Marco Carrera and Duccio Chilleri's friendship

Marco Carrera and Duccio Chilleri’s friendship is one of the formative bonds of Marco’s youth, built through school, sport, music, and gambling. It gives the two boys a shared world beyond their families, and later becomes the setting for a devastating reversal: Marco survives a plane crash after leaving the doomed flight with Duccio, then turns their escape into a story that renews the very superstition he had long opposed. Their connection endures in memory, but its history is shaped as much by loyalty and exhilaration as by the betrayal that follows.

Beginnings and Shared Life

Marco and Duccio were elementary- and middle-school classmates, tennis partners at CT Firenze, and members of the same ski club until Marco stopped competing. Though they later attended different high schools, they continued to see each other daily. Music was among their common enthusiasms: they listened persistently to American West Coast bands, including the Eagles, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Poco, and the Grateful Dead, sharing records and tapes as a regular part of their life together.

Gambling became the bond’s most powerful new element. It was Duccio’s passion; Marco was drawn along by it, discovering both the rush of the game and a sense of liberation. Neither boy came from a family with a history of gambling. For Duccio, the game offered a way to resist the prosperous, protected future his parents had prepared for him. For Marco, it opened a world his cultivated mother, gentle father, and siblings had never imagined. The friendship thus offered more than companionship: it gave both boys access to an activity that felt like a chosen departure from their family lives.

At sixteen, after Duccio’s reputation as a jinx had isolated him from other friends in Florence, Marco remained his closest companion. Their friendship had survived the social effects of the nickname that followed Duccio, even as other boys came to believe he brought bad luck. When people asked Marco why he continued to see him, his answer was simple: because Duccio was his friend.

Loyalty and the Eye of the Storm

Marco’s loyalty was real, but the novel also complicates it. He defended Duccio against the accusations of bad luck, insisting that he himself was proof the superstition made no sense: he spent time with Duccio and nothing happened to him. Yet the friendship also gave Marco an exhilarating entry into gambling and an unfamiliar social world. He took satisfaction, too, in being able to associate with someone others shunned without suffering the same consequences. His loyalty and his enjoyment of that exceptional position existed side by side.

As time passed, the old friendship changed. Duccio grew increasingly absorbed in gambling and distanced himself from interests they had once shared. Marco continued to love him as a friend, but the relationship no longer rested on the same mutual life. The explanation that allowed their companionship to continue was the so-called eye-of-the-storm theory: someone close to Duccio was supposedly safe, while a chance encounter or even a distant greeting could bring disaster. The idea let Marco remain beside his friend and let others sustain their belief in the omen. It was at once a defense of the friendship and a way to preserve the superstition around it.

The Flight and Its Aftermath

As young adults, Marco and Duccio began traveling to casinos abroad, mostly in Austria and Yugoslavia. Their trips by car involved long journeys and stops that Marco had come to find tiresome. He wanted more focused gambling excursions and, on one occasion, persuaded Duccio—who feared flying—to travel by plane. They set out from Pisa for Ljubljana on a cheap charter flight operated by Koper Aviopromet, whose route included an inexplicable stop in Larnaca.

During the journey, Duccio’s fear and his reputation became entangled in a confrontation with the other passengers. Marco and Duccio left the plane. The DC-9 later crashed into the sea off Cyprus, killing those who remained aboard. Marco did not yet know what had happened when he returned home; he spent the night thinking of the passengers and crew he had left behind, and eventually fell asleep. The account identifies this as his last night of innocence: he had survived, but had not yet understood the scale of the event or the part the story would play in his life.

The next day, before leaving for the seaside, Marco deliberately sought out two old friends at a bar in Piazza del Carmine. He told them what Duccio had said to the passengers, including the words that they were already dead and wanted to kill him too. Marco presented the escape as a divine sign and described the scene in a way that made the old omen appear vindicated. In telling it, he aligned himself with the friends’ belief in Duccio’s dangerous reputation, although he had long challenged that belief.

Betrayal, Love, and Memory

Marco’s retelling had a lasting consequence for Duccio: it delivered the friend who had saved Marco’s life to the fatal fate he had resisted for years. The story does not present this as a simple change of belief. Marco’s account suggests that he acted against his own character and did not want to do what he did, yet the act itself made Duccio’s reputation harder to escape. Their history therefore turns on a painful contradiction: Marco’s survival depends on their shared escape, while his later telling helps make that escape a source of renewed danger for Duccio.

The friendship also persists in the novel through later recollection and correspondence. In a letter written from Paris, Luisa Lattes remembers Marco in connection with a red sweater and with their nocturnal excursions in Florence, including trips for hot flatbread. Those memories place Duccio within the youthful world Marco and Luisa once shared, even as the letter’s focus is on Luisa’s feelings for Marco. The past survives not only as a sequence of events, but as details carried into later intimacy.

Much later, Marco’s relationship with Duccio still bears on the way he understands loyalty, danger, and responsibility. His marriage to Marina Molitor is damaged by his continuing relationship with Luisa, whose letters and messages leave a documentary trail. This later conflict is not itself part of the friendship with Duccio, but it echoes the earlier tension between Marco’s self-image and his actions: he can believe he is preserving distinct loyalties while making choices whose consequences reach other people. Duccio’s story is the starkest early instance of that pattern.

Significance

The friendship moves from uncomplicated shared pursuits toward an uneasy arrangement in which loyalty, gambling, and superstition become difficult to separate. Marco stands by Duccio when others turn away, but his closeness also benefits him, and his defense of Duccio cannot prevent him from eventually betraying the confidence and meaning of their shared escape. The eye-of-the-storm theory gives their relationship a memorable shape: intimacy seems to offer shelter from catastrophe, until Marco’s own account carries the danger outward again.

The bond’s importance lies in this reversal. Duccio’s reputation begins as an explanation for misfortune imposed by others; Marco’s later story gives that reputation fresh force. Their friendship is therefore both a refuge from social exclusion and a channel through which its consequences travel. What Marco remembers as a night of survival becomes, through his telling, a turning point in the history of the friend he had once defended.