Modena part two: Jo

1.

“What does she mean by ‘his type’? What was Luca’s type?” I asked Leo. “He liked women whose minds played across their beings,” she answered. “That sounds ambiguous, doesn’t it? But I can see them, and he helped them see themselves. His attraction to them was as an animator. Laura was still attractive when I first encountered her in Montevideo, but she’d been a stunner. Everyone was surprised she married Luca, the one man who couldn’t animate her in this sense, despite their children. Yet they had a remarkable bond. She found Luca funny, which he was. As for his affairs, he told me that two of the women seemed predestined in the same way that he and Laura recognized each other at the start. He felt that life had these counternarratives and he was helpless to resist them, but only the second one, his friendship with that professor who later helped your mother, proved lasting. Yet Franny was right that she was his type. By then, he saw affairs as impossible and envied the arrangements the women made, especially Giulia. She was his ideal, more so than his sisters. That tradition ended with them; we made our own arrangements, like him, but he thought we were better at it than he was, although it’s clear that his poems owe everything to it.”

She picked up one of Luca’s little Greek heads. “He was good at seeing every side of things but crazed at times by heartache. The men in the family, even a bisexual one like Carlo, were reasonably straightforward, but Luca was always harder to pin down. He was a consummate fixer, able to deal with situations that taxed others because they were drawn out, complicated. Life is like that, he’d say. It’s a different skill from Ko or Marco, as indispensable as they were to me at other points. It’s not a clear line, though. Marco told me he pulled me into his enterprise on Luca’s advice, but we had a rapport like mine with Ko and Ro. Like Maria with Paolo. You come from a long line of such types. How I got Carlo’s strand I’m not sure. Enough from the women, too, to live like a man.”

2.

“How well did you know Cosima?” I asked, reading her letters. “She left me a legacy,” Leo said. “I met her when I studied in Buenos Aires. She helped me find work building stage sets — she knew everyone in opera and theater in the city. That was her one interest in life, their world. The translation of her Milan trilogy was popular — people identified with the epoque her books celebrate, but she was genuinely, deeply interested in performance and the culture it engendered. Luca organized her books’ translations into Spanish and then into Portuguese, and Gianni organized the TV rights. I still get royalties. She loved my mother for taking her seriously as a writer and Natalia for turning her notebooks into publishable texts. Natalia was a wonderful editor, which she attributed to being a lawyer. She had an eye for the story and brought it out from under the welter of details Cosima habitually noticed, without losing any of their power.”

Cosima’s letters are to Franny. Her Montevideo journals are at her flat in Piranesi, the building now a museum, Lina told me, but the letters are likely in the same vein, recounting episodes, especially with people she knew and observed. The focus is mainly on Buenos Aires, where she had an apartment for the season. Her sister Marta sometimes joined her, as did Leo and Franny when they were there. “One thing that surprised me when I lived in Buenos Aires was how familiar she was with the film scene there,” Leo said. “She knew Mike and Mads, talking to me about Mads’ death and even mentioning details about her family, ‘gossip, probably,’ that I hadn’t heard. She and Luca were good at ferreting out the backstory of any given situation. They always had a theory.”

Cosima and Marta were both striking as young women, their photos reveal. Leo still has her family album from San Rafael. Their splendor may have rubbed off on Luca, made his marriage to Laura explicable. This was Leo’s feeling when we looked at the album.

3.

I share my work with Giulietta, my cousin and half-sister owing to the peculiarities of my parentage. Trent, my uncle who is also my biological father, is his father Gianni’s filmmaking successor. Lina is focused on the family history, with particular reference to Luca, Natalia, and Franny. Genia, Giulietta and Paola’s mother, is working on her own family’s history, so they’re actively comparing notes. Summers we spent in Modena always included staying at the farmstead where they have a country house. It belongs to Genia’s family, who were once aristocracy in these parts.

Leo wonders what I might do with her foundation when she’s no longer here to influence it. I wonder about my place in the world. Lina may be wondering the same thing, but I’m not sure. Of my parents, Lina is moody and self-critical, while Bren is buoyant and outgoing. Leo admires her devotion to mothers and babies. It is, as she puts it, a fucking miracle that Lina and Bren are a couple. I infer it’s because Bren gets Lina and is okay with her neuroses, as Leo views them. Gianni was “such a reliable man,” she told me, and Bren is Lina’s. “We treated her like one of us, growing up, so her childhood was unusual in some ways.” Well, mine too.

Leo learned from her father to see the world as a shared territory marked by paradox. He was “the only realist,” she said, but it was a pragmatic, ironic realism, amused by his luck, bemused by his fate.

4.

“He was in no sense a primitive,” Leo said of her father. “The Mapuche were into horses, cattle, and farming; hunting was a pastime, not what they did, but their idea of land still reflected it. It was my grandmother Maria who brokered the deal between her people and the newcomers. Guillermo’s father died resisting them. An implied threat of violence is one tactic in negotiation, but my grandmother distrusted it, since it left her widowed. She raised their sons in this new culture, baptized Catholic and bilingual like her. Guillermo was culturally ambidextrous, an aristocrat who Paolo taught his bourgeois arts. How my father saw ‘territory’ reminded me of Luca’s sense that the Piranesi brought along whatever they’d accrued from place to place. Hunting with him took every form, sometimes on horseback, other times on foot, with others or paired or alone. He was really patient yet always prompting me to test myself against whatever arose. I was on a horse as soon as I could hang on. I knew the night sky and the sun’s arc as they shifted, how the weather changed, especially in the Andes, when to shelter and when to tough it out, how to keep my head. He showed me how the patterns of life persist in different guises, often harder to grasp until things unfold and you finally see the situation for what it is. You have to be alert if you aren’t sure, especially to whatever seems familiar but might not be.”

