In the room were five people: a woman in her forties, Franca Castaldi; her father; her lawyer, Dottor Chiesa; and another lawyer representing Signora Lavinia Agosti, the owner of an apartment on the third floor of a building from the early 1930s, in the Parioli district of Rome. There was some rather forced conversation about the view of the Tiber from the window, the level of the Tiber during the current drought, and historical levels of the Tiber. Signora Agosti’s lawyer recalled that in his very early childhood the river had overflowed its banks. “It must have been ’37,” he said. “I wasn’t scared at all. My grandfather had a shop near the Ghetto, and it was flooded, and then there was ice. My grandfather was devastated, but I went skating.”

“A long time ago,” said Dottor Chiesa, to fill the awkward silence.

“Oh, yes.”

Franca was nervous; she bobbed her head and touched her fingers to each other as if she held a rosary, but the others didn’t notice. After what seemed to her like half an hour, the notary burst into the room with a lightning bolt of energy, shaking the hands of all present with a grip that could have broken brittle bones. His assistant brought copies of the contract for everyone, and he himself sat down and began racing through it, although he did invite the others to stop him if they had any questions.

The lawyer for Signora Agosti didn’t bother to follow along on his copy. Instead he half-smiled, as if he knew all the stipulations by heart. This was not actually the case. He’d done some nuda proprietà—“bare ownership”—contracts years ago. They were no longer in favor, and he wasn’t terribly clear on the new rules, but it wasn’t in his nature to demonstrate the slightest curiosity about the law, or about anything for that matter, so he just looked out the window.

In contrast, Dottor Chiesa was fully engaged, tracing the words on the page with his index finger while the notary hurtled along like a high-speed train. There were various taxes and stamps on top of the costs for the lawyers’ and notary’s services. Signora Agosti’s age was stipulated as eighty-seven years, four months, and three days. An affidavit from her doctor confirmed that she suffered from moderate arthritis, osteoporosis, occasional incontinence, atrial fibrillation, and a minor stroke that had occurred last year, from which she had recovered nearly completely. She also exhibited signs of age-appropriate, non-Alzheimer’s-related memory loss.

After the document was read, the notary paused for a breath and then asked for signatures. Dottor Chiesa nodded to Franca to indicate that all was in good order. If pressed, he would have had to admit he wasn’t certain, because it had all gone too fast for him. But there was no reason to think all wasn’t in good order.

The lawyer for the Signora signed on her behalf.

The notary collected a series of assegni circolari, some of them for five thousand euros (the limit) and others for smaller sums. A few of these were to be held in escrow until the transfer of the property, the atto, which would take place after the death of the Signora. More bone-breaking handshakes.

The whole procedure took less than an hour, and afterward Franca stood on the sidewalk with her father and Dottor Chiesa, in front of the building on the Lungotevere Farnesina. It was late fall, but it might have been summer, the days were so hot. The traffic flowed, but slowly, with the usual orchestra of car horns and the revving of motorbikes.

Franca was overcome with emotion. Her head felt light, so she leaned her elbow and then her whole arm against a stone seashell carved on the building’s façade.

“Well,” said Dottor Chiesa, “that’s all that has to be done for now. I’ll file the papers, and you should receive your copy with the stamps within ninety days. If there are any changes…I mean if she should…before that period…you’ll still need to wait another fifteen days before possession. As the notary said.”

“Understood,” said Franca’s father.

Franca fumbled with her purse, mumbling something about getting an aperitivo, but her father cut her off, saying he wanted to get home.

It would be a night like any other, then. Franca would cook while her father sat in the living room, watching TV with the volume so high that the speakers distorted the sound. He would emit a series of noises between coughing, gasping for air, snorting, and groaning. He was never truly quiet, never absolutely still. They would eat, and then, as she did the dishes, he would fall asleep, slumped in a chair with the TV still blasting. She wouldn’t dare to turn it off right away, since that would only jolt him awake and he would growl at her. After an hour or so he would shuffle off to bed.

