Photos were taken of the group: Silvia dressed in her clothes, her eyes hidden behind her bushy red hair, in the middle of all the others who were dressed the same way. The nuns explained that souvenir pictures were taken every year and Silvia asked to see the ones from previous years. The Mother Superior took her into her office, where other pictures like the one they’d just taken were hanging on the wall: she saw a group of boys and girls wearing the camp uniform, with the same nuns, against the same background. A few of the same children were in the camp that year too.

‘And the others?’ Silvia asked the Mother Superior.

‘The others have grown up,’ the Mother Superior said. ‘They don’t come to the camp any more.’

Even this response, and those photos, each the same as the others, also the same as the one that they’d taken a few days before in the same corner of the big square under the flagpole, plunged Silvia into that ‘crying’ mood, which got worse day by day, so much so that Silvia had to go and cry in the lavatory. It was a moment; then it passed.

August came to an end, and her grandfather came to get her. The children wanted to see him and clung to his trousers as he passed out sweets to everyone. Silvia’s suitcase was packed and they said goodbye to the Mother Superior in her office, along with all the other nuns. Naturally her grandfather asked the nuns how Silvia had liked her summer, and how she’d behaved.

‘I’d say she liked it very much, am I right?’ the Mother Superior asked, looking over at Silvia.

‘Oh yes, very much,’ Silvia replied.

‘Are you sad to go back home?’ her grandfather asked.

Silvia said No. She listened to what the nun and her grandfather were saying, and the Mother Superior, speaking of Silvia’s character, said a word Silvia didn’t understand: she said that she was a very good girl, very bright, and said many other kind things among which was the word melancholy, melancholic.

Silvia didn’t say anything, but a little later, as her grandfather was pushing his bicycle towards the big gate next to the pine grove, between two high mossy walls, she asked him what melancholy meant.

Her grandfather stopped to catch his breath (he was a bit winded) and waited before answering. Then he looked up at the sky here and there.

‘Melancholy? Let’s see now …’ and then paused at length.

‘The passage of time causes melancholy,’ he said. ‘Why? Did you feel melancholic?’

Silvia hopped on to her seat on the crossbar. Now they were going downhill.

‘Sometimes,’ she replied.

‘Malinconia’

First published as part of a series in Corriere della Sera (23 July 1978). It was later included in Sillabario no. 2 (Mondadori, 1982), republished along with Sillabario no. 1 under the title Sillabari (Mondadori, 1984, then Adelphi, 2004).