5.

“Franny struggles to reconcile Peron with what followed,” Lina told me. “Chile under Pinochet doubly cuts Guillermo off from his family, yet Franny is relieved to be securely back in Europe. She also notes Guillermo’s immersion in that part of French life that reminds him of his own in Argentina as horse whisperer, as we say now, a reputation he trades on that leads to his third act as an ecologist in the World Wildlife Fund tradition. She finds the UN incapable of meaningful action. They outlast Argentina’s dictatorship, and she lives to see Pinochet seen off, but Europe breaks the hold of their past. All she feels she accomplished was to encourage people to document the horrors they witnessed, like Natalia’s list.”

I get these running accounts of her forays into the journals. I also hear, less often, the questions she’s posing to herself. I learned from her to do this myself, not that my answers satisfy me. Convent schools give us verities we come to doubt and yet return to. Leo is also their product. They encouraged her to clamber to confront the mysteries of form, and perhaps taught her how to be a woman when she chose or needed to be, this huntress Franny brought them.

6.

“Why was it a fucking miracle that Lina met Bren?” I asked Leo. She laughed, then turned serious. “The charts and readings lay out your nature, but you still have to figure out who’s real among the facsimiles and poseurs. At the beginning, this matters less, but as your sense of what you’re after sharpens, it can be a problem, because the truth is that only direct experience can tell you, at certain points, who another person really is. That can sometimes be unhinging. This is true I think of anyone, not just a prospective partner. If he proves false, there’s an aspect of betrayal to it, even if it’s inadvertent on the other’s part — not directed at you, I mean.”

We were at her parents’ house, but Lina and Bren were out. “A kind of fluidity runs in our family, with exceptions. Franny was one. Giulia would have happily spent her lifetime with Matteo if he’d been available, but she illustrates what was also true for me, a need for a suitable father. Gianni was that man for me. He understood me like Bren understands Lina. Fit and reliability enable you to take your joined-together life in stride, bumps and all. Or else there’s an unbreakable bond, like Luca’s with Laura, pulled by their diverging natures, yet allowing time to sort it out.”

She glanced at a photo of her parents from their days in France. “I think luck runs in our family,” she said. “We have our moments of doubt, but then we recover or are helped to recover. Luca helped me, and his professor friend helped Lina. She knew the world Lina struggled with, its particular human perils, predatory mentors, and unreliable if not actively sociopathic colleagues. Luca’s friend pried her out of Milan and off to Berkeley. The fucking miracle was her meeting her complement, reliability herself. Bren was my goddess’s gift to us, wanting babies. One of life’s conundrums is to find this other amid raw desire, intuition, reason, fate, destiny, our collisions with others’ galaxies. Fecundity is there too. It’s quite spectacular.”

7.

Trent has always been in our lives. My parents named him as our father early on, and every time we visited, it was a little clearer how we both took after him. Genia is a writer and film critic — she wrote about the two filmmakers, Gianni and Trent, and Leo pulled her into their orbit, “her orbit, really.” It was Genia’s idea for Trent to be our father, once it was clear that Bren would do the birthing. I learned the details from her. When I came for Giulietta’s wedding, I stayed with them, and Genia and I took the opportunity to talk.

Why Trent as donor? I asked. “Lina is so attached to her family that I felt she’d suffer if there was no actual connection. Bren was amenable. They were visiting and wanted kids, so I suggested it.”

Why does Trent resist a DNA test? (I’d discussed getting one with Giulietta.) “Leo always says she wasn’t sure. I’ve looked at photos of Louis Kahn and there’s a resemblance, but he also looks like Leo’s father. So, I think it’s out of deference to her. There’s also the film Nathaniel Kahn made. He and Trent have met — Trent loves the film — but he came away with the sense that there were already many claims on Kahn as a father, and one more would be an intrusion. Leo felt this, too. And Trent loved Gianni, of course; they shared a lot of instincts about filmmaking, among other things, two natural collaborators. Leo’s relationship with her father was similar, ‘an affinity, not an influence’ is how she puts it. I think she saw Kahn similarly. Even if Trent isn’t his son, Leo absorbed something from him and then made it her own. She took him to bed on a whim — he was the one modern architect she respected completely.”

8.

I’m staying with Genia and Trent at her family’s farmstead. The Piranesi have two connections to her family, Genia told me. “Ercole, the one who made us bourgeois and agrarian, bought bulls from the Piranesi. After we lost our estates, Ercole approached his former tenants and they bought them back together, making each farmstead part of a cooperative that the family managed on their joint behalf. Your family invested in that. The other connection is your grandmother’s cousin Caterina, who married Cesare. Do you remember Federico from the wedding and your summers here?” I did. He’s five years older than me, so closer to Giulietta when we were younger. “He’s taken over his father’s role as the go-between, serving customers among the top restaurants and the best markets across the region. His father is the grandson of Caterina and Cesare. Cesare spent time in Piranesi and got to know two grandees connected with your family, a father and a son. They arranged the marriage. One curious thing is that Caterina’s surname is the same as her mother’s. I asked Leo, who said that maybe, finally having a girl, it seemed fair.”

