This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Some men have a midlife crisis. Francesco Marchese went to Puglia.
At fifty-eight, retired, and quietly certain that somewhere between the corner office and the car payment he lost the thread of himself, Francesco Marchese does something his careful, efficient life never prepared him for: nothing. Five weeks alone in his family’s ancestral stone house in southern Italy, with bad Italian, no plan, and the unsettling feeling that somewhere along the way he became very good at living someone else’s life.
What he finds there is Rio — the version of himself that never made it to the surface. A man who runs cliff paths above the Adriatic before breakfast. A man who dances the Tarantella until midnight and means it. A man who is, for the first time in a very long time, fully awake.
And what he discovers, in the olive groves and the village streets and the long conversations with a Pugliese guide who listens the way people used to listen, is that it is not too late. Not for any of it.
Stupido Turista is a novel about what it means to finally show up for your own life. About the version of yourself that waits, patient as an ancient olive tree, for you to come back and claim it.
For readers of Ann Patchett, Mary Beth Keane, and Fredrik Backman.