Italino lives in an enchanted garden of the Riviera: an «experimental paradise» full of plants, measurable and measured by two gods - his parents - who believe in the rational, ethical and social power of science. While outside the fascist rhetoric thunders, the language spoken in that garden is serious, exact, devoid of sentimentality, consonant with the secular composure that dominates it. But when Italino approaches the sea, he is overwhelmed by a wave that overturns him, remixes him, makes him understand that we are not exact creatures but abysmal books destined to sink into the blue. It is then that in him the perennial tension between rationality and fantasy from which one of the clearest voices of our twentieth century will originate: that of the writer Italo Calvino. In this journey, all the more true the more imaginary, Carabba guides us where everything begins. And where, thanks to mesmerizing trees and forbidden pears, tarzan anarchists and famous illustrators, old comics and dancing crabs, the Calvinian lightness, engaged in the constant operation of emotional cooling, becomes soft and fragrant, tender and dreamlike, leaving out that playful freedom that, alone, can make rampant barons, halved the viscounts, non-existent knights. And happy readers who will come.
THE AUTHOR
Enzo Fileno Carabba (Florence, 1966) is the author of fiction and noir novels. His books include Jakob Pesciolini (Einaudi, 1992), with whom he won the Calvino Prize, and Con un poco di zucchero (Mondadori, 2011). He is also the author of opera books, radio scripts and children’s novels. Feltrinelli has published Attila. L'incontro dei mondi (2012).
