Who knows whether, if I had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt that bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one's own latent greatness

After being involved in a serious car accident he was brought into hospital at Motta di Livenza where his health rapidly failed. As he reveals in his memoirs each time he had given up smoking with the iron resolve that this would be the "ultima sigaretta!!" he experienced the exhilarating feeling that he was now beginning life over without the burden of his old habits and mistakes. Svevo was a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of the First World War.