I was already halfway across the bridge when I realized I had forgotten lunch again. The Arno slid past beneath me, the color of oversteeped tea, and my stomach made a sound like distant traffic. The city smelled of yeast and exhaust. It was almost one o’clock. Somewhere behind the facades, Florentines were spearing fusilli, tearing bread. I tightened my scarf and kept walking. Hunger, in my line of work, was a professional liability.
The Institute for the Study of Appetite occupied the third and fourth floors of an otherwise respectable insurance building near Santa Maria Novella. Our brass plaque downstairs was modest and misleading:
Centro Studi sulla Sazietà
Center for the Study of Satiety
Satiety, not appetite. The board had insisted. Research councils are suspicious of hunger, but they will fund the management of it.
Inside, the elevator smelled faintly of boiled wool and disinfectant. I could tell, by the oily sheen on the buttons, which floors belonged to those who ate at their desks, those who lunched outside, and those who lived, as I did, in a sort of calendar of perpetual postponement.
On the fourth floor, our corridor still bore the ghost outline of its previous tenant’s sign: Consorzio per la Bonifica Arno. Flood management. The building had simply traded one kind of overflowing for another.
I unlocked my office. The room was too long for its width, like a shoe box tipped on its side. One narrow window, one desk, and shelves stacked with binders labeled:
- CASE 1–49: Ordinarie
- CASE 50–88: Patologiche
- CASE 89–104: Eccezioni
The Institute’s work was simple in theory: we studied people who could not feel full. Congenital leptin deficiencies, hypothalamic lesions, obscure syndromes with long, hyphenated names. My job was even simpler. I interviewed the subjects. I measured their intake, their reported hunger, the impossible curve of their desire.
“Dr. Marino,” people liked to say—friends, my sister in her loud Florentine kitchen, the baker downstairs—“your work must make you never want to eat again.”
The opposite was true. The more I listened to appetites without limit, the more I wanted something modest and finite: a single perfect pear, a bowl of beans, an afternoon in which the wanting stopped for ten blessed minutes. I did not tell them that. It would sound ungrateful, in a country where appetite is a patriotic duty.
On my desk, a folder awaited: CASE 103 – MARCHESI, PIETRO. New admission. Age thirty-three. Secondary teacher of mathematics. Referred by the Ospedale Careggi, Endocrinology. Chief complaint: “Non mi sazio mai.” I am never sated.
Underneath the folder, wrapped in brown paper, was the other object that had been delivered that morning: a parcel from Trieste. No return address, just a careful hand in blue ink. It was the third such package in as many months. I slid it aside. Work first.
I opened the Marchesi folder, took out the intake form, and circled the time. 13:00. I had one hour to prepare, and nothing in my stomach but coffee and the ghost of a biscuit.
I made a note on a yellow pad: Measure your own hunger after the session. It was a pointless directive. I had been trying, for years, to separate my appetite from the Institute’s, like twin vines grown around the same trellis. It was not clear whose roots were whose anymore.
I. THE PATIENT
Pietro arrived early. Patients who cannot stop eating often do. They are used to living their lives ahead of the clock: breakfast before the sun, lunch at eleven, dinner at five, secret meals in the spaces between—and after.
He was thin, which surprised me. Not the skeletal cachexia of certain endocrine disorders, but the wiry leanness of an inland cyclist. His hairline had begun its inevitable retreat, leaving him with the worried forehead of a man who has been asked too many times to solve for x.
“Professor Marchesi?” I said, offering my hand.
“Just Pietro,” he said. His palm was dry, quick. He sat in the chair opposite my desk, took in the room’s barrenness with a single sweep of his eyes, and nodded as if it confirmed something he had already suspected.
We began with the standard questions.
“How long have you felt this… inability to be sated?”
He thought, then shrugged. “Since always, I think. My mother said I was a ‘bottomless pit’ when I was a boy. But it became… worse… three years ago. Around when my father died.”
“Worse in what sense?”
He frowned. “The hunger stopped caring what I put in it.”
He spoke precisely, like a man used to defining terms in front of blackboards.
“At first, I thought it was grief. You know, the way some people eat when they are sad. But this is not that. The feeling here—” he touched his chest, not his stomach— “is not sadness. It is… how do you say… vacancy. A room that insists on being filled.”
“What do you eat now, on a typical day?” I asked.
He pulled a folded sheet from his pocket, laid it on the desk. Columns. Times. Quantities. Food diaries are usually approximate and apologetic. His was an audit.
