Our world here is very fragile. Somehow I feel like we have managed to arrive only at the very end of something. Last winter seems like it was a hundred years ago.

Nonno has spent the last week in the hospital, although they say he can come home today. When we asked what was wrong, we got answers with vague medical terms that don't really translate. Valerio looked downhearted and just said, "Well, he is ninety years old, you know." Mirio, who is himself just out of the hospital, seems to have suddenly aged many years. We doubt they have told him the truth about either his own or his brother's condition, but I think he knows anyway. He tries to keep our spirits up, though. "The wine in the hospital was terrible," he said to us, twinkling. "It tasted just like water."

This is a picture of Nonno and Hugo, when they fell asleep in their chairs one afternoon last autumn while watching TV. When the old men are no more at the pub, it will be a very different place. Bar Igea, the bar down in town that I used to go to forty years ago, the place where the sculptors and marble workers used to go in their dusty clothes and battered shoes to have a glass of wine with their friends and where the old men sat all day in the shade of an ancient spreading tree and played checkers, is now a chic cocktail bar called The Black Cat that is only open at night. The big old tree was cut down to make more room for parking in the piazza. I have never been in there in its new incarnation.

There are half a dozen For Sale signs on houses on the lovely Via Capriglia now. Some of the houses have olive groves, all have majestic views of the sea. They are beautiful stone houses going cheap because people don't want to live like this anymore.

I love my brother. He is one of the smartest and most fun people I know. And having been raised in the same surreal shitshow as me, he always gets it. Not everyone does. (One of the reviewers of my new manuscript used the phrase "situational absurdity" in reference to my fictionalized description of actual events in my actual family -- events that I had even toned down to make them more believable.) One of the best things about my brother is that he is always willing to play ball, conversationally speaking.

It must be very hard for people to go through life without a brother like mine. 

Of the regulars at the pub, Almo is by far the baby. He is 54. That may seem irrelevant, but what I am getting at here is that we -- Jonathan and I -- now live very much in a world of quite elderly men. It is not a world for the faint of heart.

Mirio is sick.

He spent all last week in the hospital and they were afraid for a while that he would never leave it. But he is out now and among us again, sweet-natured and gentle and a little repetitive in his discourse. And I would be perfectly happy to have him tell me once again how it was after the war when they were all so hungry and how he found some figs once growing on the hillside but gave them to an old man who had nothing to eat and how he began working the marble when he was 11-years-old, walking down the mountain from Capezzano Monte to Pietrasanta every morning and back again in the evening. I would be quite happy if he would show me again the pictures of his sculptures -- the one that is now is the airport in Geneva, the one in the Piazza della Signoria in Firenze. 

He is jovial enough still, but more quiet, and he leaves to go home early. He is not allowed to drink wine -- only one glass with meals, which is nothing here. Only one glass with meals is almost the same as no wine at all.

Mirio was our first friend among the "beasts" -- joining us at our table on New Year's Eve a year ago and introducing himself and showing us pictures on his phone of himself working the marble and explaining to us for the first time the story of his life. Since then, he has always been our friend.

Alice told us what the doctors have said -- Mirio has an "alarm clock" inside him and one day soon it will just go off and his time will be up. 

They have not told Nonno the truth of the matter. Nonno is 90 and Mirio is his younger brother. Mirio is 89. They have been together, side by side, since before they can remember, through all the dark days of the war and the hunger and then later the days when the modern world came here. They don't tell Nonno the truth because they know that he would worry too much about his little brother.

But Nonno is quieter now, too, like Mirio. And when everyone else is watching the evening news on the television in the bar, Nonno's eyes are focussed on something very far away.

Mirio went home early last night. But he was there for a while and he taught me how to make a hat out of newspaper like the artigiani di marmo wore when they worked in the old days. He made one for me -- a simple thing that I will keep forever.