For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present a delicate story of young love from Italian writer Marianna Vitale, translated by Laura Venita Green. We accompany high schoolers Sara and Lorenzo on their first date, which unfolds in fragments—clinking glasses, tentative touches, and finally, the shared thrill of a ride on a Ferris wheel. The freshness of their budding relationship imbues every moment with a tense beauty. But as their connection deepens, a sudden encounter with death shifts Sara’s perspective, forcing her to confront life’s essential ephemerality. Struggling to articulate her emotions to Lorenzo, she finds herself overwhelmed by the desire to let go. With its delicate exploration of first love and the inevitability of loss, the story intertwines themes of youthful passion and untimely death with lyrical elegance.
Leaning against a wall, his hands in his jeans pockets, Lorenzo has by now stopped tracking the minutes. He’d been told that girls make you wait, but Sara should have been there half an hour ago and he’s beginning to worry she’s changed her mind.
The San Giuliano streetlamps tint the alleys with warm light, and the Saturday evening crowd mixes with the Rimini neighborhood locals. Lorenzo checks his phone again. Then he goes back to staring at his white Nikes and the frayed hem of his jeans. He unrolls his shirt sleeves because the air is growing cooler and more humid.
When he looks up, he finally sees her: thin, straight legs moving in a hurry, wrapped in dark tights and shorts, a satin blouse that falls softly on her chest, revealing small freckles just above her breasts.
“I’m late,” Sara says.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says, greeting her with a kiss on both cheeks. “Want to get a drink?” He points to the entrance of Retroborgo and guides her there, resting a hand between her shoulder blades, barely touching her. “I’ll go ask if we can sit outside.”
She waits on a stool between barrel-shaped tables. Across the street, two little boys are playing soccer outside a house with red shutters. Sara thinks she’d like to live in this area, so close to downtown. Then she wouldn’t be stuck having her parents drive her around everywhere.
“Okay, I ordered two spritzes,” Lorenzo says when he returns, sitting down next to her. “And they’re bringing something to eat.”
“Great.” Sara smiles and exposes her imperfect teeth. They’re one of the first things Lorenzo noticed about her—her slightly crooked right canine overlapping her incisor.
“You look really nice tonight…I mean, you always look nice.”
Her cheeks turn slightly pink.
“How was your afternoon?” he asks. “You were at your friend’s…Elisa, right?”
Sara nods. “We were hanging out. That’s why I was late.” She lowers her gaze.
The waiter relieves their awkwardness by bringing two drinks and a small tasting board.
They raise a glass in silence. Their hands brush against each other from time to time when they reach for a potato chip or pizza square.
“They say the food’s good here,” he says.
“I’ve never been here before.”
“Me neither.”
“This stuff’s good.”
“Yeah, it’s great. Maybe we should come back sometime.”
“Maybe.”
Lorenzo can no longer help shivering. He rubs his arms, and Sara notices.
“Are you cold?”
“No, it’s fine.”
“You don’t have a jacket?”
“I forgot it.”
“But you’ll get sick.”
“You don’t have to give me a hard time, though!”
“Okay, sorry. But you can’t stay like this all night.”
“My house is nearby. We can stop there if you don’t mind.”
“Okay.”
Sara finishes her drink and the last potato chip.
“Do you want anything else?” he asks.
“No, I’m good.”
She pulls her wallet from her bag, but he stops her.
“I already paid.”
She looks at him sideways. “You didn’t have to.”
Lorenzo shrugs his shoulders. “I wanted to make a good impression.”
They walk through the neighborhood. He puts an arm around her waist, and he can feel her hipbone. She’s so thin that he’d like to pick her up—he imagines she’s as light as cotton candy.