07:15 – four slices bread, jam, two yogurts, six espressos
10:00 – two cornetti, one tramezzino, chocolate bar
13:00 – canteen meal (full plate pasta, meat, 1/2 loaf bread, fruit), two beers
15:30 – three packets crackers, nuts, fizzy drink
18:00 – pizza (entire), arancini (two), beer
22:00 – leftovers, cheese, bread, wine
Night – wakes twice; biscuits, cereal, whatever is there
“You’re not… gaining weight?” I said, already knowing from his chart that he was not.
He shook his head. “My doctor says I am metabolizing like a furnace. He says it is my nerves.” He smiled, a brief, embarrassed flash. “I would like to believe I am just anxious. Anxiety feels like something you can fix. This does not.”
“When do you feel the hunger?” I asked.
He hesitated. “When do I not?”
We spoke for an hour. I asked about his childhood, his work, his father’s death. He told me about growing up over his parents’ bakery in Grosseto, the yeast in the walls, the way he used to sneak dough and eat it raw until his mother slapped his hands. He told me about teaching algebra to sullen thirteen-year-olds who ate chips in class, about how the smell of their snacks made him dizzy.
“It is not just food,” he admitted, near the end. “It is… more of everything. When I finish a book, I am already reaching for the next. I cannot stop marking extra homework, even when my eyes hurt. I cannot end a conversation even when it is boring. I collect things I do not need. Notes. Receipts. People’s stories. If there is a bowl of olives at a bar, I must empty it. I do not want the olives. I want the feeling of the bottom, the moment when the thing becomes finished. Except”—he looked at his hands—“it never does. It is as if my appetite and my satisfaction live in different apartments and keep missing each other on the stairs.”
I wrote: Appetite generalized beyond food. Compulsion toward completion, never experienced as complete.
He watched me write. “You probably think it is pathological,” he said lightly.
“I think it is exhausting,” I said, before I could censor myself.
He smiled, relieved by the honesty.
“Do you feel full right now?” I asked.
He glanced at the clock. “On the way here, I ate four sandwiches and three bananas at the station kiosks.”
“And now?”
He considered. “Empty,” he said. “Very pleasantly empty. Like the first half-second after a bell stops ringing. But it will fade. It always fades.”
I made a notation. We scheduled a follow-up. He stood, thanked me, and left with the quick step of a man in search of his next coffee.
When the door closed, I put my head in my hands. My own stomach made a small, petulant sound. I ignored it. The hunger that mattered was not the one under my ribs, but the one in the binders.
II. THE PARCELS
Only then did I remember the package from Trieste.
The first parcel had arrived in January, a month when the Institute’s radiators clanked like rheumatic knees and our funding renewal paperwork weighed more than any of our case files. Hand-printed label, no sender. Inside: a thin notebook, squared paper, the kind favored by Italian schoolchildren and German engineers.
On the first page, in neat block letters, a sentence:
I have discovered that appetites leave shadows.
The rest of the notebook was filled, line after line, with descriptions of meals never eaten. Breakfasts refused, dinners declined, coffees deliberately left unpoured. Opposite each description was a notation of the hunger that had followed: its intensity, its duration, its character.
- Refused maritozzo offered by colleague. Hunger intensity moderate, accompanied by pride. Shadow lasted 2 hours 12 minutes.
- Declined invitation to second glass of wine. Hunger mild, tinged with regret. Shadow: 47 minutes, disappeared after phone call with sister.
- Did not read the news. Appetite for outrage thwarted. Shadow strangely bright, lasted all day; worked without distraction.
No name, no dates, no coordinates. Just a careful taxonomy of renunciations.
The second parcel, in February, contained a similar notebook, but the refusals had grown stranger: opportunities for promotion declined, romantic advances sidestepped, chances to humiliate enemies left unused. The shadows lengthened. The hunger described had nothing to do with food.
I had read both notebooks in a single sitting, heart beating in my ears, the way a younger man might read a novel smuggled from a banned list. I, who had spent my life measuring the effects of consumption, had never considered documenting the shadows of what was not consumed.
Now, in March, I unwrapped the third parcel with hands already impatient.
Inside: not a notebook, but a stack of folded A4 sheets held together with a brass fastener. On the top page, in the same careful hand:
EXPERIMENT 3: INVERSION
Objective: To test whether insatiable appetites can be diverted from objects to their own shadows.
My throat tightened.
The pages described a series of controlled experiments conducted—if the addresses scrawled in the margins could be believed—in Trieste, Turin, Udine, smaller towns in the Friuli borderlands. Our anonymous experimenter had begun attending buffets, receptions, funerals, office parties, taking copious notes. In each setting, he would identify the hungriest person in the room—not by plate, but by gaze—and position himself within their orbit.
Subject: Female, mid-50s, legal secretary (self-described), ravenous eyes. Observed devouring prosciutto, cheese, gossip. Stands always near table or loudest circle.
