Last Summer in the City

By: Gianfranco Calligarich, Howard Curtis - translator

Narrated by: Mark Meadows

A cult classic of Italian literature published in English for the first time, with a foreword by André Aciman, 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.

Critic reviews

The true quality of this novel is the way it enlightens, with a desperate clearness, a relationship between a man and a city, that is, between crowd and loneliness (Natalia Ginzburg)

The most beautiful love story of the year

A masterpiece

Dazzling in every detail

[A] sublime text, of extraordinary languid beauty and sadness

Calligarich’s time capsule of love and existential drift in a lost Rome, translated into sparkling prose by Curtis, is ripe for a rediscovery

A sad, seductive declaration of love for Rome

Romantic, raw and lyrical, this is a novel of rare honesty which depicts with devastating accuracy a world of missed connections and failed intimacy (Alice Jolly)

A short, gorgeous, moving and magnificent story of love and solitude (Il Sole 24 Ore)

This book, at once painful and ironic, remains a small gem

A heartrending marvel

Charming, decadent, and emotionally ruthless . . . equal parts Fitzgerald and Antonioni . . . It's wonderful to have this devastating gem at large in the world again (Andrew Martin, author of Cool for America)

Deeply haunting . . . A marvel of a novel

Calligarich’s rendering turns la dolce vita into something more akin to Camus’s L’Etranger in a contemporary-ish urban setting. Out of print for years, this welcome new translation is elegiac and heart-rending

The account of a lost generation in Rome in the early 1970s (possibly the children of the children of Hemingway’s lost generation) carries the weight of both family history and generational saga

Evocative . . . Calligarich conjures Italy’s piazzas, parties, beaches, and bars with a mood reminiscent of A Movable Feast . . . the feeling that Leo is alone in the world is poignantly conveyed