Sara lets him lead the way and she nods from time to time while he tells her about his morning at school. They both attend science high school, but they’re in different classes. It was in the courtyard during a break that Lorenzo first approached her. She was sitting on the low wall, and he came up to her, polite and awkward, and asked her out. She said no, because they barely knew each other and her classmates were staring. But the next day all the classes gathered in the auditorium for an assembly. Lorenzo sat next to her. He was silent the whole time until the end when he asked if he could friend her on Facebook. Since then, they’ve been messaging each other regularly. Sara likes how he responds to her texts—it seems like he gets her. Lorenzo didn’t ask her out again until he was absolutely sure she’d say yes. Sara knows he understands her moods, he doesn’t want to force anything. Even now, with his tentative embrace, she knows he’s only taking measurements—testing out their bodies so they can fit together in the most natural way possible.
Lorenzo stops when they arrive in the residential area of San Giuliano.
“Here we are.” He points to an eighties-era apartment building with two independent floors. “This is where I live.”
Sara looks with curiosity, as if it might reveal something more about him, but it seems pretty normal.
“I’ll wait for you,” she says.
“It’ll take me one second.”
Lorenzo opens the small wrought-iron gate, and then the doorway to the ground floor. He disappears for an instant and reappears already wearing his leather jacket.
“One actual second,” Sara says, a little disappointed that she wasn’t able to peek inside.
He puts his arm around her waist, now with more confidence.
She huddles her shoulders a little, as if to test whether his embrace can contain all of her.
“Better?” she asks.
“Much better. What do you feel like doing?”
“Let’s walk around some more,” she says, just barely lifting the corners of her mouth, like she’s trying to hold back a smile but not quite succeeding.
They continue on to the port, walking along the canal past moored boats, fishing shops, the tall white lighthouse.
“They put up the Ferris wheel,” Lorenzo says, glimpsing the illuminated metal structure in the distance. “Have you ever ridden it?”
Sara shakes her head. “I’m scared of heights.”
“I’ve never been on it either. Should we do it?”
“I just told you I’m scared…”
He slows down to look her in the eye. “Me too,” he admits. “But I’d like to ride it with you.”
She doesn’t respond but gives him a quick kiss on the cheek and speeds back up.
They reach the port square—the point where the beach begins. On one side there’s clear sand that runs for kilometers and kilometers, a smooth, bare expanse. On the other, the dockyard lantern with its intermittent, flashing red light. In the center, the Ferris wheel.
Lorenzo gets the tickets, and they hop right on before they can change their minds. The cabin stops for just a moment. Once they’re inside it starts back up.
They sit close and watch the sea grow increasingly vast, a dark velvet blanket tucked into the shore. Everything becomes less recognizable as they rise. The lights glitter off the curves of the landscape like a fitted rhinestone dress and the lanterns at the end of the pier flash their colorful signals.
Sara leans out a little—the cabins are open at the sides—and tries to calculate the meters separating her from the ground. She experiences a strange vertigo, but it isn’t fear. It’s a sort of attraction, as if the force of gravity is suddenly intensified. She puts out one arm, and then the other, feeling the dense salt air flow through her fingers. For a second it seems to her that she can command that feeling. Her head starts to spin, and she retreats back inside, her arms tight to her sides and her hands under her thighs.
“I thought I’d be more afraid,” she says.
“Me too, actually.”
They smile at each other. Lorenzo resists the urge to kiss her only because he’s scared the cabin might swing at the slightest motion.
After the second turn of the wheel, Sara regains her confidence. She opens her bag and gets a coin from her wallet. She looks at it. Then she looks down.
“What are you doing?”
She shows him the coin held tight between her thumb and index finger. “For good luck.”
Lorenzo laughs. “But that works in fountains, not off a Ferris wheel.”
Sara shrugs.
She waits until no one is passing below and drops the coin. She leans out and watches it closely while it spins faster and faster, becoming smaller and smaller, barely a shimmer in the night. It feels like a gulf in her stomach, like she’s the one falling. She doesn’t see it touch the ground. She doesn’t hear any sound.
“It would be so easy to fall from here,” she says.
“Just sit still and don’t look down.”
