1. The Blue Fiat

The Fiat was the colour of a faded summer sky, a 1972 500L with rust freckling the sills and a passenger door that only opened from the inside if you knew the trick — a sharp yank upward while pressing your thumb into the depression just below the window crank. My father called her Lucia. He called every car Lucia, as though the name itself might persuade temperamental Italian engineering toward mercy. It never worked, but he kept trying, and that was my father in a single gesture.

We packed the morning of the feast of San Giovanni, the air already thick and sweet with the promise of heat. My mother wrapped panzanella in a damp tea towel and nested it in the cooler between bottles of Chinotto, the glass sweating before we’d even backed out of the courtyard. My sister Elena, twelve and furious about everything, wedged herself against the rear window with her Walkman and a paperback whose cover she’d covered in brown paper so no one could see what she was reading. I was nine. I remember the vinyl of the back seat burning the backs of my thighs, and the way the car smelled — petrol, old bread, my mother’s jasmine perfume, something metallic underneath it all that I now understand was the slow death of a gasket.

We made it seventeen kilometres before the first breakdown.

The engine coughed once, a wet sound, and then the Fiat simply sighed and rolled to a stop on the gravel shoulder of the SS16. My father said a word I had never heard him say before, low and almost reverent, and then he laughed. That was the other thing about my father — he laughed at disasters as though they were practical jokes the universe had played just for him. He got out, opened the rear engine compartment, and stood staring into it with his hands on his hips, a man regarding a difficult but not uninteresting puzzle. The Adriatic glittered in the distance, blue and indifferent.

A low-angle medium shot from just behind the rear bumper of a vintage car, looking up toward a 40-year-old Italian man with olive skin, dark brown wavy hair receding slightly at the temples, and a weathered face with a strong jaw and deep smile lines. His hazel eyes squint with weary concentration, his full lips pressed together, as he stares down into the dark, shadowed cavity of the car's open rear engine compartment. He leans forward, his stocky build evident under a cream linen shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows, both of his hands planted on the sun-warmed metal rim of the engine bay. He wears brown trousers and leather sandals, standing on a gravel shoulder. The compact, boxy shape of the faded sky-blue car, flecked with rust on its sills, frames the foreground. Behind him, dry scrub grass leads to the glittering expanse of the Adriatic Sea under a harsh midday sun, with strong directional light casting deep, hard shadows across the gravel and his figure.

An hour passed. Elena refused to leave the car. My mother sat on a folded sweater in the thin shade of a roadside pine and ate a peach with a pocketknife, slicing crescent moons off the stone and handing them to me one by one. The juice ran down my wrist and into the crease of my elbow and she wiped it with her thumb, a gesture so absent and so tender that I still feel it thirty years later, whenever I eat a peach in summer.

A man in a three-wheeled Ape truck stopped eventually and helped my father coax Lucia back to life with a length of wire and a strip of leather cut from his own sandal. They spoke in rapid dialect, laughing, slapping the Fiat’s roof as though she were a mule that had simply needed convincing. We drove on. The sea grew larger in the windshield, a blue so deep it seemed to swallow the sky.

The second breakdown came at dusk, just outside Senigallia, and this time there was no roadside pine and no passing Ape and my mother did not have any more peaches. But that was the night we walked the last two kilometres to the sea in the falling dark, the four of us on the empty road with our shoes in our hands, and my father sang a song from his own childhood, something about the moon and a fisherman’s daughter, and Elena forgot to be furious and took my hand. The sea, when we finally reached it, was black and silver and endless, and it roared softly in the dark like something alive and patient and very, very old.