Intervention: Placed myself between subject and platters; engaged her in conversation about her grandchildren. Verbally fed her details (name, age, school). Monitored hands: she did not reach for more food while speaking. Appetite appeared temporarily satisfied by attention. Shadow noted: when conversation ended, she attacked olives with almost violent focus.
Another:
Subject: Male, ~40, junior partner, watches female colleague’s glass. Sexual appetite obvious. Intervention: Asked him to describe his first case, in detail. He spoke for 20 minutes. Appetite diverted into narrative. Upon release, he seemed… calmer. Shadow: sent two restrained emails instead of one obscene one.
The experiments grew bolder. In a hospital waiting room, the experimenter “fed” a man’s political rage by inviting him to list every injustice of the last government, then watched as the man’s craving for vending-machine snacks visibly abated. In a church vestibule, he diverted an old woman’s need to relive her husband’s death into a discussion of organ stops and incense, observing how her appetite for confession and her appetite for sugar appeared to run on the same current.
In the margin, a note:
It seems possible that the objects we use to feed our hungers—food, sex, news, purchases—are less important than the act of wanting itself. Perhaps the true insatiable appetite is for expansion: of story, of self, of sensation. The stomach is merely the most honest filing-cabinet.
At the bottom of the last page, two lines:
If this interests you, come hungry.
P.
No address. Just a date—one week from today—and a time: 19:30.
On the back of the last sheet, in smaller script, a place: Bar Il Confine, Gorizia.
The Border.
Gorizia is a town cleaved by history. Italy on one side, Slovenia on the other. Once a single organism, split, reunited, half-heartedly stitched. A place where appetites for nation, empire, language, territory have left visible scars on the facades.
I reread the note. The initial—P.—sat on the page like a baited hook.
“Come hungry,” he had written.
My stomach answered before my brain did.
III. THE BORDER BAR
The train to Gorizia left Santa Maria Novella at 14:05, which meant I had to leave the Institute at lunch. I left a note on my office door: FIELD VISIT. It was not entirely untrue.
On the train, I bought nothing from the trolley. A small experiment. As the countryside unfurled—industrial outskirts, then vineyards, then the flat, resigned fields of Emilia-Romagna—the familiar emptiness spread through my torso. I observed it the way I would log a patient’s symptom: slightly hollow, with edges of irritability. Hunger’s shadow was not subtle. It amplified every stray smell, every wrapper rustle from neighboring seats. The boy across the aisle tore open a packet of crisps, and the sound was like paper under a match.
At Mestre the sky flattened. At Udine the language on the announcements doubled. At Gorizia, I stepped onto the platform and smelled wet stone and cigarettes.
Bar Il Confine straddled no visible line; it was simply a long, low room with a zinc counter, a line of cloudy bottles, and a TV muttering in the corner. A handful of men bent over their spritzes, jaws working. The light had the greenish cast of places that forget daylight exists.
He was at a corner table, his back to the wall, facing the door. Of course he was. A man who measures appetites learns to watch entrances.
“Dottor Marino,” he said, standing as I approached.
He was older than I had expected. Sixty, perhaps, or a well-preserved seventy. Silver hair, cut without vanity. His eyes were dark and dry, like those of someone who has cried all he intends to. He wore a jacket of the sort that had been fashionable for professors in the seventies and had never quite left Italian universities: brown corduroy, patched at the elbows as a joke that had become functional.
“You’re P.,” I said, unnecessarily.
He smiled. “I am Paolo, yes. Sit. You look… underfed.”
“I skipped lunch,” I said. “On purpose.”
“Good.” He signaled the barman. “Two panini, three types of salumi, un piatto di formaggi. And bread they did not cut thin, please. We are studying appetite, not manners.”
The platters arrived with indecent speed. The smells rose: fat, salt, yeast. My throat tightened.
“We should bless the food,” Paolo said mildly. “We are, after all, conducting a liturgy.”
I laughed, then stopped when I saw he was half-serious.
Instead of bowing his head, he lifted his hands.
“Observe,” he said. “Three, no, four kinds of hunger in this room. That man—” he indicated a thin man at the bar, tapping ash into a saucer— “craves nicotine and the sight of the lottery numbers on the television. That woman near the door is ravenous for someone to ask about her bad knee; you can see it in the way she adjusts her stocking, inviting comment. The boy with the crisps wants not the crisps but to delay going home. And you”—he turned to me—“are hungry for understanding. You have brought your professional appetite with you, like a packed lunch.”
He tore a piece of bread, dipped it in oil, chewed thoughtfully.
