Florence is the setting for the postwar reunion of Rabo Karabekian and Marilee Kemp, and for a meeting of private memory with public history. Rabo first comes to the city to testify about two paintings stolen during the war; on his last day, a note from Marilee draws him to her palace. There, their old correspondence and the losses of the war return in altered form: she is now a countess, he is a wounded veteran, and the past they share includes a painful truth she had kept from him.

A postwar destination

Florence enters Rabo’s story through a registered letter from Italy. The lawsuit concerned a Giotto and a Masaccio taken by American soldiers from a German general in Paris. Rabo’s platoon of art experts had catalogued the paintings and arranged their shipment to a warehouse in Le Havre. Italian prisoners of war, who had worked as craters in civilian life, handled the packing; one apparently managed to send both paintings to his wife in Rome, where they remained hidden after the war. Their rightful owners then sued to recover them.

Rabo travelled to Florence alone to account for the paintings’ journey from Paris to Le Havre, and his testimony put his name in the papers. The trip is at once an official consequence of wartime service and a return to the world of art. His role is not to judge the paintings or claim them, but to explain the chain of custody that brought them within his platoon’s responsibility. The city thus receives him not as an artist on a pilgrimage, but as a veteran called to give an account of what happened to art amid war and displacement.

Florence also stands in Rabo’s memory as the place where the private life of Marilee’s wartime years becomes visible. Before he sees her again, he recalls that she had once written to him from Switzerland, explaining that she had gone there to ski. Only during his postwar visit to her palace does she disclose the reason she had actually been sent away: Dan Gregory had arranged for her to go alone to a clinic in Florence to end a pregnancy. The city is therefore not merely the scene of their reunion; it is also the setting of a concealed episode whose truth Marilee finally chooses to tell.

Marilee’s palace and the reunion

On the last day of his visit, Rabo returned to his hotel at about noon and found a note on expensive paper bearing a noble crest. Marilee’s message invited him over whether or not he was the Rabo Karabekian she had in mind, joked about her fondness for Armenians, and ended with an instruction to wear something green. She signed herself Marilee, Countess Portomaggiore, identifying herself as the coal miner’s daughter Rabo had known. He telephoned at once; she invited him to tea in an hour, and he describes his heart beating hard at the prospect.

Her home was four blocks away, in a palazzo designed in the fifteenth century for Innocenzo “the Invisible” de Medici by Leon Battista Alberti. Rabo recounts its cruciform plan, four wings meeting a domed rotunda, and the building’s elaborate interior: Corinthian columns, a clerestory pierced with windows, a dome painted with a sacred scene, and a terrazzo floor depicting the work of peasants. The scale and ornament of the palace contrast sharply with the humble origins by which Rabo identifies Marilee in the note. Her title and surroundings signal how far her life has travelled from the young woman who once wrote a long letter to a distant boy.

Before going to the palace, Rabo had imagined the meeting in overtly romantic terms. Marilee’s tone on the telephone and her admission that no man was then in her life seemed to him to promise an intimate encounter. He told her that he had lost an eye in battle and would wear a patch, and that he was married, though his marriage was failing. His expectation reveals the distance between the hopeful, self-dramatizing veteran he imagines himself to be and the complicated history the visit will bring back into view.

A life transformed by war

Rabo’s knowledge of Marilee’s later life is strikingly specific. At thirty-seven she would be the Countess Portomaggiori, living in a pink palace in Florence; at fifty she would be Europe’s biggest Sony distributor and its greatest collector of American postwar modern art. The coal miner’s daughter who had written to a nineteen-year-old stranger becomes a figure of wealth, influence, and collecting. The palace makes that transformation tangible, while her note’s affectionate reference to her origins keeps the earlier identity present within the grandeur.

Her history in Florence is bound to Dan Gregory’s power over her. When Rabo first received her long letter, she described herself as Gregory’s assistant, but Rabo’s parents suspected she was lonely, and his mother was right: Gregory kept her around the house as a beautiful companion and sometimes used her as a model, without caring about her opinions. After Rabo told her that his mother had died of tetanus, Marilee’s letters grew motherly, despite the small age difference between them. Her later disclosure about the clinic exposes another dimension of the arrangement: Gregory sent her alone to Florence to end the pregnancy she was carrying. She recalls that the experience made her interested in foreign languages, turning a coercive and painful episode into the unlikely beginning of a new intellectual interest.

Rabo’s own wartime history gives the reunion a second axis of injury and survival. He remembers the approach of a white German tank and soldiers crossing a snow-covered meadow in Luxembourg, but not being hit; unconscious when captured, he was kept under morphine and awoke in a German military hospital in a church across the border. His wound healed quickly, and he was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. Later, after serving in North Africa, Sicily, England, and France, he was wounded and captured again near the German border. The war’s end did not immediately restore ordinary life: on May 8, 1945, his guards vanished, and he and hundreds of captured officers were marched into the countryside, where a vast gathering of prisoners, camp survivors, forced laborers, civilians, former inmates of asylums, and still-armed German soldiers shared the landscape.

Art, testimony, and what remains

Florence links the legal testimony about two old masters to Rabo’s more inward account of how he sees art. During the trip, he acknowledges a secret fantasy that had attached itself to his abstract paintings: strips of colored tape laid across broad, featureless fields of paint seemed to him to carry the souls of people or animals. That private way of seeing could extend beyond the canvas; he imagined narrow bands of color within people on a street corner. The city’s encounter with art is thus not confined to the paintings at issue in the lawsuit. It coincides with Rabo’s own effort to understand what his work contains and what an image can hold.

The reunion also leads Rabo to describe his return to serious painting after a long hiatus. He tells Marilee that he has become a painter of work unlike anything the world has seen, and that his fellow artists in New York share one defining feature: their paintings are about nothing but themselves. Marilee responds with mock horror at another conversation about art, saying it is a swamp she will never escape, but listens thoughtfully. Florence becomes a place where Rabo can declare his artistic change to someone whose earlier connection to him began with drawings and letters intended for Dan Gregory.

The city’s significance is inseparable from the limits of what any one person can know or testify to. Rabo can explain the paintings’ passage through military custody; he cannot claim to have known every hand involved in their movement or every story surrounding them. In the same way, his recollection of Marilee’s letters is corrected by what she eventually tells him face to face. The Florence chapters bring official history, remembered war, and delayed personal disclosure into proximity without making them identical: legal testimony accounts for objects, while Marilee’s confession revises the meaning of a relationship.

Florence also returns at the far end of Rabo’s present-day account. Marilee dies of natural causes in her sleep in the same week as Edith, a coincidence Rabo marks as a devastating week in the life of old Rabo Karabekian. The city had represented her extraordinary ascent and their postwar reconnection; her death makes it part of the story of loss as well. Across the novel, Florence gathers the motifs of art, survival, secrecy, and belated truth into one place—not as a settled resolution, but as the setting where Rabo’s past repeatedly becomes newly legible.