I’ve always loved the sea. There must have been something in my boyhood tendency to linger on beaches that reflected the impulse that had led my grandfather to spend his youth on Mediterranean merchant ships before landing in Milan, that gloomy city, and cramming an apartment full of children. I knew this grandfather. He was a gray-eyed old Slav who died surrounded by a large number of descendants. The last words he managed to utter were a request for a little seawater, and my father, as the eldest son, left one of my sisters to mind his stamp shop and set off for Genoa in his car. I went with him. I was fourteen, and I remember we didn’t say a word for the whole of the ride. My father never talked a lot, and since I was already giving him a few problems with my lack of progress at school, it was in my best interests to keep quiet. It was the shortest of my trips to the sea, just long enough to fill a bottle, but also the most pointless, because by the time we got back Grandpa was almost completely unconscious. My father washed the old man’s face with water from the bottle, but Grandpa didn’t seem to particularly appreciate it.

A few years later, the fact of the sea being so close was one of the things that drew me to Rome. After my military service, I was faced with the problem of what to do with my life, but the more I looked around, the less I was able to come to a decision. My friends had very clear ideas—graduate, get married, make money—but that was a prospect that repelled me. These were the years when money mattered even more than usual in Milan, the years that saw a kind of nationwide conjuring trick also known as the Economic Boom, and in a way I too benefited from it. It was at this time that a medical-literary magazine for which I occasionally wrote a few well-judged but badly paid articles had the opportunity to open an office in Rome and I was hired as their correspondent.