Even then, Franca couldn’t watch TV herself because it would disturb him, and there would be nothing on in any case. Instead she usually played games on her laptop. Sometimes she treated herself to a magazine, though they were nothing more than overpriced collections of glossy advertisements, interrupted by brief articles touting the extraordinary benefits of the same products in the advertisements. In the past, Franca had often combed through real-estate pamphlets that she collected from wire stands in front of local agencies. No more need for that, she realized.

A few years earlier, her father had redrawn his will by hand—a hand that shook so that the elegant cursive he’d been justly proud of since childhood seemed unrecognizably weak. This decline of control, this old man’s writing, had caused a wave of sadness in Franca, an anticipatory grief. There would be no going back, she realized. The document was legible. All in good order, per Italian law. Signor Castaldi would leave the family apartment in the Prati neighborhood, purchased by his parents after the war when he was just an infant, to his younger daughter, Valentina, and her son, Michele—not to Franca.

Getting to that point hadn’t been easy for anybody.

“When I’m gone,” Signor Castaldi used to say, “I don’t see why Franca can’t stay here. With you. She’s your sister, Michele’s aunt.” (He might as well have said “old maid.”) “I don’t see why she can’t stay in her room.”

“No, Papa,” Valentina had said on various occasions, trying to explain. “It doesn’t work that way anymore. We’re not living in the nineteenth century. Franca needs her independence. And so do we.”

“What independence? She’s your sister. Michele’s aunt.”

In the end, he gave up. An expert came and calculated the current value of the apartment, and Franca’s father and sister lent her part of her half to buy the nuda proprietà in the Parioli. Technically, as of today, Franca was the owner of the apartment and Signora Agosti the “occupant”—but she wasn’t a tenant in the usual sense. The signora couldn’t be removed, though was obligated, as per a codicil in the contract, to maintain the apartment in good shape and to pay all of the expenses except in case of unforeseen or extraordinary circumstances, as stipulated in the Ministerial Decree and in Chapter 1, Subheading V of the Third Book of the Civil Code.

Franca had watched a few YouTube videos on the subject before signing the contract. Then the algorithm had directed her to another video in Italian about elder hardware that could be installed in a bathtub to help you keep your balance, and then another, in English, about reverse mortgages in the United States. An investigative reporter from a left-leaning website explained that banks can buy the home of a retiree, who might or might not lose all rights to inhabit the property. Reverse mortgages were hawked on daytime television by B-list Republican celebrities. Infomercials made them sound like a kindly gesture to put cash in the pockets of people living out their golden years, when in fact it was private equity all the way down, said the reporter. None of this registered particularly with Franca.

For several years, she had been obsessed with researching apartments. As a child, she had dreamed of inhabiting her own tall tower, imagining herself with very long red hair, like Rapunzel. As an adolescent, she had dreamed of an American ranch-style house, with a yard and a dog that she would name Fufi. As a frustrated and irritable college student, she had dreamed of a single, cement-block room in San Lorenzo, along the train tracks. All she had thought she needed then was a box with a roof over her head, like in the neorealist film The Roof. Sometimes she’d dreamed about a futuristic apartment in a skyscraper, with her own heliport.

When it became clear that her father had crossed the threshold between pensioner and elderly man, she became serious about her search. She didn’t have enough savings for anything in central Rome, even for a monolocale­—that was obvious—unless a miracle happened and someone didn’t know the market or simply wanted to move and didn’t care (but then, people with money—people with enough money to own apartments—usually did care and did know the market).

So she’d have to move far from the city center to buy her own place—to the south or the east. But that would be a terrible investment, her father insisted, and dangerous. In his mind criminals, immigrants, and delinquents roamed the streets of the Roman “periphery” waiting to prey on lone women like Franca. He repeated this whenever the opportunity arose, each time as if it were the first.

Nor would he hear of a mortgage. In his mind, mortgages were a form of usury or scams perpetrated by organized crime.

“No, Papa,” Valentina had insisted during a Sunday lunch, “it’s totally normal. You get it through a legitimate bank. We’re not in the Middle Ages, you know.”

“She’ll be in debt. I don’t want my daughter to owe money.”

There was no convincing him, and, in any case, without a steady paycheck Franca wouldn’t qualify for a mortgage.