Sara puts her hands back under her thighs with the expression of a child who’s been scolded for something she knows she’ll do again.
“What now?” Lorenzo says.
“We wait.”
“Hopefully it works.”
The wheel makes five turns before slowing to let them off. By the last revolution, they are no longer amazed by what they see. They feel lighter, staring out at the dark horizon without entirely bringing it into focus.
They’ve arrived at the end of the pier, where the last tongue of concrete juts into the sea. The statue of the Sailor’s Bride is hardly a shadow pointing to a distant spot in the darkness. It’s here, under the small yellow lighthouse, that Lorenzo and Sara kiss for the first time, amidst music blaring from Rock Island and the sweet smell of smoke from someone sitting alone out on the rocks, taking a hit.
He holds her face in his hands and brings it to his. They close their eyes, let the sound of the waves and the pulsing beat of the music guide them. At one point, Lorenzo lifts her slightly off the ground—just a few centimeters. She doesn’t resist.
Then, without speaking, they circle Rock Island, a wooden hut built on the pier with a large net stretched out over the sea. Lorenzo looks at the poster with the evening lineup hanging at the entrance. He points out the name of tonight’s band in bold white font that stands out against the black background: The Tapes.
“A friend of mine plays with them,” he says.
“Then let’s go listen to them!”
They enter holding hands and shoulder their way through the people packed in front of the stage. Lorenzo looks for a corner where he and Sara can have a little space. She dances in place, moving only her hips and legs. He bobs his head, following the beat of the drums.
“They’re good,” she says into his ear so he can hear her.
“Yes, for sure.” He puts his arms around her waist and pulls her close.
An hour later, they have to push again to get to the exit. Sara’s father is waiting for her in the beachfront parking lot. She doesn’t want him to know about Lorenzo, so they say goodbye underneath the Ferris wheel with one last kiss and a promise to be in touch the next day.
He walks home, sniffing the collar of his shirt where some of her scent has lingered.
The wheel is still moving, amidst seagulls screeching and the siren of a fishing boat announcing its arrival in the harbor. It keeps spinning, slowly, nonstop.
At school a week later, Sara is about to respond to a message from Lorenzo when the literature teacher enters and immediately asks the class to observe a moment of silence. She doesn’t say why—surely everyone’s already heard the news: last night a local boy, just seventeen years old, took his own life by jumping off the Ferris wheel.
But Sara doesn’t know anything about it. She asks her desk mate for an explanation.
“Didn’t you hear? It was a boy our age, Michele Fabbri. He threw himself off the Ferris wheel…”
Sara swallows the news like a mouthful that goes down whole and sticks in her esophagus at the level of her sternum.
“Threw himself? I mean, are they sure that…”
Elisa nods. “Someone saw him jump. Anyway, they said it’s impossible to fall accidentally.”
Sara feels herself running out of air, her head getting lighter, as if all her vital energy has dropped to her stomach.
During the moment of silence, she can’t help but think of when she leaned from the top of the Ferris wheel and watched the coin drop, when she imagined the sound of its impact with the asphalt and for one split second thought how easy it would be for someone to fly down, if only they wanted to.
“Why did he do it?”
“Nobody knows. Or they don’t want to say.”
Sara spends the rest of class on her phone, searching the internet for news of the incident. She discovers that Michele attended classical high school and that he jumped from the Ferris wheel at 10:30 p.m., amidst the terrified stares of people still out strolling along the pier.
She begins to hear a sharp hissing in her ears, and Elisa notices she’s turned pale.
“Is everything okay?”
“I was on that Ferris wheel,” Sara whispers. “Saturday. With Lorenzo.”
Elisa puts an arm around her shoulders and pulls her close.
On the way out of school, Lorenzo asks Sara if she feels like hanging out that night. She says she’d rather meet up the next afternoon at a café downtown: she wants to talk, but calmly and in the light of day. He doesn’t push. Later he sends her a message on Whatsapp, How are you?, but she doesn’t reply. She turns off her phone and crawls into bed, under the heavy comforter left over from winter. She pulls it over her head, trying to muffle every sound, every sense, every thought. Lulled by that feeling of numbness, as if she were inside a soap bubble, she falls asleep.
