Is it possible to come to hate a mother whom we have loved so much?

In November they took me home to the building where I was to spend the first fifty-two years of my life. Livorno is a city in Tuscany, on the sea. I lived near the port, in a filthy little street that for me was — and always will be — the whole world. Flights of swallows in spring, ferocious cries of seagulls all year round, the harbor cranes and the shipyard siren, a cloister and the red edge of the roofs, the cranes like black waders against the disc of the sun that I still couldn’t see sinking at sunset from there. A popular neighborhood…