London becomes the focus of Probo Carrera’s startling 2003 announcement: he intends to leave Florence and move to a small apartment in Marylebone, a district whose importance to him had remained private for decades. The plan reveals a personal geography of memory, but a cancer diagnosis three weeks later brings it to an end before it can be realized.

A Private Attachment to Marylebone

Probo’s wish to move to London is not a casual change of scenery. He imagines buying a small apartment in Marylebone, leaving behind his home in Florence’s Piazza Savonarola, his laboratory, and the railway models and trains that belong to his established life. His attachment reaches back to a study visit in the 1950s, when he spent twenty days in London with his friend Aldino, staying with an aristocratic Mansutti family in Cavendish Square. He has returned only twice: once, a decade later, for a visit connected to his love for Letizia, and again with his family during the Easter holidays of 1972. On that second trip, he had arranged for the family to stay in Marylebone, though Letizia and other members of the group found the hotel cramped. Probo, by contrast, was delighted simply to be in the district.

The city’s significance has survived without explanation. Probo is characteristically taciturn, and he has never told his family that Marylebone is the most beautiful and reassuring place he has seen. Even after Irene’s death and the paralysis that followed it, the district has remained vivid in his imagination. His sudden proposal makes visible a long-held attachment that his silence had kept beyond the family’s knowledge.

The Announcement and Its Ambiguity

The plan surfaces after a family lunch on a warm Sunday in autumn 2003. Letizia has been complaining, as usual, that Giacomo no longer visits even at Christmas. Probo listens quietly, then announces that he will move to London. His intended life there has an almost curated shape: Georgian architecture, bookshops, pastry shops, pubs, the Wallace Collection, and the Langham Hotel, alongside the plane trees of Manchester Square and places associated with Turner, Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett, and Joanna Southcott.

Southcott gives the plan a more unsettling edge. Probo recounts the story of the self-proclaimed apocalyptic prophet, who had predicted that she would give birth to a new Messiah and whose most famous prophecy placed the end of the world in 2004. With only months remaining before that date, Probo says he wants to face the end in Marylebone. He has also looked into the availability and high prices of small apartments there, describing them as affordable. The family cannot tell whether he is joking, stating a serious intention, or blending the two; he gives no sign that resolves the uncertainty, nor does he clarify whether Letizia is included in the imagined move.

London as a Reversal in the Family

Letizia phones Marco afterward to ask whether Probo has lost his mind. Marco reassures her that the announcement is a joke and says that he checked the details Probo had cited: they came from the English-language Wikipedia entry on Marylebone. But the episode reveals more than a prank. Probo has taken naturally to the Internet, while Letizia has remained wary of it. As the couple age, their positions appear to have reversed: she, once quick to grasp new developments, now lags behind, while he moves easily through the unfamiliar world and may even use it to construct an elaborate joke—or a new purpose for living.

Marco tries to explain this change to Adele as a Copernican revolution: her grandfather surfs the Internet and wants to move to London, while her grandmother does not understand. Adele has not yet met her grandparents and cannot grasp the scale of the reversal. London thus briefly serves as the emblem of a transformed family dynamic, even as Giacomo’s absence and distance in America underline the family’s dispersal.

The Plan’s End

Three weeks after the announcement, the proposed move is overtaken by Probo’s cancer diagnosis. A biopsy, performed after occult blood is found in a routine examination, confirms adenocarcinoma. London and Marylebone are abandoned: the imagined journey gives way to the medical course that the narrative calls a Via Crucis, with tests, consultations, treatment decisions, and changing protocols.

The contrast is decisive. Probo had spoken of facing the predicted end of the world in London, but illness brings a more immediate and personal confrontation with mortality. The city remains unrealized, its intended future cut off by diagnosis; its narrative force lies in the private longing it exposes and in the abruptness with which treatment replaces the life he had planned.