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Why they'd set the meetings up in Monfalcone he couldn't understand. True, it was closer to the site, and they'd put him in a charming hotel on the corniche -a long road virtually at the sea's edge, so gently curved it could almost be straight, right across the top of the Adriatic, all the way to Trieste. But the area appeared empty and spiritless at this time between seasons, not to say windy, and left him with little to do but look inward. No problem normally, he tended to enjoy his own company, but he was in one of those flat places in life, listless.

Perhaps it was just the eight days of negotiations. And the uncertain weather. Some days, advanced as the spring supposedly was -it was the twenty-fourth of May already -seemed to look back toward winter, others only tentatively toward summer, and none of them with much conviction, so that you didn’t really know what to do with them. Yesterday morning, from the hotel, he’d watched Robbie, proprietor of the trattoria next door, come out and look at the pale sunshine, roll back his awning with a long crank-handle, then bring just the one table onto the pavement, putting an umbrella into the centre but leaving it furled. An announcement that it was time for the Season to begin. Or perhaps just a plea. As yet, so far as he could tell, no one had sat down there. Maybe today Robbie'd be luckier. It was warmer, the warmest day so far. Emilio at Reception was saying that it was going to be the first real day of summer, twenty-six degrees. The first real day of summer: when was that? The solstice? Weeks away.
――David Brooks Conversation