About — The author in New Jersey
Matteo della Rovere was born in Italy. He arrived in the United States in 1980, became a resident in 1981, and has been an American citizen since 2010. For the last twenty years he has lived in New Jersey. Across that whole life, one thing has not changed: he writes novels.
He has published three. Maya and Incertezze appeared with Castelvecchi; Amare note, a novel of Mozart and Rossini in the Italy of the Napoleonic wars, with La Lepre Edizioni. Critics took them seriously — Filippo La Porta read Incertezze as a third-millennium answer to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and Guglielmo Bilancioni wrote at length on the world of Amare note.
His fiction keeps returning to the same few obsessions: the man who leaves and the man who cannot; private lives pressed hard by history — the Years of Lead, the last summer of the war, an empire’s wars at the start of a century; music, which in his books is never decoration; and the thin places where one life touches another across time.
America was, at first, only where he lived. Then it became where his readers were. The first of his finished novels to be set in English, Where the Honey Was, belongs to both of his worlds: it opens in New Jersey, in the present day, and reaches back to a village in the Italian hills in the last summer of the war. It is written for the readers of the country that has been his home since 1980. Its English text is under way now, and expected by the end of 2026. Behind it, The Land Between Us — also a finished novel — waits its turn, and behind that a shelf of earlier work, to be brought into English one book at a time.
— Matteo della Rovere
In short: Born — Italy · In the U.S. — Arrived 1980 · resident since 1981 · Lives — New Jersey, USA, for the last twenty years · Citizen — American since 2010 · Published — Three novels · Publishers — Castelvecchi · La Lepre Edizioni · Now — Setting his finished novels in English, one at a time