She might have moved to one of those small towns offering houses for one euro, but her father would never have accepted that either. And for all that the prospect seemed enticing, Franca understood, from instinct if not from experience, that those one-euro towns were filled with old people who had been abandoned by their children in the great “brain drain.” The old women would peer at you through sheer curtains as you passed by, while the old men played cards and smoked and drank coffee, laced with grappa in the north or anise in the south. And then, what would you do all day and night, once you’d finished fixing up your home?

From time to time Franca entered a real-estate agency. Inevitably, if the agents could even be bothered to look up from their desks—even before they looked up from their desks—they wanted to know her budget. Not “Welcome to our agency. What kind of living solution do you dream about?” Not even “Hello, would you like to browse through our available apartments?” And certainly not “How are you? Tell us about yourself so we can keep an eye open for something that will suit you.” Just the cold and formal “Mi dica! What’s your budget?” And then “Next time come with a check, and we’ll see what we can do.”

Most of the real-estate agents were unsympathetic when they heard that she had virtually nothing, but once Franca had found a gentle man who kept shaking his head. “That’s not much, I’m afraid,” he’d sighed. “There are plenty of nice apartments around Rome, plenty of inventory, but no one is willing to lower the price.” She had never heard back from this sympathetic, gentle man who had taken down her number just in case a seller became desperate.

Her father had only minimal interest in Franca’s future apartment itself. Whether the floors were wood or marble or terracotta, whether the water heater would need to be replaced, whether the façade would need to be re-stuccoed within five years—none of this interested him. Signor Castaldi cared only that, for the time being, his meals and his routine would continue undisturbed. And he insisted, naturally, that Franca’s apartment had to be—had to seem—suitable for a woman. A single woman.

Once Franca had seen an apartment listed for auction between Pigneto and Tor Pignattara, two neighborhoods on the rise, though her father said that even Cairo compared favorably to them, in the number of beggars and addicts and the amount of garbage strewn on the streets. There was no point in explaining gentrification to him. It wasn’t that he thought it was a bad thing—at least that might have led to a discussion—it was that he was convinced it didn’t happen. It simply didn’t exist. Punto e basta.

Still, Franca had thought it was worth a try. The ad included three blurry black-and-white photos. The ceilings seemed higher than the usual. Two windows faced the street, reaching nearly from floor to ceiling. And the starting price was low enough that Franca had imagined she could buy it and fix it up to her taste. She pictured herself in a white smock, scraping off wallpaper on a stepladder while some pleasant music played in the background. Maybe Mozart.

But the number given in the ad was a landline, and it rang and rang. Franca let it ring thirty times before she decided to hang up. The next day she called Dottor Chiesa, but his secretary said he was away. For about forty-eight hours Franca had become fixated on the Pigneto apartment. While she was at work and waiting for something to do, she looked it up on Google Earth. She placed the little yellow man on the street nearby and had him walk as far around the neighborhood as possible, and then return to the entrance of “her” building. The street was wide and seemed quiet. It was empty, in the picture. Of course, it wasn’t an area of villas and green spaces, for the wealthy. And it wasn’t in the center, for aristocrats or tourists. It wasn’t anything, really, but it seemed right for Franca.

Finally, Dottor Chiesa returned her call. He didn’t trust auctions. They were complicated and required a lot of advance money, some of which might not be refundable. The photos in the ad might not have been taken in the apartment that was actually for sale. Even the address listed could have been indicative, at best. But since Franca had insisted, and given his long friendship with her dear departed mother, he had managed to reach the agency that had placed the ad—and they had said the tenant was facing eviction. An agent had tried to enter the apartment, but the tenant had barricaded the door and threatened violence. “That’s not a situation you want to get involved with,” said Dottor Chiesa. “It’s not for you. It’s not for a girl like you.”

It had taken several days before Franca could shift her mind away from the Pigneto ad. But now she had a new apartment to think about.

Franca’s bedroom in her father’s apartment was a long and narrow rectangle, with one window at the back made of composite glass bricks. The bricks let in some light, even if they were mostly opaque. A small dresser with a mirror gave a slight sense of width, but there was no getting around the fact that this room had been built for sleeping and nothing else. A chambre de bonne. There was a third bedroom in the apartment, the one she and her sister had shared when they were young. It was large and airy, but it now served as a storage room for things the family had acquired over the years. When she suggested once to her father that it would make sense to move these things to the smaller room, he had just grunted, “No need for that.” Franca didn’t dare to bring it up again.

