Argentina, an introduction

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 place of refuge. Argentina picks up the story in Buenos Aires, where Leo, a university student in 1950, will soon be on her way to becoming an architect 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.

Note: Two books mentioned are Frederic Jameson’s The Benjamin Files and Yves-Alain Bois’s An Oblique Autobiography. The Wildcat Viols is a real quartet I heard in St. Mary Magdalene’s parish hall in Berkeley.