Probo Carrera

Probo Carrera is an engineer and model-maker, the husband of Letizia Delvecchio and father of Marco Carrera, Giacomo Carrera, and Irene. His life is marked by a marriage held together despite deep incompatibility, a fierce concern for Marco’s health, and a habit of approaching uncertainty through engineering and calculation. When cancer leaves him dependent on his sons, that habit becomes inseparable from the question of how a person can face death—and what a son may do when his father asks to leave.

Identity and Family

Probo is an engineer whose temperament and work stand in contrast to Letizia’s architecture. She is described as drawn to thought and revolution; he is associated with calculation, dexterity, and a particular skill in making models. Their differences are not a passing disagreement but part of the structure of the family: Marco grows up without recognizing how little his parents have in common, while Irene observes and remembers the strain more acutely. Beneath the household’s appearance of ordinary well-being lie quiet quarrels, resentment, and a failed union.

The mismatch does not mean that Probo’s attachment to Letizia is absent. The account of their marriage describes a one-sided, persistent love on his part, which Letizia cannot accept or return in the same way. The household’s unhappiness is therefore not reducible to indifference: Probo remains bound to a relationship that brings both of them bitterness, while the family continues to live inside its consequences.

The couple’s home in Florence, on Piazza Savonarola, and their house at Bolgheri hold different layers of their family life. In the early 1960s, Probo and Letizia bought a ruined farmhouse behind the dunes, with a piece of pine forest around it, intending to make it a symbolic place of happiness. They renovated it together, Letizia shaping the design and Probo contributing to its growth; over time it expanded into an elegant retreat. By the time the family continues to spend holidays there, however, the harmony behind the project has faded, and their insistence on gathering at the house has become a kind of self-defeating habit.

Concern for Marco

Probo’s response to Marco’s short stature differs sharply from Letizia’s. She gives their son the affectionate nickname “hummingbird” and repeatedly reassures herself that there is no cause for concern. Probo initially tries to trust her view, but when Marco reaches adolescence without developing as expected, he begins to feel guilty for having let nature take its course. To him, Marco’s small size is not a charming difference to be accepted without question; it may be a medical problem requiring attention.

When Marco is fourteen, Probo’s concern leads to consultations and tests. The diagnosis is a moderate, non-serious form of statural hypoevolutism caused by insufficient growth-hormone production. Treatment is not yet generally available for cases like Marco’s: existing experimental programs tend to be reserved for more severe conditions. Probo nevertheless finds a pediatric endocrinologist in Milan, Vavassori, who says he can help through a program with encouraging results. Probo wants to enroll Marco; Letizia opposes intervention, invoking nature and the value she places on Marco’s distinctive development. Their argument exposes an old fault line in the marriage, and Irene, who hears it, intervenes when it appears the dispute may lead to separation. Her action shocks her parents into repairing the breach, though the deeper reasons they remain together are left unresolved.

Probo’s insistence is an expression of care, but it also brings the family’s competing ways of understanding Marco into sharper focus. Letizia’s image of the hummingbird frames his smallness as part of a harmonious whole; Probo’s engineering-minded attention turns toward diagnosis, evidence, and the possibility of treatment. Their disagreement is consequently both practical and intimate: it concerns what should be done for their son, and whether his body should be accepted or altered.

Aldino and the Mathematics of Loss

Probo’s friendship with Aldino Mansutti supplies one of the clearest accounts of how he tries to live with events he cannot accept. Aldino dies in an extraordinary accident on the Aurelia state road: while riding his new Guzzi V7 Special near the church of San Leonardo, between Pisa and Livorno, he is struck by a 170-liter bucket of water that falls from a Bell Model 206 helicopter assisting firefighters. The bucket has detached from its hook during operations against a large fire in the lower Pisan hills.

Eleven years later, as Probo and Letizia drive to dinner, he tells her how he attempted to make the death intelligible. He obtained the investigation data—among them the helicopter’s course, speed, and altitude, the weight of the bucket and its water, the wind speed, and Aldino’s speed—and used them to calculate the accident’s probability. His first calculations appeared to show not the extreme improbability he wanted to establish, but the event’s inevitability within a rigid field of forces. He then reframed the problem through a simpler comparison: the helicopter traveled 43 meters per second, while Aldino was moving at 23.5 meters per second. If the hook had broken one second later, the bucket would have been 43 meters farther east, while Aldino would have advanced 23.5 meters. The calculation does not undo the death; it is Probo’s attempt to find a form in which its absurdity can be borne.

