Verso sera (1990)

In a long letter to his granddaughter, who was four years old at the time, Ludovico Bruschi, an elderly university professor, recounts a series of events that took place in 1977. Ludovico, a widower for some time, had a troubled relationship with his son Oliviero, who wanted a free life without rules, in keeping with certain youth ideologies of the 1970s. After living in a commune with Stella, the young man had decided to leave her and move to an agricultural community, entrusting his father with the little girl born from their now-ended relationship. The child—significantly registered under the name Mescalina, but called Papere in everyday life—had been raised by her parents to live the same unruly way they did, and at first has difficulty getting along with her grandfather. He is an atheist communist intellectual, but attached to certain traditional principles such as work, order, punctuality, and respect for rules; he is paternalistic toward Elvira, his elderly, illiterate housekeeper, loves academic culture, and is distrustful of experimentation. After Oliviero leaves, matters become more complicated because of Stella’s intrusiveness: she does not want to give up the child, but neither does she want to give up the rule-free life she has always led. The little girl is affected by this conflict between her mother and grandfather, and seems ambiguously to reflect both their personalities, especially in a game in which she pretends to be two different girls (“Papera the First” and “Papera the Second”) who are perpetually at odds. At first Ludovico and Stella detest each other because their values and ways of life are completely opposed, but eventually they grow fond of one another in a kind of platonic, impossible love (after all, “it’s not done” between a father-in-law and daughter-in-law, at least according to Ludovico’s “bourgeois” principles). In the end, the unusual family reunites at the farm-commune where Oliviero lives. The characters’ future remains uncertain, but little, intelligent Mescalina will be able to take from each of her very different relatives whatever good they can pass on to her.