But Gianfranco Calligarich’s origins are more complex. He was born in Asmara, Eritrea, once a thriving Italian colony. His father, who was born in Corfu to a Greek mother and a Triestine father, was Jewish, while his wife was Piedmontese. Gianfranco himself grew up in Milan, then moved to Rome, and yet, as he claimed in an interview, his roots are planted in Trieste, where he would most likely want to be buried. His extended family feels drawn to Trieste, dreams Trieste, feels Trieste, and ultimately claims to belong to no place but Trieste, even if many of its members may never have set foot there and wouldn’t begin to understand the Italian spoken by native Triestini. His grandfather’s life is worthy of a tiny epic, since the man, born with Slavic roots, moved from Trieste to Corfu, married a Greek woman, and later, on being branded a deserter by the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I, fled on the first ship he found, landed in Italy, and settled in Milan. On his deathbed—or so the story goes in Last Summer in the City—Calligarich’s grandfather, who had traveled the seas in his younger days and whose mind was already drifting to a seagirt Trieste of memory, asks his son to let him taste some seawater. Though the request may seem strange, coming as it did in landlocked Milan, his son, in Calligarich’s novel, has no choice but to get in his car and drive all the way to Genoa with his fourteen-year-old son, whose brooding silence seems to have become the norm. The boy’s father finally reaches the sea, fills up a bottle with water, and drives all the way back to Milan only to find his dying father already unconscious. Still, the dutiful son, who could very well be Gianfranco’s father, daubs his father’s face with the salty water even if the dying man is past caring or being grateful for the gesture.

Seawater is not in the slightest insignificant, since Leo Gazzara, the narrator of the novel, who at times could probably be a stand-in for the author himself, will choose to leave Milan and move to Rome, in good part because of its proximity to the beach. There are, in the novel, numberless times when, on a lark, the narrator will hop in his car and drive for a good half hour to the sea. Trieste, after all, faces the sea, and finding the sea anywhere on the planet remains, in more ways than one, a form of homecoming for the narrator. His Triestine grandfather found closure by asking for seawater, and, fifteen years later, at the age of thirty, Leo will too.