Where It All Goes Down
An Italian Seaside Town on a Rainy Day
This story is set in a small, coastal Italian village. This town may have been familiar to Hemingway, as he was stationed in Italy during World War I. The Great War happens to be tremendously present in this story, too. Remember the War Monument in the public garden? It's one of the things the wife sees from her perch at the window.
If you've ever been to Europe, you may have noticed that these sorts of monuments are in pretty much every town, commemorating the citizens of that particular town who were lost to the violence. The fact that the story was written in 1925 hints to us that the story must take place pretty near 1918, the year the war ended.
The sheer scope of World War I's tragedy and destruction across Europe was immense and unprecedented. It wiped out nearly an entire generation of young men and left the landscape scarred with trenches, craters from bombs, and half-populated towns. The fact that the war was over, however, also meant a period of relief and celebration amid the mourning. In the opening paragraph, Hemingway juxtaposes the painters and colors in the public garden with the war memorial. This is a pretty good representation of the dueling sorrow and celebration in the years following the armistice. The town in the story is on the seaside, too, which suggests it's as a place for vacationers, for people wanting to get away and forget.
Still, Hemingway doesn't set this story on your typical sunny day on vacation. The relentless rain and the way it envelops the whole scene—gardens, sea, square—conveys a feeling of imprisonment. No one's going out, there's no moving around, no distraction. Rainy days in vacation towns also have a more disappointing feeling to them than rainy days elsewhere. It sort of hints that things aren't what they're supposed to be, or they're not what people hoped for when they set out on holiday. Hm…sound at all similar to a certain marriage in this story?