Each move, there it was: Some cherished books got lost, some more of nonna Catina’s china got chipped, some drawings got marked by moisture and some family papers torn, and some more ancient furniture, going from the chill of Italian apartments to overheated American interiors, burst its joints, cracked, and crumbled. The daisy-backed Empire chairs from the Veneto palazzo of a titled relative gave way regularly under guests at the dining room table and were by now a patchwork of mends and underpinnings, not meant anymore to sit on but kept for sentiment.

“I don’t care where I live,” her mother used to say. “All I need is a roof over my head and a little place where I can work in peace and put my books and things.”

But she did care. She cared enormously for place, and each one they came to and claimed, she worked at to make beautiful. And then moved on. Tina remembered six: some in Italy, some in the States, one in France. This one, her mother’s last home, was the seventh.

Alberto Morosini’s literary trophies were among heaps of books and magazines on the refectory table her mother had found in the Marche—little statuettes and sculptured knickknacks that he had won over the years. “A prize for each saint’s day”—she could hear her mother’s ironic tone—“and your father is on his way to collecting them all.”

Her mother, on the other hand, had collected stones with interesting patterns from beaches or classical ruins, boxes, vases, wooden figures, dried plants, and branches; and these were spaced artistically throughout the shelves of her book collection in English, which took up one wall in the living room, while her father’s Italian books ran all the way down the long corridor onto which the bedrooms opened. Two separate libraries, two separate worlds that had never merged.