in the wrong order. He openly says that, as a novelist, he rearranges the fragments into what he hopes will be a coherent narrative. The episode makes Lucca the setting for both the telling and the shaping of a life story: the meeting supplies a listener, while the narrator’s later reconstruction turns the classmate’s disordered recollections into an account readers can follow.