The next morning, Lorenzo wakes up early. He checks his phone first thing, but Sara never viewed his message, nor any subsequent ones.
He decides to go running. It’s a beautiful day and he needs to release some tension. He wears his earbuds, the music volume at maximum, and walks briskly to the Tiberius Bridge. Once he’s past it, he descends into Marecchia Park and takes the first path.
He starts his stopwatch and begins to run. He goes all out as if it were a race. He doesn’t slow down even when he feels short of breath, his heart beating out of control. He runs forty minutes straight.
Exhausted, he lies on the wet, cold ground, spreading his arms like he’s making a snow angel, pulling up clumps of grass and throwing them a short distance away. Drops of sweat drip down his face at the corners of his forehead, his cheeks are on fire, his lungs hurt every time he inhales huge gulps of the icy air.
He stays there until his heartbeat slows. When he gets up his head spins. He starts running again in the opposite direction, this time at a more normal pace.
Sara’s message arrives when he’s already in his neighborhood headed home. It’s a quarter past ten.
Sorry for just responding now. Let’s meet at 4 at Caffe Cavour.
Despite her cold tone, Lorenzo’s relieved.
When he gets home, he slips into the shower, standing still under a jet of scalding water for ten minutes while his skin turns red. Every time he closes his eyes, the face of that boy, Michele Fabbri, reappears, from that photo of him on Facebook and in every newspaper article. In the photo he was smiling, his hair shoulder-length, some of it covering his eyes a little. He had the laid-back look of someone who doesn’t get too upset when things happen.
Lorenzo remembers thinking that’s the impression he himself would like to give and feeling guilty immediately afterward.
Sara’s already waiting in front of the café when Lorenzo arrives. He greets her with a kiss on the cheek and points to a small table outside, under the awning, in the center of Piazza Cavour. They sit down and immediately a waitress approaches to take their order: hot tea for her, cappuccino for him.
“Are you alright?” Lorenzo asks as soon as they’re alone.
Sara’s eyes roam the piazza, restless. “Do you know about that boy?” She says it almost like it’s their fault.
“Yes,” he says with a sigh. “I didn’t want to believe it.”
“It’s just…We were up there, too…” She leaves the sentence hanging, the words dissolving in midair.
“I know.” Lorenzo stares at the ground.
“It was our first date.”
“I know,” Lorenzo repeats. “I’m sorry.”
Sara nods. She knows there’s not much to say but she wishes he’d make more of an effort—that he’d find the right words, like he always has up to that moment.
The waitress arrives with their order and the check. This time Sara doesn’t let Lorenzo pay for them both.
“What was it like for you, when we were on the Ferris wheel?” she asks him, pouring tea into her cup and adding lemon.
He takes a sip of his cappuccino. “I was a little scared, actually. But it was also really cool.” He knows he’s messing everything up. She wants to hear something different, but he can’t figure out what.
“And you never looked down?”
“I was trying not to.”
“Because, when I looked down, I felt like…”
He waits for her to finish the sentence, but Sara seems intent on leaving things half unsaid.
“You felt like what?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
She continues to see the coin plummet, the image now one with those from the news—police officers, the taped-off scene, Michele’s parents.
Lorenzo takes her hand, squeezes it gently.
“Tomorrow at three is the funeral,” she says after a few minutes. “I was thinking of going. Do you want to come with me?”
“Of course.” He smiles at her with his eyes.
The funeral is held in the cathedral. The thick white marble walls seem to narrow around the crowd of boys and girls Michele’s age.
