Meeting in Positano

1

Everyone was held spellbound as she walked down the steps to the dock where a skiff waited for her to push out to sea. Or when upon her return, at no later than one o clock, Nicola the son of Lucibello, called the Monkey, the oldest and most audacious ex-fisherman in Positano, who like the rest of them had switched to renting beach umbrellas and loungers helped her down from the boat, and with admiring eyes followed her steps on the carpet of wooden planks which made a snug living room of the ancient, rocky bay.
Every time, Nicola was left breathless by that thank you, barely whispered from two harmoniously shaped lips, perhaps too full to be perfect. The teenage boy couldn t help but stare until she went out of view, slightly hurrying up the large steps through the feverish and bustling crowd, the men all in trunks, the women in their beach outfits, too colorful to bear the contrast with her sober sarong or her trouser pants.
He had never seen her go swimming, even though he had attended to her since he was a child, the boy ruminated as he jumped onto the princess s boat to tie it up. To go swimming with her, what he would give for that. He threw one last jealous glance at the friends, who always surrounded her like a faithful band, protecting her, or cutting her off from the rest of the world. If only he could be one of them, he thought as he tidied up the boat, collecting with care the precious objects that those lucky people always forgot: sun cream, a watch, a bracelet.
The princess sent him daydreaming. He couldn t even say how many countesses, duchesses, and princesses he d seen. But that one! Lying in the tidied boat, Nicola dreams of her, his brown body curled up in the sun, his lionlike head on a muscular arm with skin, in the hollow of the armpit, that s still as soft as a baby s.
Lightly and confidently walking around the veranda of the Buca di Bacco, crowded at that hour with people having a drink, Erica absentmindedly ignores

Goliarda Sapienza was born in Catania, Italy in 1924. She moved to Rome at the age of 16 to study at the Academy of Dramatic Arts, followed by a career as an actress in both films and the theater. She wrote several novels, including The Art of Joy, which remained unpublished until after her death.

Brian Robert Moore is a literary translator who previously worked as foreign fiction editor of the Italian publishing house Chiarelettere in Milan. He won the 2021 PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature, and his translations have appeared in publications such as 3:AM Magazine, The Arkansas International, and Asymptote.

Once too radical for Italy, Goliarda Sapienza is belatedly getting her due a characteristically intense work of autofiction Meeting in Positano is a nuanced exploration of happiness, guilt, and the fickleness of human affections. New York Times Book Review

Sapienza intersperses Erica s revelations with brief, finely rendered character sketches of townspeople and crisp descriptions of the landscape. The insights on the relationship between love and money give this elegantly slender novel a nice bit of heft. Publishers Weekly
 
With lucid prose that is at once descriptive and meditative, threaded with pearls of phrasing that provoke the mysticism of conceptual thought, Meeting in Positano is a distinctive contribution to Italian literature, crafted from Sapienza s richly informed, semi-autobiographical stance as a metropolitan woman with both countrified origins and ideals inherited from Italy s educated class. In addition to building on the foundations of her background, the book also exhibits her filmic ear for dialogue and cinematographic imagination for scenography. Asymptote

A profoundly intimate book, achingly beautiful, like a warm, lyrical daydream. As I turned the pages I felt as though I were in postwar Positano, brushing the sand and salt from my skin, a silent character in Goliarda s world of tragic possibility. Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Meeting in Positano is an absolute dream of a novel. Set on the magical Amalfi Coast, it is full of beauty and yearning, secrets and art. The friendship at the novel s center is so compelling, and ultimately heartbreaking, I felt I was swept along with Goliarda and Erica, by the dazzling sea, through the Positano nights.   Luanne Rice, New York Times bestselling author of The Shadow Box

An elegy for a town and time lost, a Jamesian meditation on class and privacy, an intimate and often glamorous account of a charged friendship, a