Florence

Florence is both the setting of Marco Carrera’s formative years and a durable point of return across his family life. Its schools, tennis club, streets, and family home hold sharply different kinds of attachment: the friendship with Duccio Chilleri, a household divided by unspoken conflict, and later the rooms and routines through which Marco keeps contact with the dead and with the family still living. As the story moves outward to work, travel, and the coast, Florence remains the place from which many of those ties are measured.

Childhood, Family, and the City

Marco grows up in Florence without recognizing the unhappiness inside his parents’ marriage. He fails to register his mother’s impatience, his father’s silences, or the whispered arguments that his older sister Irene listens to and remembers. His parents’ temperaments and professional worlds seem opposed: she is an architect drawn to ideas and change, while he is an engineer skilled in calculation and model-making. Their household’s apparent comfort conceals a failed union marked by bitterness and resignation. Florence is thus not merely the backdrop to a happy childhood; it is where Marco lives inside a family atmosphere whose tensions he cannot yet interpret.

At fourteen, the city’s everyday geography is bound up with the freedom he expects from his new Vespa. After a year of trying to persuade his parents, he gets it just as the 1973 oil crisis brings Sunday traffic restrictions into force. The sudden ban includes private vehicles, so the scooter cannot give him the Sunday independence he had imagined. It is an especially sharp disappointment because he has stopped skiing in order to enjoy his new freedom at home rather than spend winter and spring traveling to Abetone for training and competitions. The restrictions also reshape Florence itself: streetlights are switched off at night, television broadcasts end early, and household heating is limited. For Marco, the speed of these changes makes adult society seem suddenly vulnerable to decisions made elsewhere.

Friendship and Adolescent Life

Florence is the ground of Marco and Duccio’s long friendship. They meet as elementary- and middle-school classmates, play tennis together at CT Firenze, and share the ski club until Marco gives up competition. Even when they attend different high schools, they continue seeing each other daily, often listening to American West Coast bands. By sixteen, as Duccio’s reputation for bringing bad luck drives former friends away, Marco is the only friend he has left in the city.

Their friendship is sustained by more than shared history. Gambling, which Duccio introduces, becomes a new source of excitement and a way for him to rebel against the sheltered bourgeois future his parents have designed. Marco is less consumed by it: he retains other friendships, sport, and an interest in girls, and keeps gambling from his family. Still, being with Duccio takes him into a world his own household would not have imagined. Their betting can even leave Duccio temporarily in debt to Mondo Disco, the record shop in via dei Conti where the friends buy imported music, though he pays what he owes himself within weeks.

The city’s size makes Duccio’s ostracism difficult to escape. He continues to encounter former friends at school and around town, including downtown, at cinemas, and in bars. They treat his remarks as if they could bring misfortune, while Marco refuses the group’s superstition and answers their recurring question about why he still sees Duccio by saying that Duccio is his friend. As the years pass, other foundations of the friendship erode. Duccio loses interest in the music and books they once shared and turns increasingly toward racing publications and gambling; Marco, meanwhile, continues to benefit from their games and from the social independence of standing by someone the group has rejected. Florence holds both the loyalty and the less flattering motives that complicate it.

Streets, Encounters, and Consequences

A foggy Sunday in Piazza Savonarola gives Florence a suddenly unfamiliar face. Marco can barely see his feet, and the square’s trees, sky, and cars seem to have vanished from view. The mist arrives on his birthday, already made frustrating by the newly enforced Sunday ban on his Vespa. The scene joins personal disappointment to public disruption: the city that should have opened into his adult freedom becomes difficult to see and navigate.

Years later, Marco’s relation to Duccio’s reputation becomes a public act in the same city. Before leaving for the holidays, he deliberately goes after dinner to a bar in Piazza del Carmine, where two former friends are spending the evening. He tells them what happened during the episode that has troubled him, repeating Duccio’s warning and describing the relief of the flight attendants who had helped them leave the plane. Instead of continuing to resist the boys’ superstition, he presents himself as someone converted by what he regards as a sign. The disclosure is not a return to the old friendship: Marco admits to himself that Duccio is no longer his friend in the way he once was. In telling the story, he also lends credibility to the very belief about bad luck that he had long opposed.

Home, Work, and Family Memory

The family house in Piazza Savonarola remains one of Marco’s recurring destinations long after he has stopped living there. He goes back periodically to check for leaks, breakdowns, and other problems, though the house is deteriorating and ought to be cleared and rented. He has had the gas turned off but has left the water on, since otherwise the house could not even be cleaned. His visits are practical in intention, yet the rooms preserve a family past that cannot be reduced to maintenance.

One visit draws him into Irene’s room, which his parents have kept intact, its bed made as if she might return. Marco notices the blue bedspread, the lamps, records, record player, and the dollhouse his father made for her. He had believed that the desk held nothing beyond its familiar objects; looking more closely, he discovers a book there. The room is peaceful in the sense that it belongs to a life that has ended, and his return to it shifts the house from a place he checks for damage into a site of remembered family loss.

Florence also organizes Marco’s demanding life of care. He travels between the city and Bolgheri to spend time with his father, and takes his mother out to dinner or to the cinema, sometimes with Adele. He also accompanies Adele to climb in the Apuan Alps, sometimes making a complex round trip that includes collecting her, visiting his father, and returning for her again. His work brings him close to her studies: Adele attends the Faculty of Motor Sciences, located across from the eye clinic at Careggi Hospital where Marco works, so father and daughter often meet for lunch. The city is the hinge of a life divided among professional duty, parental care, and Adele’s growing independence.

Final Gathering and Last Return

Florence remains part of Marco’s life even when the story’s final gathering takes place by the sea. As he approaches the end of his life, his niece Miraijin arranges for the people he wants around him to come together. The guests include Giacomo from America, Luisa from Paris, Marina and Greta from Germany, and Carradori from Lampedusa, alongside Miraijin’s boyfriend Oscar from Barcelona and Rodrigo, the nurse who will carry out the practical task. The gathering is international, but it also draws together relationships formed across the years in and around Florence.

A practical limit keeps another person from joining them: Guido, the nurse who has cared for Marco in Florence, cannot leave because his mother is disabled. Guido understands that Marco will not return and is upset that he cannot accompany him. The separation gives Florence a presence even at the edge of the final scene: it is the city where Marco has received care, and the place from which a member of his daily life cannot travel. In the gathering itself, Marco rejects a formal farewell and plans instead to offer a simple embrace to those who want one, making clear that they are not responsible for his decision. Florence, which has held the family’s earlier silences and the ordinary work of care, remains bound to this last act through the people and responsibilities that began there.