“I read your Institute’s papers,” he said. “There is always a graph. The x-axis is time, the y-axis is hunger. It rises, falls, rises, falls. A manageable tide. You speak of hormones, signaling, satiety. I admire the precision. But tell me”—he wiped a crumb from his lip—“where on your graph do you place the appetite that does not want food, but more hunger? The desire not for satisfaction, but for the ache itself?”
“There is no receptor for that,” I said. “We cannot measure what we cannot define.”
“Ah, but we can.” He pushed a notebook toward me—the same squared paper, the same careful hand. “We can measure by shadow. By what the appetite does to the person who carries it.”
On the open page, in his neat, dispassionate script:
Subject: Self.
Intervention: One week of radical refusal. No extra portions, no sugar, no impulse purchases, no news, no unnecessary conversations, no pornography, no fantasies of past or future.
Result: Initial craving unbearable, like ants under the skin. By day three, physical hunger receded into a clean ache; other appetites multiplied, fought, turned on each other. By day five, I began to feel that my body was full not of emptiness, but of room.
Shadow: still ongoing. The desire to want has not abated. It has simply begun to notice itself.
“You see,” Paolo said gently, as if explaining fractions to a child, “an insatiable appetite is like an empire. It never expands to be full. It expands to keep expanding. If it cannot annex bread, it annexes attention; if not attention, outrage; if not outrage, self-hatred. The object changes. The motion does not.”
“And your solution is… refusal?” I asked, hearing the skepticism in my own voice.
“Not solution,” he said. “Experiment. I am an old man, Dottore. I do not have solutions. I have modifications.”
He watched me reach for a slice of salami, watched the way I hesitated, then took two.
“Tell me,” he said. “When you interview your patients, do you ever feel you are stealing from them?”
“Stealing?” I said.
“Their hunger,” he said. “You take it, you pin it to a page, you show it to your colleagues. You feed your own appetite for understanding with their inability to be full. Does it ever seem… cannibalistic?”
The slice of salami on my tongue turned to ash.
“I measure,” I said. “I do not feed.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Of course. And I write notebooks that are not diaries.”
We ate in silence for a moment. The bar buzzed softly around us: spoons against porcelain, football arguing from the TV, someone’s laugh snagging on a word.
“Why did you write to me?” I asked finally.
“Because you skipped lunch on purpose,” he said. “And because you came.”
He offered nothing more. The omission was its own notation.
“And Uz?” I said, before I could stop myself.
He laughed, delighted. “Ah, so you have read the Trieste notebooks carefully. Good. Yes, Uz, Job, all that. The land where appetites are tested. I am not religious, Dottore. I have no interest in whether God exists. I have interest in whether appetite does. So I built my own Book of Job. I refused things. I took notes. I watched what the refusal did to my desire.”
He tapped the notebook.
“I discovered that every time I said no to one object—food, sex, conversation—the appetite flowed, like diverted water, into another channel. The only times it did not were when I did something very small for someone else without telling anyone. A favor so minor it could not be narrated. The appetite did not know where to attach. For a moment, it hung in the air, confused. That confusion was the only satiety I have ever known.”
He broke off a piece of his sandwich, placed it on my plate.
“You came hungry,” he said. “Good. Now, what will you leave hungry?”
I thought of Pietro, circling his school canteen, his students’ chips, his father’s bakery. I thought of my own binders, my own craving for another case, another graph. I thought of the train ticket in my pocket, paid for with the Institute’s petty cash.
“I will leave the rest of this bread,” I said, pushing the basket away. “And the last question I wanted to ask.”
“Which was?” he asked, amused.
“If you are sick,” I said. “If this—” I gestured to the notebooks, the refusals, the experiment bar— “is simply another appetite, dressing itself as theory. If your hunger is to be the man who understands hunger.”
He smiled, slow and tired.
“Of course I am sick,” he said. “To spend one’s life staring at appetite is like spending it staring at the sun. It burns. You, too, are sick. We have chosen an illness of measurement. It is better, perhaps, than some others. Not better than all.”
He raised his glass.
“To insatiability,” he said. “May it someday be bored with us and move on.”
We drank. The wine was cheap and perfect. My stomach, full enough to stop muttering but not enough to sing, settled into its usual, low complaint.
On the train home, I took out my own notebook. For the first time, I did not write about a patient. I wrote:
Refused to ask Paolo how his experiments will end. Appetite for certainty thwarted. Shadow: still forming.
Then, after a moment’s hesitation, another line:
Hunger: mine.
For once, I did not try to quantify it further. I let it be what it was: an empire without borders.
Outside the window, somewhere between Gorizia and Udine, fields slid past in the dark.
□
A Note About the Typeface.
The story is set in Garamond, which is a near homophone for ‘gourmand’, which seemed appropriate.