The Summer I TOOK My Mom "HOME"

Whenever I tell people about the Last Trip Home I took to Italy with my 87-year-old mother and my older son last summer, everyone has the same response ("Awwww..."), which makes me feel like a fraud because I know they're imagining some gauzy scene. And to be fair, I'd tried to plan it that way.

- PILAR GUZMÁN

I'd been dreaming of a "homecoming" for my mom for some time, once the kids were old enough to feel the weight of their grandmother's origin story as a child-prodigy soprano.

I remember the first time I experienced my mother in her natural habitat, four decades earlier. On a hot day in her hometown of Pesaro, I'd watched her hop on a bike with a gelato in hand, speaking in her native tongue with a girlish informality I hardly recognized.

Looking back on it, I realize I had never seen her ride a bike or eat her own ice cream cone before or since. I imagined a similar ice cream cone scenario with my mother and son, whom I had always referred to as "the Swans" for their achingly sweet love connection. The plan was to drive from the airport straight to my mother's hometown in Le Marche, then make our way to Florence and Rome for final glimpses of the David and Piazza della Signoria, and the Colosseum and La Pietà, respectively. At the last minute, we had cut Venice, her favorite city on earth, from the list. Too many bridges, we all agreed, for her chronic back pain.

"Next time," my mom said, though I suspected there wouldn't be a next time.

When we arrived in Pesaro, a charming summertime seaside hamlet on the Adriatic Coast, it was unseasonably cold and rainy. We stayed with my 92-year-old uncle Edmondo, who, like my mother, was remarkably well-preserved, no doubt by genetics and a healthy dose of vanity. Technically, he is my mother's first cousin, though in some ways has always felt more familiar to me than either of her siblings.