Bolgheri

Bolgheri is the Carrera family’s name for a stretch of Tuscan coast and the retreat they built there behind the dunes. The house gathers the family’s changing history into one place: it begins as a shared project of happiness, becomes the setting for intimate family crises, and finally receives Marco Carrera and those he has summoned for a last gathering. Its persistence offers shelter, but it cannot preserve the harmony its founders hoped to establish.

Setting and the family house

The name does not refer simply to the nearby village. The family uses Bolgheri for the coastal pine forest and beach south of Marina di Bibbona, a stretch also known by the names Renaione and Palone. In the early 1960s, Letizia Delvecchio and Probo Carrera bought a small ruined farmhouse just behind the dunes, with a piece of pine forest around it. With two young children and a third on the way, they imagined the property as a symbolic home of happiness whose influence might extend beyond the family.

Letizia and Probo worked on the renovation together, but in different ways: she shaped the house, while he oversaw its growth. It expanded over the years, sometimes without permits, from a modest cottage into an elegant retreat in the Maremma. The physical enlargement outlasted the couple’s harmony. Their annual insistence on spending holidays there together increasingly appears less like a renewal of family happiness than a habit that has become self-defeating.

Childhood and family life

Bolgheri is one of the places where Marco’s relationship with his daughter Adele takes shape. On a bright Sunday in August, while they are having breakfast in the kitchen and Marina Molitor is still in bed, the three-year-old tells her father that an invisible thread runs from her back to the nearest wall. She explains how she must stay close to the wall and carefully move around anyone who might become caught in it. When Marco asks about his own movements around her, Adele says he never walks behind her. The revelation makes him feel fear and recognition, and marks the beginning of a closer relationship with his daughter; almost immediately, however, he suppresses what he has understood.

The thread becomes a practical concern before Adele starts elementary school. Marco enrolls her in fencing without first discussing it with Marina. The activity coincides with the disappearance of Adele’s thread-related behavior: she stops circling people who pass behind her, no longer speaks of the thread at home, and stops resisting school and crying there. Marco believes fencing has helped, but the Magician Manfrotto and Marina attribute the change instead to Marco’s increased presence in his daughter’s life, treating the timing as coincidence. Marco accepts their account without arguing, partly to keep the peace and spare Adele an open dispute. The house is thus associated not only with a child’s crisis and its easing, but with a family’s competing explanations of what happened.

A place of refuge and estrangement

The house’s promise of family unity sits uneasily beside the divisions that accumulate around it. At one point, Marco describes himself as alone after everyone has gone away, with the family saying they will not return and will sell the house. He goes through the hedge and down to the beach and the whirlpools, thinking of Luisa Lattes and his sister Irene Carrera, whose happiness and loss remain joined in his memory. The familiar coastal landscape remains accessible, but the household that gave it meaning has dispersed.

Earlier, the coast had also held the possibility of intimacy and escape. Marco and Luisa, who had been in love for years amid a feud between their families, meet at Baratti on the night of August 23, 1981. Their families’ hostility had helped make their relationship secret and difficult, while shared childhood memories at the beach sustained Luisa’s attachment to Marco. The contrast between their private hope and the family conflict surrounding them gives the coastal setting a double character: it offers room for closeness, yet remains embedded in the history of the households that oppose it.

Return and final gathering

In 2015, Marco writes to Luisa from Bolgheri, reflecting on how long and complicated their connection has become. He says that when he speaks with her he sometimes feels he is addressing not only the woman he has loved since he was twenty, but also the voice of her psychoanalyst. The letter places the old retreat within a later stage of their relationship, where intimacy persists but is mediated by distance and by the people they have become.

In the novel’s final period, the house is again central to family life, now under the pressure of Marco’s pancreatic cancer and his decision not to resume treatment. His granddaughter Miraijin arranges for relatives and friends to gather at the family house in Bolgheri. Giacomo Carrera comes from the United States, Luisa from Paris, Marina and Greta from Germany, and Daniele Carradori from Lampedusa; Miraijin’s boyfriend Oscar arrives from Barcelona, alongside Rodrigo, the nurse who will carry out Marco’s plan, and members of the escort. The house’s international guests make it unlike any gathering in its history, while Marco’s effort to treat the visit as a celebration rather than an occasion for self-pity gives the old retreat a final role as a place of deliberate farewell.

Although Marco can no longer eat normally and receives nutrition through a feeding tube, he helps Miraijin prepare dinner and lunch for the guests, remembering their preferences from decades earlier. Seafood for Giacomo, scampi for Luisa, and buffalo mozzarella for Marina turn the preparations into an act of attention across long separations. The meal cannot restore the family’s former life, but it allows Marco to welcome those who have returned and to offer them a shared memory before he leaves Bolgheri for the last time.