I liked the idea of starting the story of Lucy by the Sea with a rather bizarre image: ping-pong balls crashing into each other. In one passage of the novel, the protagonist recalls a film she saw at school as a girl, focusing in particular on the opening scene: many ping-pong balls bouncing against a blue background, colliding with each other, then separating and returning to their original positions, until they reach a moment of...
Family sagas have always been the genre that most resonates with me. There’s something about the chorus of voices, the interweaving of intertwining and intersecting stories and themes, that can overwhelm me like a raging river. I love losing myself in that powerful chaos, that emotional richness that only great family narratives can offer. The story of the Li family is one of them: it shocks and heals, just as any saga worthy of the...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “Now everything was different. Nothing was pre-established anymore, everything had to be redone.” Many people these days may have read “Confini di classe” (Feltrinelli, 2025), the small collection of essays by Lea Ypi, in which the author technically but passionately addresses the double knot that links the class question to that of citizenship. Reading “Libera”, her autobiographical novel published a few years ago, perhaps helps to understand how one can arrive at...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “And what could not be explained, not even by a fervent imagination, disturbed the necessary order.” This is not a book, but a meeting. First of all, the meeting of the author, Francesca Valente, with her friend and psychiatrist Luciano Sorrentino. Then it is the meeting with a topic, that of mental health, which always creates some problems for public attention: we act a bit like with the mad, we say “yes, yes, it’s...
“FRIDAY RE-VERSO” “All his cravings combine endlessly.” It’s hard to think of a heart that isn’t also a battle. Some are long and devastating, others small and petty, but the heart always seems to have the space needed to accommodate even the most incomprehensible of pains. “Small body” is the crack in the door through which we can spy a heart in struggle: against absence, against loss, against fatality. It is a long story (100 pages) about how...
“For many years I thought we met in a sick time that wasn’t our time.” We are not sure if Concita De Gregorio is aware of how much her pen, with this kind of books, is able to leave a profound trace in Italian society, like a furrow that everyone should follow on a path towards greater awareness of their own limits and of its potential. We liked the book because it made us reflect,...
“Power cannot be managed by a village clan, which arrived there without knowing it.” From 2011 to 2022 we have witnessed constitutional forcing, reinterpretations of roles and prerogatives that were once unthinkable. Palace games and partially revealed backroom deals, which Lucia Annunziata tries to reconstruct through the direct testimony of the protagonists of that season, revelations, confidences and ex-post analyses. An approach that we greatly appreciated because, despite going into the detail of the reconstruction,...
“Joyce has never let herself be stopped, least of all by politics.” Daughter of Guglielmo Salvadori, professor of sociology, and of Giacinta Galletti de Cadilhac, correspondent journalist of the Manchester Guardian, Beatrice Gioconda Salvadori known as Joyce in deference to her English origins, is above all a daughter of the twentieth century, a century that lives intensely in its catastrophes and little interludes of joy. She will make of her the libertarian and progressive demands...
“The truth of the facts is useless and in any case it does not define that of people?” Flaiano, Rome, summer. Three evocative words that perfectly describe the book. Memories, walks, reflections that are able to make Ennio Flaiano known as an old friend, what he represented, indeed he represents, for the Italian cultural panorama. Ennio was none other than an Abruzzese transplanted to Rome at a young age, and which makes him the eternal...
“Mine has always been a family of fighters.” A book necessary for the collective memory. An isthmus of land, submerged by the ocean of ingratitude, returned visible after too many years, which connects the memory of those who sacrificed their youth, and even their lives, to those who enjoy the fruits of that sacrifice. The role of women during the civil war of 1943-1945 in Italy was soon forgotten, sometimes not even acknowledged, although honoring...
