Books — Three published novels. The next to appear in English, Where the Honey Was, is introduced on the New Work page.
Maya — A NOVEL · CASTELVECCHI
It begins with a man who leaves — not because he wants to discover the world, but because he no longer knows how to stay. From Rome to Istanbul, then Kabul, finally India: Maya follows Sandro, a fragile and tormented young Italian who flees his inner demons for the torrid, contradictory India of the seventies, and loses himself in the dusty streets of Benares.
What he finds there is not the spiritual peace the sacred city promises. It is the tired body, the dust, the heat, the smoke, the smell of the river — a descent into his own darkness that may also, told forty-five years later, be an enlightenment.
Incertezze (“Uncertainties”) — A NOVEL · CASTELVECCHI
Rome, fall 1975. Sandro, twenty-four, lies bleeding in his bed, recounting the events that led him there. The story he tells is one complicated summer: a relationship of wild passion with a friend’s wife; an absurd affair with a wealthy older woman, in which he ends up entangled more than he wished; a quirky circle of friends coming apart; a night of debauchery that ends in disgrace.
Sandro doesn’t want to hurt anyone, yet he keeps spreading pain and disorder around him — remembered and relived amid doubts, reflections, uncertainties, and guilt, in the Italy of the Years of Lead, until a conclusion gives new meaning to everything before it.
“Almost a third-millennium reimagining of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground — the same vaguely masochistic obsessiveness of the narrator.” — Filippo La Porta, essayist and literary critic
Amare note — Scherzo su Mozart e Rossini · A NOVEL · LA LEPRE EDIZIONI
Why does Mozart — a genius recognized and celebrated through the ages — have no grave, not even a cross under which to place a flower? And what extinguished the creativity of Rossini, who died at seventy-six yet stopped composing almost forty years earlier?
Set in the early nineteenth century, in an Italy made tumultuous by the Napoleonic wars, Amare note — bitter notes, and a lover’s notes, too — attempts an answer: the countryside and the wine, the spinet and the soup, the rustle of the pen on staff paper, two lives and two souls intertwined by fate. Some jokes, as its cover asks, arrive at the heart.
“Reading and writing, teaching and learning, composing and suffering… this story will hold many surprises for the fortunate reader.” — from the reflections of Guglielmo Bilancioni, essayist and architectural historian