Sara and Lorenzo find a spot in one of the last pews in the back of the church. They sit and vaguely follow the service, pretending to participate in this pain that’s not their own. The priest speaks at length about Michele, calling him a golden boy, saying his loss was a hard blow to everyone. He tries to provide strength to the family by reminding them that Michele is with the Lord who has called him home for a reason, and even if we don’t understand, we must have faith and accept it.
Sara thinks it’s nothing like that. What Michele did was a choice, a terrible choice, but also brave, and above all, his own. The priest’s words are so impersonal, so easy replicated at any funeral, for any loved one that leaves us.
“Let’s get out of here,” she says to Lorenzo as soon as Mass is over.
“You don’t want to offer our condolences to his parents?”
“I’d rather not.”
Before leaving they cast one last glance at Giotto’s crucifix, which seems to be keeping watch over the coffin, resisting time and oblivion.
“Are your parents home?” Sara asks as they walk slowly down the Corso.
“No, they’re both at work until six.”
“Let’s go to your house then.”
He smiles and wraps his arm around her.
The next week Lorenzo asks Sara to go with him to a friend’s birthday. She agrees, even though it would be their first official outing as a couple and it makes her a little uncomfortable. The evening plan includes a drink downtown at Cantinetta followed by Rock Island.
The two teens meet in Piazza Cavour in front of the old fish market, where three brick arches bordered with white marble serve as the gateway to the busiest weekend spots. Lorenzo takes Sara’s hand. Together they make their way through the tables at Cantinetta, where Christian, the birthday boy, is waiting for them with the rest of the group. As soon as he sees them, he gets up, hugs Lorenzo, and introduces himself to Sara.
She smiles, embarrassed, and wishes him a happy birthday.
Christian points to an empty seat next to his girlfriend, and Sara’s relieved that she and Lorenzo aren’t the only couple at that table.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Rebecca.”
She introduces herself and immediately puts Sara at ease. Sara shakes her hand.
“You’re Lore’s girlfriend, right?”
“Yes, I mean…we’ve been seeing each other a little while.”
“Chri and I only met three weeks ago. At Altromondo,” Rebecca says. “And get this. I didn’t even want to go to a nightclub but my friends brought me. Then I met him, and by the next day we were already dating. It was love at first sight.”
Sara nods, smiling.
“What about you?” Rebecca asks.
“Same school,” Sara says, but then she decides she wants to tell their story, too. “I actually didn’t like him until we started texting. But after a while I realized Lorenzo understood me like no one else does. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that feeling…”
Rebecca nods her head and invites her to continue, curious.
“And after he asked me out a thousand times, I finally said yes. I think I did the right thing.”
“You definitely did the right thing. You two are so good together,” Rebecca remarks.
Sara would like to tell her about their first date but decides not to. She gets up to go to the buffet.
Lorenzo follows and stands beside her while she absentmindedly fills her plate. He asks how she’s doing, if she’s having a good time.
She nods. “Rebecca’s nice.”
He gives her a kiss on the cheek and fills his plate with salad and rice. Then he returns to the table next to Christian, who pretends to make fun of him for being overly considerate. Lorenzo plays along but continues to glance over at Sara as if he’s afraid she’ll disappear.
After a drink they stop in the piazza, on the stone steps of City Hall, where Christian unwraps his gifts. While Rebecca posts photos of the evening on Instagram and someone lights a cigarette, Lorenzo and Sara sit close together and slightly removed so they can exchange a few kisses.
“Will you two stop?” Christian says to them. “The party’s over here.”
“Knock it off,” Lorenzo says.
The group heads toward the port. Sara’s with Rebecca again and they continue chatting. She doesn’t mind the long walk even though the air feels cool and the weather threatens rain.
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Rebecca says. “You two are so cute.”
“I’m still getting used to it, honestly.”
“You will. It’s not so bad going out as a couple.”
Sara nods, not realizing where they’re going even though she knows well enough that to get to Rock Island they have to pass the Ferris wheel. But she doesn’t think about it. When they arrive in Boscovich Square and are about to pass under the towering metal structure, she suddenly freezes, staring at it.
