Marylebone is the London district around which Probo Carrera’s late-life wish to leave Florence gathers its memories and mysteries. A place he had scarcely discussed for decades, it emerges as the private landscape of his youth, the destination of an abrupt plan in 2003, and the setting of the imagined departure that Marco Carrera offers his dying father as he dies.

A private geography of memory

Probo’s attachment to Marylebone began with a study vacation in London in the 1950s, when he spent twenty days with his friend Aldino Mansutti among an aristocratic family of Mansutti friends who owned an entire building in Cavendish Square. The district remained, without anyone knowing it, the place his heart had stayed. He returned twice: once, about ten years later, for a love affair with Letizia at the Langham Hotel, when they were still happy together; and again with the whole family, during the Easter holiday of 1972.

That family trip had been organized for the Order of Engineers of Florence, where Probo was then an adviser. He had given the travel agency only two requirements: a budget and an overnight stay in Marylebone. The result was two tiny rooms in a small hotel on Chiltern Street, cramped enough for Letizia and other members of the group to complain. Probo, however, was delighted. Being in Marylebone itself made him feel well, even when his family’s circumstances had grown unhappy. His silence had hidden not an incidental preference but a lasting emotional attachment.

The proposed move and the end of the world

On a warm autumn Sunday in 2003, after a good lunch cooked by Probo for Letizia, Marco, and Adele, his unspoken attachment surfaced as a startling announcement: he intended to move to Marylebone, buy a small apartment, and leave Florence, its house in Piazza Savonarola, his laboratory, and his railway models. Letizia was the most astonished. She wondered whether this was a plan for the two of them or a separation in their seventies; Probo did not clarify whether she was included.

His account of the move made Marylebone less a practical destination than a whole imagined world. He listed Georgian England and London’s Adam houses, antique bookshops, pastry shops, pubs full of cricketers, the former homes of Turner, Dickens, and Elizabeth Barrett, the Wallace Collection, the Langham Hotel, the plane trees of Manchester Square, and the last home of the prophetess Joanna Southcott. Letizia could not follow his sudden command of these landmarks. Probo, smoking a Capri, told her Southcott’s story: she had claimed to be the Woman of the Apocalypse and to bear a new Messiah, but fell gravely ill and died in 1814 before that prophecy could be fulfilled. Her worshippers waited for her body to begin decomposing before declaring her dead, in case she revived.

Southcott’s most famous prediction placed the end of the world in 2004. With only months remaining, Probo said he wanted to be in Marylebone to face it. Whether he was joking remained unresolved. He had researched apartments there and their very high prices, calling them affordable; he gave no indication whether the move meant a shared adventure with Letizia or a separation. The district thus held both the details of a carefully researched plan and the unsettling possibility that the plan belonged to an elaborate private fantasy.

A reversal between generations

That afternoon Letizia telephoned Marco to ask whether his father had lost his mind. Marco, himself perplexed, reassured her that the announcement was a joke: he had checked, and Probo’s information about the houses, plane trees, and prophetess came from the English-language Wikipedia entry for Marylebone. Letizia did not know what Wikipedia was; the internet had not interested her, whereas Probo had taken to it naturally. The family’s roles seemed to have reversed: the taciturn father was navigating a new world and producing an elaborate performance, while Letizia struggled to keep up.

Marco tried to explain the change to Adele as a Copernican revolution: her grandfather was surfing the internet and talking of moving to London, while her grandmother did not understand and was left behind. Adele had not yet met her grandparents, so the scale of the reversal was beyond her. Giacomo, meanwhile, was settled in America and no longer involved in family matters. Marylebone’s sudden prominence therefore exposes not just Probo’s hidden history but the changing alignments and distances within the family.

From imagined destination to final promise

Probo never spoke of Marylebone again. During his illness, his attention turned instead to work and the sea. Though weakened by cancer treatment, he designed a meticulous model of the 1884 Circumvesuviana line between Naples and Baiano, then abandoned it when he stopped chemotherapy for the summer. As his strength returned, he bought a used pilot boat in Marina di Cecina and began fishing daily, resuming an activity he had not pursued since his friendship with Aldino more than thirty years earlier. Marylebone receded from conversation, but it remained available as the destination that could give meaning to a final exchange.

By the last phase of Probo’s illness, pain and morphine had left him tormented and demanding to be taken away. Marco, a doctor, knew he could intervene when the assigned pain specialist would not say how long the process would take. After another anguished appeal, Marco told his father that this time he would take him away, gave him an initial injection of morphine sulphate outside the prescribed protocol, and lay beside him. He asked whether Probo was ready to move to Marylebone. Probo, at last docile, murmured yes, added names Marco could not understand, and clearly said “Goldfinger house.” He then fell asleep; Marco subsequently used his father’s venous access and the morphine.

The next day marked one month since Letizia’s death and was Probo’s birthday; it was also the day Probo died. The London move had never happened, and its meaning was left unresolved. In Marco’s final question, however, Marylebone became more than the subject of an eccentric plan: it was a place of remembered happiness and imagined escape, offered as a promise at the threshold of death.