At 30, Katy Silver, has just lost her mother to cancer and suddenly she isn’t quite sure what to make of her life: she doesn’t know who she is without her mom.
I cannot yet conceive of a world without her, what that will look like, who I am in her absence. […] I do not ever imagine coming to terms with the loss of her body – her warm, welcoming body. The place I always felt at home. My mother, you see, is the great love of my life. She is the great love of my life, and I have lost her.
The only thing she can think to do, to help her make sense of this senseless tragedy, is to go on the trip to Positano, Italy, that she and her mom had been planning for ages. So, she leaves her husband, the affable Eric, and grieving father behind and lands at Hotel Poseidon (an actual real place where you too can see what Katy saw for a measly $1500 a night -in high season; you can stay for about a third of that in the off season). There, itinerary for two in hand, Katy tries to do the things that she and her mother had planned which was, essentially, to revisit her mother’s own transformative 30th summer on the Amalfi Coast.
Katy isn’t going to have to do it alone, though. First, she meets Adam, a handsome American property developer, who has been coming to Positano for years because “it’s special here […] a little piece of paradise.” Then, miraculously, Katy meets her mother.
Of course, this turn of events is going to take some suspension of disbelief – but just go with it. For anyone who has ever lost a loved one, especially a mom, this reunion will be bittersweet. Suddenly, Katy finds herself actually living that life-changing summer her mother lived 30 years ago…with her mother. It’s a game changer for Katy as she comes to understand her mother in a way it would have been impossible to before.
I see a woman. A woman fresh into a new decade who wants a life of her own. Who has interests and desires and passions beyond my father and me. Who is very real, exactly as she is right here and now.
It’s hard to imagine our parents as anything but our parents. It’s almost like they didn’t have a life before we came along, and I know that this is likely how my son and daughter, both in their twenties now, see me. I am their mom, but before that – just one yawning blank. I wonder if that is also how I saw my own mother? I lost my mother to cancer when I was 45; she was just 67. There are so many things I wish she was here for, so many milestones and heartaches, so many vacations we never had the change to take, and so many questions I wish that I had asked.
For this reason, One Italian Summer is a balm for the soul. The other reason is Italy itself. As anyone who has ever been there knows, it is a magical place. I wrote about my last visit in 2018 here.