“Is everything okay?”
Rebecca is the only one who stopped to wait. The others didn’t notice—Lorenzo turned for just a second to look at the Ferris wheel, and then at the ground directly underneath.
Sara doesn’t respond right away. She continues watching the cabins move and feels that vertigo again, even there, standing still. And this time she recognizes it.
It reminds her of when she was a kid and she used to swim into open water, out to where she couldn’t reach, abandoning herself to it. She would see how long she could stay afloat and only at the last second, just as she was about to go under, she would start thrashing her feet underwater, fighting with all her might to get back to shore. Or when she flicked a match on the box and watched the flame come to life, bringing it close to her nose so she could feel the heat on her face, letting it burn until just before it reached her fingers. Or when she dropped that coin just to watch it fall, imagining what it would be like to take that leap. Who knows if it was the same force that had driven Michele to jump into the unknown.
“Yes, everything’s fine. My head’s spinning a little.”
“Do you want to sit down?”
“No, it’s better now. Let’s catch up with the others.”
They continue to Rock Island, the music already overpowering the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks and wood pilings that support the venue.
Sara huddles into her leather jacket and looks far off to the open sea.
When the bell rings for break, Sara doesn’t feel like joining Lorenzo in the courtyard. She looks out the window, opens it wide and waves to him, then shakes her head when he gestures for her to come down. She stands there, the damp air caressing her face, pausing to study the movements of others, all those kids smoking, gossiping, sipping espresso in small plastic cups, chewing mouthfuls of pizza.
One of her classmates launches a paper airplane, and Sara follows its trajectory with her eyes, almost as if she were steering it. She watches it pass by her and out the window, make a small turn on itself, lose altitude and begin to plummet, then pick itself up a few feet off the ground and fall a few centimeters further than she expected.
She keeps staring at it lying on the unkempt grass among cigarette butts and empty snack wrappers, until a foot steps on it. She gasps, as if it had crushed a sparrow that fell from the nest. She recognizes Lorenzo’s white Nike.
After a few minutes she climbs onto the windowsill, sits down and swings her legs outside the ledge, dangling.
“Sara!” Lorenzo calls. “What are you doing?”
He gets underneath her, as if to catch her on the fly in case she falls, even though he knows he wouldn’t be able to.
Sara leans out a little, stretching her legs to feel the void beneath, closing her eyes.
“Sara, stop. Get down from there,” he yells, unsure whether it’s better to stay put or run upstairs and pull her back inside.
She waits a few more moments. It seems like she hadn’t heard him, but then she says: “Don’t worry” and bends her legs.
With a slow, calculated motion, she turns around and brings them back inside.
She’s still sitting on the windowsill when Elisa returns from the bathroom.
“What are you doing?”
Sara shrugs.
Elisa joins her, looks down and sees Lorenzo, motionless, looking up.
“Ah, I get it,” she says. “You two are playing Juliet and Romeo.”
“More or less,” Sara replies, getting down with a small jump. She moves away from the window and exits the classroom.
Translated from the Italian by Laura Venita Green
Marianna Vitale (b. 1993) was born and raised in Rimini, a popular beach resort on Italy’s Adriatic Coast. She has a master’s degree in creative writing from Scuola Holden and works as a copywriter for the tourism industry. Her recent fiction and translations have appeared in World Literature Today, Apple Valley Review, Rivista Blam, Tropismi, and Spazinclusi. “The Unknown” is the opening story in her debut collection, Soltanto Giovani (Only Young), published in Italy by Augh Edizioni in September 2022.
Laura Venita Green (b. 1979) has an MFA in fiction and translation from Columbia University. Her translations have appeared in World Literature Today, Apple Valley Review, and Spazincluzi. Her fiction won the Story Foundation Prize and has appeared in The Missouri Review, Story, Joyland, and Fatal Flaw. Her debut novel, Sister Creatures, is forthcoming from Unnamed Press in October 2025.
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