The Rome of the early seventies is not just a city with famous sites and monuments, most of which are to this very day still begrimed by age and neglect. Rome is where almost everyone in Last Summer charts his or her circuitous transit through a city that, despite claiming a historic center, has no center and lets everyone feel squandered and scattered about. All Leo does is drift—as Arianna, his love interest, drifts; as Graziano, his drunken friend, drifts; as Fellini’s Marcello drifts. People don’t amble or stroll in Rome, they meander, and stray from the Spanish Steps to Piazza Navona, to Campo de’ Fiori, over and across Ponte Sisto to Trastevere, then back across the river to Piazza del Popolo, Via Frattina, and finally once again to Piazza di Spagna and Trinità dei Monti. Places spill into one another, by turns splendid and beautiful, then ordinary and drab, mirroring Calligarich’s masterful prose style, which frequently jolts the highly elegiac with the brutally colloquial.

Calligarich’s Rome is lived and loved in all seasons, at all hours of the day and night, dawn especially. Not a city easy to peel off or to abandon and forget. And to bring the point home, Calligarich quotes Cavafy’s unforgettable poem:

There is no ship for you, there is no road

As you have destroyed your life here

in this little corner, you have ruined it in the entire world.

(TRANSLATION BY RAE DALVEN)

And yet, as Calligarich has Arianna say, no one is from Rome. Everyone comes from elsewhere. Rome is home to the transient, to those who don’t belong anywhere, who are unfinished, who have a self but want another and can’t, for the life of them, disown the one they’ve got. They drift and they ramble. One way or another, they will ultimately alzare le vele—to use a common phrase in the novel—hoist their sails, or, as more accurately rendered here, get the hell out.

One learns to hate Rome so as to stop loving it.

Or it’s the other way around: one loves it because one could easily hate it.

Rome is the lingering, glamorous patina that blinds the characters of Last Summer in the City to the very real fact that they are seriously damaged and marooned. Despite their few moments of mirth and pleasure, each is an emotional cripple. What afflicts them all, if observed from a purely literary perspective, is a classic case of existential anomie. Whether they are rich or poor, settled or not, with or without someone who means anything to them, all seem to spin their wheels. There is no one to blame, everyone to scorn, and only one person to love—if you could even call it love, because the feeling bristles with so many barbs that one should know enough to leave it alone. Better to flee and leave everything behind.