So many books about grief set in Italy begin the same way: a woman, a long trip, a door in a stone wall. Mine does, too. In the second chapter of The Last Room, Lucinda climbs the steps of Villa Fiorita and feels the stones warm under her feet. She glances back at the road she came in on, and it seems to have dissolved behind the bend. She's crossed an ocean to get there. She's cried in the Rome airport bathroom. Twice. And now she's standing in front of a woman who seems to know why she came before she knows it herself.
Some of these heroines are widows. Some are leaving a marriage, or a version of themselves. Some are carrying a loss nobody else knows about. They keep buying plane tickets to Italy, and readers keep following them.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about why.
Home is full of the furniture of grief
At home, loss has a place to live. It sits in the chair nobody uses. It's in the routine you keep up because stopping would mean admitting something. It's in the faces of the people who knew you before and are waiting, kindly, for you to go back to being her.
Lucinda has spent years caring for other people. She knows where the nearest place to sit down is in every room, and she carries bandages in every purse. Her body stays on duty long after the emergencies end. At home, there's always one more thing to manage.
Distance takes the duties away. In a place where nobody needs you to be fine, grief finally has room to stand up and be looked at.
What books about grief set in Italy understand about the past
Italy has a way of keeping the past in plain sight. Walls stay standing for centuries. Olive trees older than anyone's grandmother still bear fruit. Every November 2, families across Italy mark the Day of the Dead, carrying chrysanthemums to the graves of people they still talk to.
There's a lesson in that for a grieving visitor. Here's a country that doesn't hurry its losses out of the room. It builds around them, plants a garden next to them and sets a table.
At Villa Fiorita, that's the oldest orange tree in the grove. It was there long before Lucinda arrived, and it will be there long after she leaves. Something about standing under a tree like that makes your own sorrow feel held.
The table does what words can't
Before Lucinda even reaches the villa, Benna has sent her a biscotto wrapped in waxed paper. When Lucinda thanks her, Benna shrugs. "It's not much," she says. "But it's sweet. Sometimes that's enough."
Grief makes conversation hard. Food gets around that. A plate set down in front of you says stay without asking you to explain anything. Somewhere between the bread and the lemon water at that first terrace lunch, Lucinda looks down and finds she has eaten half of what she tore, without noticing. That's how healing tends to arrive: in the background, while you're busy with something else.
Italian cooks have a phrase for this, quanto basta: as much as it needs. It's the instruction in old recipes where a measurement should be. The cook is trusted to know. I've come to think grief works the same way. There's no correct amount of time and no right quantity of tears. It takes as much as it needs.
Strangers can witness what family can't
The people who love us are often too close to our loss to simply sit with it. They're grieving, too, or they're frightened for us, or they need us to be okay so they can be okay.
A stranger at a long table asks for none of that. When Lucinda admits to Rae and Marianne that she cried in the airport, they laugh with her. They don't flinch. Rae lifts her glass: "To honesty. And clean Italian tile floors."
There's a line late in the book I keep returning to: And sometimes being witnessed was enough. Travel gives us strangers, and sometimes strangers give us that.
I stayed a few nights at a B&B in Lucca. Looking back, I’m amazed at how freely I talked with the woman who ran it. She made me the most delicious bruschetta with things from her garden, and we sat in her kitchen, just talking. Another time, down in Sorrento, I shared some time with a private guide. He talked of his woes, and I shared mine. Such intimate thoughts, shared so easily with strangers.
And then you have to go home
The best of these stories don't pretend Italy fixes anything. The trip ends. The suitcase gets packed. The chair at home is still empty.
What changes is the woman carrying the loss. Midway through The Last Room, Lucinda asks Benna whether it ever gets easier. Benna's answer is one word: "No." Then she adds, "But you become larger than it."
I think that's why so many novels about grief send their heroines to Italy, and why so many of us follow them there. We go somewhere old and beautiful and unhurried. We let the light, the food, and a few kind strangers do their slow work. And we come home a little larger than our sorrow, carrying our love a little differently.
You don't need a plane ticket for that. Sometimes one of the books about grief set in Italy will do.
The Last Room, the first Villa Fiorita novella, is out now in paperback and ebook. If you're near Houston, join me for the launch at The Gilded Page in Friendswood on Saturday, November 14, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. And if you'd like a note from my writing desk twice a month, plus Benna's biscotti recipe, sign up for my newsletter.