I Mulinelli

I Mulinelli is a beach marked by absence, grief, and an intimacy that Marco Carrera and Luisa Lattes never fully allowed themselves to pursue. In Marco’s recollection, the shore’s whirlpools hold two histories at once: his sister Irene’s death by drowning and the night, seventeen years earlier, when he and Luisa kissed. The location becomes a physical point where loss and desire recur together, rather than separate chapters of the past.

Setting and Return

After the family has dispersed, Marco describes himself as truly alone. The others have said they will not return, that the house will be sold, and that they will never again set foot on a beach or take a vacation. Luisa, too, is gone. Marco moves through the hedge and returns to the beach, the whirlpools, and the area behind the dunes, finding no one there. The deserted shore gives shape to his isolation: he goes back to a landscape of shared memories, but there is no one with whom to share them.

His thoughts there turn at once to Luisa and Irene. He cannot bear the prospect of losing either the happiness associated with them or the pain of their absence. The beach is therefore not a place where grief resolves; it is where Marco confronts how closely attachment and loss have become intertwined.

Irene’s Death and Marco’s Memory

I Mulinelli is associated with Irene’s drowning, an event that remains a decisive wound in Marco’s life. Seven years before the moment when he sees her body in the morgue, he has already looked at Irene in a moment of apparent death: she has fainted, and he waits to learn that she is alive. The look he gives her then, the narration says, is the same one he will later cast on her corpse—an expression of desperation, pity, anger, helplessness, horror, and tenderness. The early scare thus acquires its meaning retrospectively, as an echo of the loss to come.

The account also links Irene’s death to a childhood wish made on the beach at Bolgheri, where she had asked that Irene not commit suicide after seeing a shooting star. The wish does not prevent the later tragedy; instead, it becomes part of the legend Marco associates with his sister and the fate he feared for her. The beach’s significance is consequently inseparable from the way memory returns to a feared outcome that could not be averted.

Marco and Luisa’s Interrupted Intimacy

The shore is also bound to the one night, seventeen years earlier, when Marco and Luisa kissed while Irene was drowning at I Mulinelli. That brief intimacy becomes the limit against which their later relationship is measured: in the years that follow, they resume seeing one another, but they do not repeat the kiss. The location holds the origin of both their closeness and their restraint.

When Marco and Luisa later spend a night together in Lyon, they make a vow of chastity, believing that refusing sex will let them preserve their existing lives and betray no one. Their promise not to kiss again reaches back to the night at I Mulinelli. The vow does not erase the desire that began there; it makes the remembered kiss more conspicuous as the one breach they both continue to carry.

Narrative Significance

I Mulinelli gathers the novel’s recurring collision of happiness and desperation into a particular landscape. Marco returns to the shore after others have left, and memory brings Irene and Luisa together in his thoughts: one associated with irreversible bereavement, the other with an enduring love that remains unfulfilled. The empty beach does not settle the difference between those histories. Instead, its whirlpools and dunes mark the terrain through which Marco repeatedly passes, as loss and longing continue to pull at the same life.