Months ago, we decided to do a bus tour of Sicily and Malta, thinking this would be a good way to see them against possible longer trips later. In mid-November, we flew to Palermo via Istanbul, a route we failed to note when we booked the trip. It added hours…

(Set somewhere in the English countryside in the summer of 2024.)

Classes with Clare Wigfall led me to write a novella trilogy that includes Piranesi, Argentina, and Modena — a family saga in nine acts. Laurie Snowden read it in draft and made helpful comments. Michael Parman, my oldest son, once left a note on my desk expressing confidence that I’d…

Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.— John Berger Piranesi is the first of a novella trilogy, “a family saga in nine acts,” as recorded in the journals of its protagonists. Luca, his cousin Giulia, and Giulia’s daughter Natalia live in Piranesi, the Italian port town from which the family took its name. As they ponder their everyday, the rise of fascism begins to cast a shadow. Yet their lives go on, very much their own behind a carefully constructed scrim of orthodoxy.

1. Piranesi, the city is called, with its high, expansive plinth looking down at a harbor bracketed by jutting rock formations, the twins, that mark the southmost part of the peninsula the city terminates and defends. I was born here and have only left at others’ bidding. Matrilinear descent is…

1. The father and the son resembled each other less when both were older. Paolo favored me enough that people thought he was Carlo’s, like his sister Natalia. She was our concoction, proof that a man who in general prefers the young men who model for him and assist him…

1. At some point, I realized that it’s impossible to hide. Not that I don’t make a constant effort to blend in, to be one more among so many others, but this never completely forestalls my sense of foreboding. …

All means are sacred which are called for by the inner need. — Wassily Kandinsky In Piranesi, we met the older generation of this port-hopping family, named after their latest place of refuge. Argentina picks up the story in Buenos Aires, where Leo, a university student in 1950, is soon on her way to becoming a renowned architect/industrial designer at the urging of her older cousin Luca. He reappears in Italy in the mid-1970s, visiting Franny and Guillermo, Leo’s parents, also exiled from the plague of dictatorships in South America. Lina, Leo’s Left Coast academic daughter, brings us to the post-pandemic present.

1. Leonora’s the name they gave me, but it’s Leo, thanks, an in-between brevity fitting for one like me in a place like this at a time the newspapers celebrate as a new beginning. It’s not the worst moment to be half European and half Mapuche. Some mise en scène…