Gianfranco Calligarich

A Novel

Last Summer in the City

Aurelia 🧚🏻‍♀️ 

No language has a word for being more than just alone.

The first great disaster to befall mankind

logan chung

Like a Rohmer film, but set in Rome and occasionally with a more flagrantly offensive air, and more melodrama and less musings

Danielle

Giving off every Eric Rohmer film I’ve seen. Definitely not for everyone. Very sad read.

A cult classic of Italian literature published in English for the first time, with a foreword by André Acimen, author of Call Me By Your Name In the late 1960s, Leo Gazzara left his family in Milan and moved to Rome for work. Soon unemployed, he has spent his time in an alcoholic haze, bouncing between hotels, bars, romantic entanglements, and the homes of his rich and well-educated friends. Rome is indifferent. Leo drifts, aimless and alone. On the evening of his thirtieth birthday, he meets Arianna, a young woman who is both fragile and seductive. All night they drive the city in Leo’s run-down Alfa Romeo, talking and talking. They eat brioche for breakfast, drink through the dawn, drive to the sea and back. A whirlwind beginning. This is the story of the year Leo fell in love and lost everything. Intense, brief, witty and devastating, Last Summer in the City is a newly rediscovered classic of Italian literature. Translated into English for the first time by Howard Curtis, Gianfranco Calligarich’s romantic and despairing debut is reminiscent of The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises and The Catcher in the Rye.

Alex Stelzhammer

Last Summer in the City A Novel

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