the disappearance of Maurizio Giussani

The disappearance of Maurizio Giussani is the unresolved disappearance at the center of Laurence Arne-Sayles’s 1987 summer gathering at Casale del Pino. Recounted in Matthew Rose Sorensen’s old journal, it connects the professor’s claims about reaching another world with the vanishing of a young philosophy student—and confronts Sorensen, then living as Piranesi, with a past he can no longer read or recognize.

Background and Gathering

In the summer of 1987, Arne-Sayles rented Casale del Pino, a farmhouse twenty kilometres from Perugia, and brought along the students he most favored: Stanley Ovenden, Bannerman, Hughes, Valentine Ketterley, and Sylvia D’Agostino. They formed an inner circle around Arne-Sayles’s great experiment, but the group was already under strain. He reacted harshly to questions that suggested insufficient commitment, turning criticism into a public inventory of the questioner’s personal and academic failings. Most students kept quiet; Ovenden continued to voice doubts, and Hughes defended him.

As the tension grew, Ovenden and Hughes spent more time away from the others and became friendly with Maurizio Giussani, a philosophy student at the University of Perugia. That friendship alarmed Arne-Sayles. Giussani was not simply a visitor at the farmhouse: he had become close to students whose independence was already a source of friction within the professor’s circle.

The Night Giussani Vanished

On the evening of 26 July, Arne-Sayles invited Giussani and his fiancée, Elena Marietti, to dinner at Casale del Pino. He spoke about the Other World, describing a place where architecture and oceans were mixed together, and about the possibility of getting there. Marietti took this for metaphor or a description of a psychedelic experience in the manner of Huxley; the journal does not indicate that she understood his account literally.

Marietti had work the next day at her father’s law firm in Perugia, where she was employed over the summer as a paralegal. At about eleven, she said goodnight, drove home, and went to bed. The others remained talking. The English party had promised that one of them would drive Giussani home, but the later account given by Ovenden, Bannerman, Hughes, Ketterley, and D’Agostino was that he refused the offer and set out on foot a little after midnight. The night was moonlit and warm; his home was about three kilometres away.

Arne-Sayles said he had gone to bed shortly after Marietti left and knew nothing of what happened. Giussani was never seen again. The journal preserves these competingly consequential statements—the professor’s claim of ignorance and the group’s account of a voluntary walk—but supplies no resolution of what took place after midnight.

Investigation and Uncertainty

Ten years later, after Arne-Sayles was convicted of kidnapping another young man, Italian police reopened Giussani’s case. The journal’s account breaks off at that point without recording the result of the renewed investigation. The disappearance therefore remains an absence rather than a solved crime: the last known setting, the dinner, and the reported walk home can be described, but the evidence here does not establish Giussani’s fate or identify what happened to him.

The Journal and Sorensen’s Lost Past

The episode acquires another consequence when Sorensen encounters it while reading his old journal. The entry is in his own handwriting, yet its references to Birmingham and Perugia mean nothing to him; he experiences the words as gibberish because his life in the House has severed him from the world and identity they describe. The account is thus both a record of Giussani’s disappearance and a measure of Sorensen’s estrangement from his former self: the names and places are visible on the page, but no longer connect to a world he can remember.