Closing Time

Italians don’t let go of summer easily.

It’s hard to blame them. It is in so many ways the quintessential Italian season, a collage of postcards pinned to the wall: sunflowers, sea, tomatoes on the vine, tourists taking photos of their spritz. Who wouldn’t hold on to it all as long as possible?

When we lived in New York, the boundaries were much more clear. Labor Day drew a line in the sand so to speak, beyond which summer Fridays perished, the linen went back in the closet, and the street outside our apartment was once again filled with tartan-clad private school kids with backpacks the size of a plumber’s tool kit. It wasn’t so much that autumn hung romantically in the air. It descended like a guillotine. Now it was time to go back to work.

Meanwhile, in Rome the summer lingers like guests at the end of a dinner party, with everyone standing on the corner till one in the morning saying goodnight. For most of September, I kept waiting for the locals to come back to the gym, the seagulls to take their customary spot atop Bernini’s statues on the Ponte Sant’Angelo, and the blue-suited politicos and lawyers to be holding court around Palazzo Montecitorio.

But even by mid-month, tourists still took up most of the tables at Caffè Ciampini, the gym regulars were nowhere to be seen and one lone seagull, like a sentry left behind to hold the fort, was left to patrol the skies above the Vatican. Even our downstairs neighbor, who left in June for her home in Porto Ercole, had yet to come back.

Where was everyone?

In the countryside, the farmers were at work: grapes had already been crushed and a new vintage was on the road to maturity; the olives had been combed from the trees. In the area of Le Marche where we have our home, this year’s olive crop ended in disaster. A one-two punch of fruit flies and fungus left the olives shriveled on the tree, looking more like dried nuts. If spring is the season of Hope and summer is pure Pleasure, then fall is the season of Judgment, when even baseball’s boys of summer must step up to the crucible of the World Series.

I understand this “sharp slap of reality” aspect of autumn all too well, because I have a late September birthday. And as the trips around the sun have now accelerated to a Formula One pace, I also understand the desire to escape that judgment for as long as possible, to take refuge in the soft warmth of late summer until there’s no choice but to face the cold hard truth. So it was that C and I found ourselves at the Gallia Palace in Punta Ala along the coast of Tuscany on the last weekend of September, forsaking fall foliage for tennis and sand between our toes and spaghetti alle vongole.

Here perhaps was the solution to the mystery of Italy’s missing city dwellers. Not that they were all in Punta Ala, hiding under a green canopy of Mediterranean pines. But as the resort begin to fill up on Friday afternoon, it was clear that the Romans, Milanese and Florentines who could manage it were still grabbing weekends at their beach of choice or at country homes, clinging to their August routine even if the sun was insisting on retiring well before the close of aperitvo.

With its mod, midcentury design, the Gallia Palace has the ambience of a country club circa 1975. People there speak softly, glide smoothly across the stone floors in their suede driving mocs, and swim effortlessly out to platforms floating in the Tyrrhenian sea, where they lounge like subjects of a Slim Aarons photo. Everyone at the beach club seems to know one another. It’s a hypnotically luxurious life, even from the outside looking in. So much so that we never heard the clock ticking toward the party’s end.

On Saturday evening, the resort hosted a special dinner at the beach club, but C and I opted to head into the town of Castiglione della Pescaia instead. When we got back, most guests were still working through the remains of the grand buffet, and we settled into the half-empty bar for a nightcap. As someone crooned “Sapore di Sale” from the piano in the corner, we toasted a summer that already felt like a memory.

So we shouldn’t have been surprised when the pianist announced that his next song would be his last of the season. Apparently, after check-out on Sunday morning, the hotel would be closed until May. Sometimes the only way to get people to go home is to shut the whole place down.

If you don’t work in it, you can forget that much of Italy’s hospitality industry is still a seasonal business. From Tuscany to the Amalfi Coast and Sicily, many of the iconic properties pull their shutters closed for at least six months every year. It happens in the United States as well, but most American resorts have found ways to keep things going through the offseason: arts festivals, conventions, wellness retreats and themed weekends. Italians would rather just give it a rest, or at least take a change of scenery.

The final song of the summer of 2025 was Michael Bublé’s “Home”, but when the pianist came over afterward to chat, it turns out he wasn’t going home at all. He was journeying on to his winter gig in Brazil, where his endless summer would continue unabated. He had a professional musician’s ambivalence about the whole transition, neither excited to go nor sad to leave. The sun is always shining somewhere he seemed to say. If you keep moving, you’ll find your place in it.

At breakfast the next morning, the waiters were busy saying goodbye not only to the guests but also to one another; the tennis pro confirmed that he was finished for the year and going to visit family in Egypt. Only the proprietor, Andrea Ansaldi, grandson of the founding family, would be staying on. This, he explained, was in some ways the most important time of the year: a period to make repairs, improvements, and plans for the future.

It’s a good approach to autumn I suppose. These months can be a bit melancholy, but they’re also a chance to look ahead. Best to go cold turkey. Close up the beach umbrellas, cut down the sunflowers, leave the dried-up olives on the ground. It’s time to start something new. Or maybe go to Brazil.

The weekend before our visit to Punta Ala, we stayed with good friends at their home in Milan. Their two teenage daughters—incandescent lights we’ve been tracking since middle school— had left just weeks before, off to college in Boston. In the apartment, the rooms of the girls were intact, ready at any moment for their return. But now the cheerful spaces had the stillness of a chapter closed. Summer was over. Soon our friends would be heading to New England for Parents Weekend.

     Closing time                           
     Every new beginning 
     comes from some other beginning’s end.                                  

* “Closing Time”, recorded by Semisonic; written by Dan Wilson, published by WB Music Corp./Semidelicious Music (ASCAP) WB Music Corp/El Good Enough Music (ASCAP)