Dacia Maraini’s memoir, The Ship for Kobe, features a series of recollections which weave her mother’s diaries written in 1939, when the family embarked for Kobe, Maraini’s own travels with Italian luminaries of the era, such as Fellini, Callas, Moravia, and Pasolini, and the profound experience of the concentration camp for anti-fascists in Nagoya, where the family was deported.