His mourning also reopens a memory of conflict. Probo recalls a hunting trip in Vallombrosa, when Aldino suddenly shot a partridge near him, frightening him and acting carelessly. Probo’s response was disproportionate: he shouted, insulted his friend, and left him behind. Remembering that he had been holding a loaded shotgun and consumed by anger, Probo asks Letizia whether, for an instant too brief to notice, he might have wanted to shoot Aldino. The question reveals how bereavement turns an old quarrel into a source of retrospective moral uncertainty. Their friendship endured the fight without lasting consequences, but after Aldino’s death Probo cannot keep it safely in the past.

The Engineer’s Private World

Probo’s habits of preserving and arranging objects make his inner life visible through things. His collection of Urania science-fiction novels runs from issue 1 to issue 899, covering 1952 to 1981, and has only six missing issues. He protects the books individually with tissue paper, and their careful preservation gives the collection substantial commercial value. In an email to Giacomo, Marco says that he will not sell the books if his brother wants them: their value is not merely financial, and their place in the family belongs to the father who kept them.

One gap in the collection has its own history. Issue 20, an Isaac Asimov novel dated July 20, 1953, is missing from the shelf, but a card between issues 19 and 21 records that it was lent to someone on April 19, 1970. Marco reads the note as evidence that Probo had owned the book and lent it to a friend. The small record of a loan turns the collection from a neatly preserved sequence into a trace of relationships and past use.

Probo’s model-making and his books are also part of the quiet world that remains after him. During his final illness, his sons return to the family home and its rooms; the caregiving brings Giacomo back into the atmosphere of the family he had left behind, while Marco bears much of the practical responsibility. Probo’s possessions endure as material evidence of a life organized around work, preservation, and private attachments, even when those attachments were not always spoken aloud.

Illness, Death, and Marco’s Choice

Probo develops cancer shortly after announcing that he intends to leave Florence and move to Marylebone in London. The plan surprises the family because it would mean leaving Piazza Savonarola, his workshop, models, and trains. Its pull is connected to a youthful stay in Marylebone with his friend Aldino, though Probo has not explained this attachment to those around him. He had returned to London twice: once with Letizia, when they were still happy together, and once with the family in 1972, on a trip he organized through the Order of Engineers of Florence. Even during the latter visit, a cramped hotel stay on Chiltern Street pleased him simply because it placed him in Marylebone.

When both parents are ill and choose to remain at home rather than end their lives in hospital, Giacomo stays in Florence to help care for them. He gives himself over to their needs, preparing drinks, getting supplies, helping Letizia with sudoku, and assisting with Probo’s care. He is so involved in the nursing tasks that the daytime nurse mistakes him for the doctor son. His anxiety about making a fatal mistake leads him to seek advice from Marco, who reminds him that he is an ophthalmologist. Beneath the practical work, their old competitiveness persists; in one nighttime emergency, the brothers come close to reconciliation, but neither takes the step that might make it real.

After Letizia dies, Probo is left in severe pain and repeatedly asks Marco to take him away. Marco understands that he could hasten his father’s death, although the doctor assigned to pain relief does not act on that possibility. After another bout of suffering, Marco gives Probo a first injection of morphine sulphate outside the prescribed protocol, lies beside him, and asks whether he is ready to move to Marylebone. Probo answers yes, then says “Goldfinger house.” Marco subsequently acts through the venous access and the morphine. Probo dies the next day, which is also his birthday and exactly one month after Letizia’s death. At the funeral, Marco tells visitors that he feels tired; the ashes he receives are darker and coarser than his mother’s.

Probo’s ending does not resolve the contradictions of his life. The man who tried to make loss calculable dies in a sequence of coincidences that calculation cannot soften: his wife’s death, his own birthday, and Marco’s decision arrive in close succession. His wish to go to Marylebone, sustained by a memory from his youth, becomes the setting of his final exchange with his son. For Marco, carrying out that exchange is both an act of care and an irreversible moral burden; for the family, Probo’s carefully kept books and models remain where his unspoken attachments can still be read.