I think back to Genia’s comment about Leo pulling her into her orbit. We’re a family of arrangers, ready to make something happen if it looks promising. Is it a model for the foundation? Whoever runs it needs a sixth sense. Why on earth then did Leo choose us?

“A small world,” Trent said in the car as drove here, apropos of something. It sometimes feels a bit incestuous, but Trent in person dispels this.

9.

“I was immediately attracted to him. I think that’s what she saw.” This from Genia, elaborating on her “in Leo’s orbit.” Spending time with him, I find that Trent is at his best in the context of a task or a project — warm, forthcoming and conversational. Not that he isn’t a good father — his daughters adore him, clearly — but it’s harder to raise things with him if they’re approached directly. They come out as passing remarks, as if they just occurred to him.

There are parallels between our families, Genia said, if you take Ercole as a hinge, shifting a 10-century-old ducal family into his idea of the landed bourgeoisie. The Piranesi did this by a different route.

Federico appeared at the party this evening. Paola texted me from Berkeley that he might come. She and Giulietta call him Freddy, but I’ve always thought of him as Federico — a serious person, to me.

10.

“While we were seizing Ferrara, you ran the Spanish caliphate,” Genia said. “In Kyoto, women were inventing the novel, bedding whoever caught their fancy, and watching as the men jockeyed for power by marrying off their sisters.” Don’t overlook the Etruscans and the Mapuche, I added. She nodded. “When we look back, our different strands come forward. Lina tells me that being here has put her academic life in perspective. She misses parts of it, especially her students, but she thinks her field is the wrong one for her at this point. I’m not an academic. My articles and books reflect some fairly deep interests, but I tire of them. Yet as time passes, I’m starting to see how they relate to each other. Lina says she’s writing her family’s history to clear her head. I think mine has a similar impulse. You have to approach things obliquely sometimes, write a narrative that has nothing to do with them so your thoughts can marinate a little.”

She added more hot milk to her bowl. “Lina has a characteristic of your family, which is to move quickly if the situation demands it. There’s something visceral about its history. We made dynastic marriages, but the Piranesi women maneuvered by intuition. They burnt their fingers sometimes, I gather, honing the art of this.”

She laughed when I noted that some of them married aristocrats. “The famous Cosima, who had no children, and fled to Uruguay. And Caterina, who did and didn’t. When I suggested that Trent be your father, I wanted somehow for you to get a bit of me, to be part of my family in the same way I’m part of yours. It’s mad, I know, and ironically, it’s possible now to have three parents, thanks to genetic engineering.” I took this in. Whose orbit am I in, exactly?

11.

“Leo’s approach to design always implies an unknowable future somehow to be contained, given identity, an organizing principle that will be self-evident to those who follow.” Genia sums up after I shared my fears about the foundation. She feels it should be set up like the rest of Leo’s work, as open-endedly as possible.

I asked her about Lina. “‘Sprang like Athena from God knows where,’ Leo told me. She and Gianni were affectionate parents, but neither of them knew what to do with her. She’s brilliant, yes, but at what? Franny helped Lina with that, as did Luca’s professor friend, but ‘at what?’ is an episodic question for her.” I can relate.

Did she know Caterina? (I’m reading her letters to Luca.) “The generation of my grandparents. Cesare and his son Francesco organized harvest dinners at our farmsteads. She died when I was 23. She lived in Ferrara, where her novels are set, but her memoir describes the Piranesi of her childhood and a visit she made to Uruguay and Argentina before the war to see her exiled family. She saw Cosima in Montevideo and again later, but Giorgio Bassani was her champion.” Lina is reading Bassani’s Novel of Ferrara.

12.

“They’re really different,” Genia told me. “Trent is a filmmaker like his father, unwavering in that ambition. Lina is more ambivalent.” After dinner, she put her book down and turned to me. “Leo is like Saturn, its rings drawing the eye. Lina is like Venus, a cloudy planet, but she’s also like Jupiter with all its moons. Perhaps she wonders how to put her two planets in dialogue?”

At night, to the sounds of a summer farmstead, this conversation replays in my head. Who is this Jo? Is this even the right question? Leo always considers the outer world, wondering what to do with it. Genia is another model, not an academic but a journalist and critic respected in the cultural circles she inhabits. I assumed, growing up, that Lina had a community like Bren did, but talking with her now, it’s clear that students were her main concern. They move through, although a few become friends. Her “community” is the atomized one of specialists, and she’s steadily lost interest in it.

She told me that she and Bren want to rescale their lives. That’s an interesting thought. Leo and I also talk a lot about scale, which she sees as the great conundrum, “the edge conditions past which we find mass society with its anonymity and shallowness. And yet everyone has individuality and depth, in reality. How to serve it?”

13.

“Hello! Here I am, living your foggy life.” Paola texts with a photo from the window of my room. It’s morning there, early evening here. “I heard you saw Freddy,” she adds. He must have told her, confirming my impression that I made one. I try not to put too much store in this. Not unhappy, though, to see it confirmed. “I did,” I text back. “Off to studio,” she replies.

Genia says that Bren and Lina will join us tomorrow. Leo may come, too, but it’s not decided. Trent will fetch them. He’s been going back and forth in his old Land Rover, which he’s teaching me to drive. (It would be ideal for Inverness.)

