Gianfranco Calligarich’s novel “The Last Summer in the City” – Culture

Gianfranco Calligarich knows lightness. A compelling mood reigns in his resurrected novel The Last Summer in the City, originally published in 1973 and then forgotten for decades. All the characters, including militant idlers and occasional writers, an antiques dealer, a TV editor, an undecided student, a lost tennis pro, one or the other burned-out count, screenwriters and of course journalists who were unable to play, stagger drunk through the Roman nights.

From the very first page one suspects that under the supposed light-heartedness, at least in Calligarich’s main heroes, there is a deep melancholy. Because the author lets Leo Gazzarra, who is thirty years old, comes from Milan and has been struggling in Rome for some time, speak for himself. The novel is structured according to the structural principle of a circle and consists of a long flashback: Gazzarra is in a bay south of the capital and begins to explain his fortunes from the retrospective, only to end up exactly where he started.

What are you talking about in between? About love for a woman who withdraws, financial difficulties, the loss of a friend. Or, as TS Eliot’s motto anticipates: “As he rose and fell, he passed through the stages of old age and youth. And drifted in the wind.”

Leo Gazzarra addresses his readers directly, the epic device of foreshadowing is used again and again, and the whole thing takes on the character of a confession, a life confession. His grandfather was a Slavic sailor, and in fact his grandson also liked to use maritime imagery, brilliantly translated by Karin Krieger, as did Leo Gazzara’s colloquial and at the same time elegant Parlando. The young man understands one thing above all: “to set sail” and to make a departure before things get too dangerous.

But first and foremost he is a seducer, someone who conquers his counterpart through quick wit and witticisms. With swinging sentence periods, interspersed with pointed dialogues and pictorial comparisons, he describes his departure from Milan, the pain of breaking away from his father, who was shattered by the Second World War, his arrival in Rome and his first job as a correspondent for a medical-literary magazine. The latter lasts only one year, but since the editorial office was based in the villa of the bankrupt nobleman Giovanni Rubino di Sant’Elia, it offers an example of stylish idleness.

Some of the valuable furniture in the house has already been seized, only the Steinway grand piano is still there, and wrapped in a dressing gown, the Count performs his repertoire in the late afternoon. After the termination, Leo Gazzarra continued with temporary jobs Corriere dello Sport across water, types articles from tape, moves into a friend’s apartment and takes over their decrepit Alfa Romeo. All the ingredients for living like an early 1960s movie star seem to be in place, and then the woman in question comes into play: an over-the-top Venetian architecture student with psychiatric experience named Arianna, who captivates Leo with her playful approach to life.

The novel captures the sedate grandezza that Fellini commemorated in “La dolce vita”.

But they can’t really decide for each other, and it goes back and forth for a while. Less glamorous is Leo Gazzarra’s fight against alcoholism, into which he repeatedly threatens to slip. When Arianna gets involved with a very wealthy artist and then his best friend Graziano, with whom he has just written a screenplay, dies from alcohol, the lustful frenzy of the summer nights comes to nothing.

Gianfranco Calligarich, who owed the publication of his debut to the writer Natalia Ginzburg, worked for a long time as a director for Italian television, then founded a successful off-theatre and has only had success as a writer again since 2004 with a few novels, incorporates a number of autobiographical experiences into his debut. He was born in Asmara (Eritrea) in 1947 and grew up in Milan, just like his hero. After leaving school, he trained as a journalist in Urbino and then moved to Rome, where he worked for one or two magazines and was enraptured by the city’s sedate grandeur.

These were the late years of the Via Veneto, which the writer Ennio Flaiano had already portrayed in his feuilletons, and which he then commemorated with Federico Fellini in the mythical film “La dolce vita”. Usually one only has in mind the stray reporter Marcello Rubini – embodied by Marcello Mastroianni -, the sensationalist photographer Paparazzo and the bathing Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain, but it is also the story of the intellectual Steiner, who out of despair over the saturated, self-satisfied doings of an increasingly restless bohemian finally kills his children and himself.

The image of the city seems less damaged than in Fellini’s work

The echo of the scandal that the film caused when it premiered in 1959 was still felt in the 1960s. In any case, “La dolce vita” looks like the foil from Calligarich’s novel, its hero Leo like a purified revenant of Marcello and the apocalyptic Steiner. The scenes, such as the modern apartments on the outskirts of town, the nocturnal streets, the crumbling fountains in the squares, seem to be based on the film.

The interest in Calligarich’s novel, which was only available for sale for one summer, may have had something to do with that déjà vu effect: someone reliving the pleasure-seeking Rome of the early 1960s for the last time, steeped in deep sadness , but still smitten by the beauty of life. Although this story also has a bad ending, the image of the city seems less damaged than in Fellini’s, who, in Flaiano’s words, depicted it as a place of rot and decay.

Calligarich’s novel had a strange fate. It was published by Garzanti in 1973, reached a circulation of 17,000 within a few weeks and then disappeared from the scene for inexplicable reasons. It was still available from the Bouquinists, and “Last Summer in the City” was passed on to fans. The fact that the novel was published by Aragno in 2012 and suddenly found its audience again was due on the one hand to the amazingly timeless subject and the sparkling language, but on the other hand to the omnipresence of an experience of decadence.

All of Italy seemed moved, and it is no coincidence that a year later Paolo Sorrentino resorted to Fellini’s great metaphor in his film “La grande Bellezza”. Whether Fellini, Sorrentino or Calligarich: It’s about the Italian desire for carnival, for the complete state of emergency, which is followed by Lent, contemplation and penance, which only increases the urge to violate the norms again. An anthropological constant. And with Calligarich you can experience exactly that: only Rome remains the same forever. At worst, you become a victim of your beauty.