Antonio Moresco wrote Il Canto degli alberi during the first months of lockdown in 2020. Its narrator finds himself in the Italian city of Mantua, where he was born and spent his adolescence, a place he would prefer not to have returned to. On his lone walks around the empty city, he encounters tree
Two years ago, a month after the Covid pandemic reached Italy, Paolo Giordano, author of How Contagion Works, wrote the following article. It was a response to a situation that now feels dismally familiar, but back then was new and unnerving, and, even for those of us outside Italy, watching the vir
Whenever an author has already made their mark with an impressive, prizewinning novel, you dread their subsequent books, out of fear that the new one simply won’t match up. This is the case for me with the Italian author Paolo Giordano, one of Turin’s famous literary sons. He was a superstar age
Whenever I think about Italian literature from my hometown of Turin, I’m faced with some legendary figures. The city’s most famous writers in the last century were, of course, Italo Calvino and Primo Levi, both appreciated for different reasons (not only in Italy but also abroad) and their legac
‘Hummingbird’ is the nickname given to this novel’s protagonist, Marco Carrera, by his mother when he was a small, beautiful and agile child. Marco was born in Florence in 1959, the same year and city as his creator, Sandro Veronesi. Over the course of the novel we meet Marco’s parents, Prob
To find those millions of words, I had to cross the threshold of the broom cupboard that my father insisted on calling a ‘study’: a little room about a couple of metres square, suffocated by books piled up on the floor or on shelves so full that the walls resembled the dome of a church. [&hellip