Paola’s photo leads to a wave of nostalgia. The pandemic meant I was home three semesters out of eight, cutting into the distance I’d sought. Did I really want it? I was the one who demanded Lina come, but it was really Bren’s idea, luring her. Like Franny and Guillermo, they’re very much a pair. I said as much to Genia, but she countered that once back together, they quickly staked out their separate domains. She’s pretty observant.

Giulietta texts me, asking when I’ll be back in Modena. I’ve been so caught up in this place, my conversations and self-questioning, that I’ve let things drift a bit. She says that Trent stopped by and they talked about the film part of the foundation. She wants to update me. Maybe they should come up? She’ll talk with Genia.

Putting my phone down, I remind myself that I’m co-directing this thing. Leo chose us to help give it shape. She’s not immortal. It would be easy to fritter the time away and disappoint her. Trent told me that she always hands off to others, so the trick is to understand her intent. His part of it is clearer. If Paola wasn’t away, would Leo have picked her instead, an architect like herself? But in our conversations, she emphasizes the social or human aspect that drove her work, despite her reputation as a form maker. “Yes, forms, but what people can do with them is my main interest.”

Federico seems to appreciate that I call him Federico, as always.

14.

I’m awake and it’s three a.m. My head’s full of anecdotes — family histories mixed with the incidental stories I heard about work, love, marriage, walking home or taking the train or going to a concert. Incidental is to say that they range from hope to hopelessness and often back again — the friend who went away for a week and came back to an empty house, the husband proving to be sociopathic, or realizing a boyfriend is a dud, or that a marriage you hope to break up isn’t. In the golden age of the Piranesi, someone watched out for us, but it was a cultivating sort of watching that attended to our desires. It suited them, their journals say, and they managed to get past it and on with their real work. And Federico, here by chance or having another look? For this was what he was having, however much this pleased me. I could text Paola to ask if she set it up, but no — to the texting, that is, not the thought that she set it up. If she did, it epitomizes the Piranesi’s modus operandi: read the mind of the other, intuit her hunger, find a way to sate it.

Leo, where does she fit in this? Her choice of me and Giulietta has a basis in our interests and abilities, but is there something else? And where is my arranger? How did a tradition so obviously useful die out? Also, there’s the small matter of my actual hunger, actual desire, against the background of my paradoxically conventional upbringing, in which not a word was ever said about it, yet I was dropped into a convent school in a city with a homophobic prelate. Don’t mention the parents! Yet just enough Mapuche to be vaguely indigenous, unsure what box to check on those forms because I’m as bourgeois as they come, in reality, despite my aristocratic half-sisters with whom I share a Piranesi father. Jesus! I say this aloud, invoking our patron, our guardian against hubris, our unconditional wingman, spade in hand. He sees me through my little hours, my few minutes, of doubt and despair, reminding me that I’m Etruscan somehow and Mapuche more specifically, at home in the world despite my attachment to Inverness and the sea.

15.

An update from Paola: “He’s smitten. I have it in text.” I take this in. Lina’s making dinner, in her element. Bren is talking with Leo about the clinic. Genia and Trent are talking with Federico, as I persist in calling him, who’s here again. Giulietta grabs me. “I’m pregnant!” she says. “Only Vanni knows.” He’s helping Lina — a man who loves to cook, which is lucky for her. I take this in, too. My life is unfolding in tiny cataclysms.

Earlier in the day, talking with Bren, I told her how I invoke Jesus sometimes and identify him with our family. “I was raised Anglican. I love the old service, but the Madeleine’s priests are believers; that wasn’t always true of the Anglicans. You Piranesi are attuned to Jesus as a reminder to rein it in, but He also protects you against randomness. Medicine frames life scientifically, but our stories all end with our extinction. I tell my patients, ‘You might die. Your baby could die or be incapacitated.’ I pick my moment to say this. I could quote the odds, but I don’t. We’re all gamblers in some sense and Jesus is there with us at the table. I’m there too, of course, because God helps those who help themselves.”

16.

At last night’s raucous dinner, Giulietta revealed her pregnancy as Vanni beamed. Bren gave me a look that I think referred to our conversation. This morning, Federico and I talked. He opened with variations on “Who is this Jo now?” This appealed to me, and I returned the favor, wanting to know how he sees himself.

“A négociant is what the French call it, in constant conversation with the market and the producers, in my case the wholesalers and chefs across the region, and the cooperatives on our farmsteads. It’s like being a gardener, advising them, but my talents are market savvy and sensory assessment. What they produce is costly, so does it live up to the expectations that come with that? I can also describe those qualities convincingly to the buyers. I have a feeling for both sides of it, acquired by accompanying my father, growing up.”

I’d made him a cortado and he took a sip of it. “My father sent me to business school to test my interest in the role. What I got from it was a clearer idea of the border of mass and bespoke. It’s not hard and fast, but you see where credibility is stretched. Mass sometimes wants to be taken for bespoke, and bespoke always looks enviously at scale, wondering how far it can go without looking foolish.”

Another sip. “We carved out this niche when there were landed estates and someone had to handle the trade. It wasn’t a road to glory except when the accounts were read out, when banquets were held, and whenever the family needed to display its largesse.”

One last sip. “It seems prosaic, no? I find it interesting, though, a dialogue that’s been going on for eons, interrupted by the stupidities of power but finding ways through and around. There’s always a desire for it, like other things that mix pleasure with necessity.”

17.