Now it didn’t matter anymore. After signing the contract for Signora Agosti’s apartment, Franca spent a lot of time walking around the neighborhood of “her” new place. Hers, but not hers. She would circle the building and approach it from different angles, at first being careful to appear in a hurry so that no one would find her presence odd. Eventually she gave up that charade and simply loitered. There was no law against standing peacefully on the street and staring at a building, was there? She might be an architectural historian. A historian of modern Roman residential and vernacular architecture. Why not?

The building was divided into two parts. Below, it was painted white. Then there was a balustrade of small white columns, at the level of the second floor. The upper part was a yellowish-ochre hue, and the windows all had brown shutters. On the roof were several satellite dishes and antennas of varying heights, though in general the building appeared well-ordered. In the courtyard, partly visible from the side street, were three stone basins now filled with dry bushes. In the past, these basins had been connected to a water supply and held goldfish. In fact, a long time ago the city had given out fines to buildings that did not have fish, as part of an effort to keep mosquitoes under control, but no one thought about that anymore. At dawn sparrows congregated in the bushes, and if you were awake at that hour you would no doubt hear them chattering away.

The main doors were made of wood, with protruding bronze decorations that looked as if they belonged on a medieval fortress. Beside it was a plaque, also made of bronze, with the names of the residents and corresponding bells. Some of the names, including “Agosti,” were engraved on small metallic plates. Others had been written by hand on slips of paper and inserted into the proper slots on the plaque: short-term tenants or people who hadn’t bothered to request an engraved plate. Eight marble steps led from the entrance to the ground floor. Just beyond the stairs, a large wooden structure held the mailboxes, and beyond that was the elevator—the “cage” type, with a metallic shaft.

There were always one or two cars double-parked on the street, interrupting the flow of traffic, and another one or two parked on the sidewalk. Without this possibility, the building might have lost value, in Rome.

Franca’s apartment, like all those on the fourth and fifth floors, had a tiny, curved balcony. She couldn’t see into it from the street, only the underside. It was slightly larger than the typical “Juliet balcony,” large enough for a few plants and a tiny table and one chair, but not large enough to be called a terrace. “You should be really pleased to have a terrace,” Dottor Chiesa had told her. “If you ever want to sell, it will be a big selling point. Everyone in Rome wants a terrace.”

Sometimes now, when Franca was at work with nothing to do, she searched online for information about the Signora Agosti. Naturally a woman of her age wasn’t on social media. She had no digital footprint. All Franca found was the phone number and address of the building manager, but she already had those among her papers, stored in a plastic folder in a box under her bed. The street view of the building on Google Earth must have been a few years out of date, because it showed a large tree, maybe a chestnut, to the north of the building. Now the tree was no longer there; in its place was just an empty square of dirt.

Franca, forty-something, signs a contract for an apartment in one of the most prestigious areas of Rome. The price is well below market value, and she pays cash, thanks to an advance on her modest future inheritance. There’s only one catch: It’s a nuda proprietà, meaning that Franca can’t move in—she can’t leave her family home (or her elderly father’s constant wheezing), eat what she wants, listen to the radio when she wants, or even open the window to let in a breeze—until the former owner, now “the occupant,” an old woman with age-appropriate conditions—passes on to the next realm. Creative solutions are called for.

NUDA PROPRIETÀ sets the story of Franca against the background of two major pandemics, Italy’s gerontocracy and demographic collapse, and the city of Rome itself—stupendous and decrepit, filled with rats, mafia, and empty piazzas with magical fountains. The style is darkly comedic, drawing on the sparse prose of true-crime writers, but with a feminist touch. It’s a novel about waiting—an Italian editor compared it to Giorgio Bassani’s Desert of the Tartars, if that rings a bell.

I myself have been looking for an apartment—the perfect apartment?—in Rome for many years. But that’s the limit of “autofiction” in this novel. It’s not about me, and I am not Franca.