I always wanted an older brother, someone to release me from the burden of being the heir, the responsible son and I never got that. I got Giovanni instead. 
To me he was the test case for the life I would have lived had I stayed behind and done the sensible thing, managing the farm I inherited in Italy with my sisters. Instead I ran away and divorced myself from my life in Umbria. I had an English father so I spoke English too and found my freedom there. He used to say if he spoke English his fantasy would have been to become a rural family practice doctor in small town America.
He stayed the course, did his military service and married a colleague, a doctor, who gave him a son whom he named after me. And a daughter whom I love now more than ever because she is so much her father.
I gave her driving lessons and taught her how to take corners at speed because she is her fathers daughter. Giovanni loved cars and she has the gene where young Michele never has oddly. He doesn’t look like me either.
Giovanni had a career, a family, lots of vacations and one big hobby, riding motorcycles. He told me a few weeks ago he was going to ride the Balkans with his neighbor and I heard in the words the unspoken memories of us on two wheels. Since my accident I have sworn off motorcycles and riding in his car together was not the same I’ll admit.
You and your camera he used to say. You’re like a Japanese tourist. They’ll make good memories I said never expecting it to be so soon.
I’d take a couple of weeks in summer and rent or borrow a BMW and we rode all over Italy stopping to eat and talk or for him to smoke and talk. He couldn’t break the habit, the cardiologist had to smoke.
He hated the internet and preferred to speak in person so I relied on Eleanora’s posts to substitute for news from him directly.
He loved his work and he took me around his hospital ward to meet his cardiology crew. And on his days off he napped.
A year ago we spent some days together and we talked more profoundly than we had ever before and he gave me insights into my harrowed childhood that I spent months thinking about and trying to understand. I thought it was a start to our old age relationship reviewing the crap of our youth but instead I guess it was goodbye.
It was bizarre but everywhere we went within a radius of his studio in Terni he would get flagged down by grateful patients still alive thanks to him. Here in Spoleto last year:
Put the camera down and get riding.
The devoted father.