“But he is a gardener,” Lina said as I recounted our conversation. She cited a Taoist parable: a Confucian mandarin points out to a farmer the folly of his slow approach to watering his plants, since machines exist to water thousands of them in short order. “But then I’d be a machine,” the farmer objects. Must repeat this to Federico, I think. Then Leo spoke up: “He’s tied to the land.” Giulietta added, “He lives in two worlds. He couldn’t do his job if he didn’t know them both intimately. And he trades on our family name just like you do.” Genia laughed. “ I’m not sure ‘trades’ is right, but yes, we do.”

I like this image of Federico, bridging between the farmsteads and the metropolis. He left earlier, but will return. I note suddenly that no one, not even Giulietta, has called him Freddy after I called him Federico. He’s acquired some gravity. Not too much, though, hopefully. I like a little buoyancy, especially in bed.

18.

“I dreamt of your father last night,” I told Leo. “I dream of him too,” she said. In my dream, he was wearing the tailored suit he wore in the photo with Franny at Deauville. Trailing after him, sometimes forming a background and other times a cloud, was what I realized on waking was the territory he brought along. We sat on the terrace of their house in the rattan armchairs that are still there, and the cloud evaporated. He pointed at the view. “I like to pause here and then go back into the hills to talk with the wolves. Some are hesitant to put roots down here, but I understood why to do so when I laid eyes on this,” meaning the view, to which he pointed again. “It was the end of my journey. There was no point turning back. I planted trees here to shade my descendants. A few of them may come as far as I did in order to feel properly at home.”

Then I woke up. In the half-light, I felt he was still present, although we were distant from that terrace. Brings it with him, I thought. It might be the view out to the bay or of the next ridge. Would I miss them? Yes, I would, but Federico could make it worthwhile, even inevitable, I thought. “Recent graduate lapses into fantasy,” I said aloud, but it was true, the thought was there and it seemed likely Guillermo knew it.

19.

My siblings are on my mind. We’re a cohort, but what, exactly? I asked Leo, since we’re all her grandchildren, and she pointed to the unusual way we’re tied together, a symbol she thought of how life has evolved to address the demands that télos makes on it. She reminded me that she’s an only child, unusual in both families. This may account, she said, for her close relationship with her father growing up and her independent nature.

I think of Ben, my amiable brother, very much Bren’s son, drawn to medicine at a young age and just going with it, the way Trent was drawn to film and seems very much Gianni’s son, although maybe not. Such ambiguity floats through the family. Perhaps what floats through is a tolerance for it in its various forms, inner- and outer-directed. Leo ventured a theory “in Luca’s memory” that the Piranesi unconsciously seek safety without really knowing what it means, even as they doubt it’s possible. It can take such forms, she added, as assuming another identity, if this is possible, or wearing its clothing, if it isn’t; and appropriating the bloodlines of any and all available primordial cultures.

Paola texts: “OMG, I’m dreaming in forms like nonna!” LOL, I reply, but it’s also possible that her father’s lineage skipped a generation. Our father’s, I should say. My parents don’t fit the tropes, but I give Lina the edge as the dad. She’s a bit self-absorbed, there’s no way around that, while Bren is out to save her small part of the world, including us, thank goodness. I feel closer to her because when she’s with me, she’s there. That this is bedside manner doesn’t make it untrue. To Leo’s point, it’s who she is.

20.

I’ve been staying at Federico’s primitive hut. We’re an item. The path to this included a road trip to see the cities where he plies the cooperatives’ goods. Each city has its own network of suppliers, and there’s a farmstead or several to cater to its needs. Federico has an encyclopedic grasp of these long-established relationships, “sunk knowledge,” he calls it, that would be lost if he left the business, for it is a business, and not a particularly easy one, despite its longevity. His hut is a stone cottage on a farmstead in the vicinity of Ferrara, the family seat and the eastern end of its territory. They have properties across the region and he has the use of a house or an apartment wherever he does the family’s business. Our knowledge of each other thus far has been gained in such places, a timely break from the collective Piranesi. He’s in Ferrara now and I’m here in the country writing this.

Federico is the same wherever he is, in my observation, and aware that the ideals he espouses won’t be easy to realize. He admires Leo’s efforts to give scale to the bespoke. “A lot is broken in agriculture,” he says. “The EU isn’t helping. It should be possible to find a middle ground, but a lot weighs against it. Yet it’s as crucial to resilience as the rest. Whenever you look into mass in an agrarian sense, it doesn’t add up. It’s either logistics or chemistry, and the cost is too high, environmentally. It’s also bad for people.”

Regions are the largest possible area when it comes to scaling “sound agrarian practices,” as he puts it. I mention home, as I still think about it, despite the intervention of college and Modena, and then blurt out that we should go there together, then wonder if he’ll find this be off-putting. He picks up on this. “I’m not irreplaceable here,” he says. “My work is an extension of my childhood, and I feel uneasy about abandoning it, but your region is another agrarian one like this that could be scaled in the manner I envision. Looking ahead, I could imagine our making a business of such a process, once we prove it. I’m not sure I want to be a negociant my entire life. It may be why my father insisted I get this schooling!” I love this reply. I met his parents again in Ferrara. It went well.

21.

While Federico acknowledges his family is bourgeois by choice, he’s focused on limits and the tendency to ignore them that capitalism’s cyclical self-destruction reflects. Bourgeois democracy is better equipped to deal with this, he thinks, being relatively freer of ideology, although its detractors deny this. China is grappling now with this same tendency. He believes it will go badly.

“Entrepreneurial better describes us than bourgeois,” he says. Pushed by circumstances to diversify from locally bespoke to larger markets, we reached an apogee with Leo. Her habit of letting others run her enterprises after piloting them, using licensing and regional partnerships, has agrarian possibilities, he believes. It’s hard to ignore the longevity of his family’s relationships with its farmsteads, so it might be better to find roughly comparable entities to cooperate with on a wider basis. “Leo’s model,” I say. He nods.

I agree that “entrepreneurial” better describes the Piranesi, who “could make money from anything,” as Leo said, quoting her father. He, anyway, was proudly bourgeois as a kind of embellishment of his native aristocracy. Not unlike Federico’s ancestor Ercole, who made lemonade so successfully with the lemons handed his family.

22.

In a passage in her journal that I just read, Natalia writes,

This dreadful period we’ve lived through and are now coming to understand in specific terms is captured for me by the camps as the mechanical aspect of state murder ratcheted up in efficiency to the factories of “scientific management,” and the murder of some 600 civilians — men, women, and children — in Oradure-sur-Glane, burned alive in the barns and a church to which they were herded, an act of depravity and blasphemy by “hardened Nazis,” as they’re called now in postwar accounts. Fascism oscillates between these poles. That we had smaller versions of its oscillation doesn’t let us off the hook for the crimes our fascists committed, yet it takes my breath away, the industrial scale and the wanton cruelty. Now we watch as certain people try to exonerate themselves. That they do so is understandable, but I lament that we permit it on the grounds of expediency or a sense of “where will it stop” if a reckoning is made seriously. Italy is worse than Germany in this respect, but even in Germany, the prevailing bias is to let it go, imagine that the worst offenders were dealt with in the trials or will be hunted down, leaving others to be rehabilitated or, if not, to write their self-serving memoirs in a bid for sympathy. It’s an illusion to think fascism has been stamped out. It has a hundred disguises, but its central theme will continue. As the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s are forgotten, they too will recur.

I had to google this village. Jesus. Lina compared the war in Syria to the Spanish civil war, saying it was a warmup for something worse. Is the Ukraine invasion that something? It seems equally wanton.

Franny often commented on politics. Looking back at Peron from Paris, she saw how populism led to fascism in its military form, a feature not just of Latin America, she noted. Her Russian friend predicted his country’s immediate future, but also Putin’s petro-fascism. Who designs the Russians’ uniforms? Giulietta asked, putting down her phone. “Now that’s a Milanese question!” Leo said. “They do look like duck hunters.”

I’m back in Modena. In Ferrara, Federico proposed marriage.

23.

We laid our cards on the table. He went first. “It’s hard to leave.” I nod. “And impossible to give you up,” he added. Is this a marriage proposal? I asked him. He looked at me. “It is. If it means living in California, then I’ll do it.” I answered, “I’ve given it a lot of thought. When the pandemic lifted, I came here immediatly, I notice. I want to make a life here, not somewhere else, and I want to make it with you, Federico, so, I accept. Absolutely.”

I feel a bit like Franny must have felt in San Rafael, so distant from Piranesi, deciding to cast her fate with Guillermo. Federico isn’t landless, but I identify with her youth and appreciate her confidence. Nearly a century ago, that decision, and now three generations of her descendants are gathered here.

My parents were “supportive but wary” in Left Coast fashion, worrying that a summer fling was being cemented prematurely, but Federico called on them, asking for their blessing, which they gave, his sincerity being manifest. He’s central casting. These negociants don’t lack for charm or persuasiveness.

They say that Franny knew at once she would marry Guillermo. Can it be true? I think she looked back and saw a trail. Leo told me to come, I reflect. Little with her is accidental, I’ve come to realize.

Trent and Genia are on board. “You’ll even have a title,” she said.

24.

“Who is this Jo?” I take inventory of my foremothers. Lina is the only scholar, although Leo says her mother was a serious student. My experiences to date with higher education remind me of Leo’s account, gravitating toward what appealed and evading the rest. I lack the singlemindedness of Ben’s long march toward medicine. Could I support myself? It seems doubtful, although stories abound of equally feckless ones finding footholds in strategy and such. Even the scholars are competing for those jobs now, as academic posts are fewer and pay worse, Lina says. She backed the grad student strike and disdains the bloated, overpaid cadre of administrators. Things certainly ground to a halt when they struck.

Am I sidestepping this dilemma? Or doubly sidestepping it, as the family took me on and now Federico’s taking me on. I don’t dream in forms, like Paola and Leo. I have a good mind, if I say so myself, but my efforts on behalf of Leo’s foundation are questionable and I keep waiting for her to express exasperation, but she doesn’t. Ko would have had it up and running. What am I resisting? Why is Federico’s project so appealing?

Tangibility, for one — the same resonant sense of “land” that I felt in Inverness. Purpose, too — seeing how much it matters to Federico and sharing his conviction. But both are present too in Leo’s work and Gianni’s. Leo told me that while she gave her archive to the polytechnic, she doesn’t trust it to handle a bequest wisely. It’s like Lina’s reservations about the university. Could there be a school? Genia and Lina could run it. They’re at a similar point, wanting to shift things so they do more of what they genuinely want to do, in a setting that’s small enough almost to run itself. Is it a school? That’s probably the wrong word, although certainly Lina loves to teach. An institute, a seminar, a lab, a studio — something that combines study with making, that invites conversations and builds on them. What Federico has in mind needs this sort of apparatus. Finding a place for it here is one piece of this thing I’d like to construct. It’s a Leo sort of thought, this, my own version of dreaming in forms.

25.

“Maybe just call it a foundation,” Genia said. She’s here talking with Lina and, finding her on a terrace, I told her my idea. “Foundation doesn’t suggest expectations or point to fields or professions. It’s open to all sorts of things that aren’t typically found together but in the right hands might cohere. That sounds right for the Piranesi.”

Can it survive without Leo animating it? “She told me once that she’s a big fan of lateral thinking because its creator, de Bono, saw that the path to a good idea goes through a lot of obvious or stupid ones, so, let things emerge through dialogue. I imagine she wants it to have a form that’s open-ended about exactly what it does.”

The famous ambiguity of the Piranesi, recast as a virtue. But likely it always was a virtue, “flexibility” in light of events, and principles like honest dealing, personal pacts with the gods, no to hubris but yes to ambition and desire, a scrim and exit strategy handy, ironic distancing, a layer of calm. This sums us up, I think, and now I’m marrying into Genia’s family like she married into ours, another dip into another gene pool, more rooting, possible added safety.

Modena Foundation sounds plausible, although Ferrara, scene of our ongoing debauchery, is growing on me. Eros attaches to such places, as one of Cavafy’s nights-in-Alexandria poems makes clear.

26.

Have you ever seen wolves in the mountains? “Yes,” Leo said, “and that’s an odd story. My father often hiked up to one or another of the huts we made together. He would leave early and return before dark, but one evening, he failed to return. My mother telephoned, and I drove up to their house and, without giving it much thought, set out with a headlamp and the one clue he left behind: a note on the table that said “№2.” The huts were numbered, and I guessed that this was his destination. The note itself was unusual. He came and went, completely at home in the mountains.”

She shifted in her chair. “I knew the path quite well because we’d traversed them a lot while the huts were being built. There was a moon, so I didn’t need the headlamp. The second hut marks an edge, my father told me, beyond which the real nature of the mountains starts. Like most edges, it’s porous. I also remembered him telling me that wolves are like pumas and jaguars in that it’s possible to befriend them. The second hut lay at the upper end of a meadow. I saw that a man, likely my father, was seated, propped against the wall, his arm draped over a big dog, on first glance. Alerted by my footfalls, it rose, larger than I thought, and gave a low growl. I stopped, and opened my jacket to let the wind carry my scent. It sniffed the air, raised its head, and howled, and this was picked up by other wolves apparently in the vicinity. I’d come closer, but it turned to my father and licked his face. Then it retreated uphill into its own territory. My father was dead, I saw, but peacefully so. There was an emergency phone in the hut, one of those old wind-up ones connected to foresters lower down. I told them my father had died while hiking, probably a heart attack, and we were at the second hut. Bring a stretcher. They sent a helicopter. Times had changed and medics were called in as a bureaucratic precaution, even if it was medically useless.”

Another shift in her chair. “I sometimes wonder if I dreamt it. I never told my mother about the wolves, as it would have frightened her. My father wouldn’t have mentioned them, either, She put up with our adventures when I was young, but she avoided the Andes. A city girl at heart, her interest in nature ended at their fence line.”

27.

At dinner, Lina mentioned Bassani’s Novel of Ferrara and some of Caterina’s stories, which reminded her of Natalia’s journals, tracing how fascism made its way to Piranesi. Federico said that the repercussions of the Jews’ removal from Ferrara were still felt there. The city’s bourgeoisie deserted them, despite their long presence, only abandoning the fascists when its own interests were threatened. Then Lina set out her thesis that hostility to the Jews split the bourgeoisie after WW I. This led to a discussion of modernism.

Leo cited Ivan Illich’s critique of the Enlightenment for defining and applying universals, and its overconfidence in science and technology. Leo noted that modernism had two traditions: the locally aware, humanist one of the arts-and-crafts movement; and the hubristic and exploitative one of industrialization. Traces of both still unfold concurrently, often in the same architects, oblivious to the contradictions in their work. Yet some can look critically at it, preserve the local without losing sight of the need to give it scale.

This also applies to agriculture, Federico said. The terrible effects of imposing universals locally are only too clear, yet the sheer demand for food makes it harder to resist their continuing imposition. “It’s true in healthcare, too,” Bren added. “It’s a constant battle to keep track of the individual patients as human beings rather than as bodies with conditions, to know them in a more personal sense, so you can talk them through the arc of pregnancy and birth meaningfully.” (I noted to myself that this remark had more resonance with me suddenly.)

Leo felt that this dilemma is built into life, how the local vies with larger forces even to be heard, let alone preserve its prerogatives. If the Piranesi have any claim to evolutionary success, it’s how they’ve managed to find fertile middle ground between the cosmos in its many forms and the local that’s its immediate base and opportunity. “We also benefited from the older cultures we married into.” Lina said that this was characteristic of the Sephardim, assimilating by intermarriage and constantly extending its idea of family. It worked for some but not for others, but our inherent wariness led us to have a Plan B. Every port-hop probably reflected one.

28.

At dinner, Lina raises her objections to Slow Food. Citing Laurent Berland, she argues that junk food has its place. Federico listens calmly. Leo notes the precarious situations that many live in, while supporting his desire to give scale to sounder agriculture.

“Tobacco is an example of how junk food might evolve, left to market forces,” he says. “Stung by its association with ill health, the industry is trying to vape or warm its way to a post-smoke product that holds onto the smoker image and of course the nicotine. But junk food was there earlier, adding vitamins and non-cancerous dyes, touting each and every innovation as healthier. I don’t think an arc like this gets us anywhere. It would be better if we touched the mass market more frequently, the way the wine industry manages to do, steadily improving things at both ends in order to educate taste and create a demand for sounder practices in the vineyards. I know, apropos of Leo’s comment, that this doesn’t solve the precariat’s issue of falling below what such producers can economically deliver. This is like housing. You have to subsidize supply or demand. Right now, there’s no appetite for subsidies beyond the subsistence level.”

Lina objects that for some people, nutrition may not matter. “Yes, convenience is also a factor. Inadequate housing and lack of time work against cooking your own meals, but this is sometimes a lifestyle choice,” he replies. Yet there are ways around this, like cohousing and communal gardens. In wartime, there’s more interest in these solutions, then the market reasserts itself. But they exist. They work. It comes back to education, demonstrating again what’s possible.”

Leo notes how she used this strategy to show people how to live in new ways, using products that better met their needs. She feels that the case for farm to table, conveyed in human terms, hasn’t been made effectively, but “your coops have a head start on that.”

“What brought me back to this,” Federico says, “is the example of my father and our branch of our family, tied to the land and proud of what comes from it. I think this is true of many family enterprises, a sense of purpose that’s genuine, seeing profit as the means to reinvest, weather reversals, and hand them on to the next.”

Leo beams at him approvingly. I sense that Lina is torn between her not inconsiderable family feelings and her theoretical apparatus.

29.

The next morning, Lina sought us out. “Why am I resisting the points you’re making?” she asked rhetorically. “It goes back to Berkeley, the way Slow Food manifests there and junk foods are condemned. In principle, I agree, but the assumption is always that nothing can be questioned. Of course, there are questions, and I’ve raised some, as if I were back there, my skepticism prompted. But in fact what you’re proposing is an enterprise like others that our family took on, cleaving to fair dealing, trust, shared values, and longstanding relationships as a way to sustain ourselves.”

We were out on the terrace, and she paused to take in the view. “I support what you propose. Let me be clear about that. It takes time for my head to clear, to remember that an idea can have value, even if some of its advocates try to make a religion of it. I don’t hear you proselytizing. If Leo was with you totally last night, it’s because it’s exactly what she did across her career. People think of her as a form-giver, but scaling what doesn’t seem very scalable is her specialty.”

I set my notebook down and spoke. “Something else runs through all of this, something that leads to art, poetry, lovemaking, memoirs of Milan, and creches and clinics that support women and children. If some of it seems frivolous, it’s the yeast from which our lives rise.” I mostly take the notes but find my voice on occasion. “It’s our religion, our orthodoxy,” I added. “Also, not to change the subject, I intend to marry Federico by the end of August.” The yeast waits for no man, I thought but didn’t say.

30.

Thanks to Genia’s interventions, we found ourselves in a tavern as old as the church where we wed not long before. I had proposed a civil ceremony, but his parents might be put off, Genia said, and things were unorthodox enough. The tavern is along what seems almost like a country road, but is part of Ferrara proper, left as a remnant of a grand plan for the city of one of Federico’s ancestors. The food is medieval, he told me, a culinary history kept alive by the owner. It made for a memorable meal within this long, dark space, out of the midafternoon, late summer heat.

Genia rose and made a short speech directed at her cousins, Federico’s parents, noting that Ben and I were “practically siblings” of their Giulietta and Paola, and that Federico first met his bride at the farmstead tended so well by Giorgio, his father, in his role as its négociant. Across this summer, she added, she had come to know this couple better, Jo and Federico, who found each other again and will make common cause in the service of our agrarian family, like Jo’s ancestors did for our Ercole, many years ago.

Giorgio spoke next. He, his wife Elisabeth, and their daughter Lucie, Federico’s sister, welcomed me to their family. He thanked Ben and Paola, last seen at Giulietta’s wedding, for coming all the way from Berkeley for the occasion. He greeted my parents and Leo, noting their “many good works” in Modena. Then he spoke to us, remembering encountering me at the farmstead across several summers. “Even then, I could see Federico’s admiration for you!” The rest is a blur, but we ended up at his Ferrara house and then made our way to the primitive hut, scene of our recent revels.

31.

“Are you okay?” he asked after I threw up one morning. I could see him running through what I ate, sources of contagion, but there were none, I assured him. “I’m pretty sure I’m pregnant.” He turned pale and then flushed, a sequence that pleased me immensely.

In The White Goddess, Robert Graves mentions in passing that Roman babies born in May were mostly the result of Saturnalia, a kind of mid-summer lid-lifting also popular in the sun-starved north, and so it was that we, two besotted celebrants, are blessed with this possibility, quite fitting for an agrarian-minded couple. The yeast and I must have a secret code, because I knew. This was soon confirmed, the family’s OB/GYN close at hand, then relayed hither and yon. Genia was ecstatic. “I never understood why everyone delays. Get on with it is my view.”

I’d wondered if Leo would feel Giulietta and I were letting her down, overlapping our pregnancies like this, but she shared Genia’s enthusiasm. We were alone when I told her and, quite remarkably, she said that she felt all along that I was intended to be here and that Federico was part of that intention. “Perhaps too you were the lure we needed to draw Lina here, to free her from that life so she could join Bren and make another. No coincidence that you found those boxes, and maybe that Franny left them there for you to find.”