Languages

A gender transition unites a mother and daughter in this poem by Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto. When I was born my mother gave me an ancient gift, the gift of the mystic Tiresias: to change sex once in my life. Even from my first wails she understood that my growth would be a rebellion to come unstuck from my flesh a fratricidal fight between spirit and skin. An annihilation. So she gave me her clothes, her shoes, her lipstick; she said: “Take these, my son, become what you are if...

A poet considers anonymity and solidarity in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy.   Maria Borio reads "From the Red Desert" in the original Italian. In the red desert I’m a single dot: my size today, a dot without length, width, depth, fallen from the sky’s highest point on an earth filled with silence and suddenly pure. I write to you from the red zone, and here’s the truth: the borders are drawn, the red has filled the space without entry or exit, and...

A boy is visited by a mischievous demon in this children’s story by Pietro Albì. Translator’s Note: Farfariel: The Book of Micu is set in rural Abruzzo in 1938. The narration shifts between the scribe who is writing the text and the mischievous devil Farfariel, whose sections appear in red. The crossed-out sections are parts that Farfariel thinks should not be included in the scribe's text.   Summon me. No, it’s too soon to summon me, or...

An anxious college student falls for a blue-collar man in Matteo Bianchi’s short story.   La stagione dell’amore viene e va   all’improvviso, senza accorgerti  la vivrai, ti sorprenderà. Love’s season comes and goes until suddenly you realize to your surprise, it is your life. —Franco Battiato The absurd heat of a May afternoon insinuates itself through my bedroom window to the accompaniment of Electronic’s mongrel mix...

Speculative fiction is alive and well in Italy, with its Urania Prize for the best Italian science fiction going back to 1989 and a whole host of publishers and gatherings that highlight sf occurring throughout the year. And yet, given the fact that Anglophone sf has dominated world markets during the twentieth century, and that Italian is not as widespread as, say, English or Spanish, Anglophone readers have yet to read much Italian speculative fiction. That is slowly changing, though,...

In this speculative fiction piece, there are as many universes as robots' dreams.    Panic There’s still some snow on the path. Last week, this same mountain went suddenly quiet. It was snowing. Just like in fairy tales, she had thought, slowing her pace, beautiful and sad. And so unlike today’s desolation: everything looks naked, cold, inanimate. Her breathing labored, she hurries forward. A mystifying anguish clings to her. Not far now. She...

When Genie wakes up after six years in a coma, she finds a disturbing new addition to the family.  Listen to Francesco Verso read "AIwakening and AIdolon" in the original Italian. AIwakening Mark is the first person I see, after so long.  “She’s awake. Come over here.” It must be Easter because, apart from some flowers, he’s holding an Easter egg.  “Hello darling, what year is it?” “Hello, Genie, it’s 2028.”...

In these two microfiction pieces, a woman adopts an egg and a flower awaits a man to tend to her.    Bea’s Egg Bea returned from the intergalactic market with a smuggled mineral from the depths of the Universe. During the night, she heard a tick-tick-tick. She got up, turned on her bedside lamp and gasped. The light filtered through the rock, revealing its secret life.  “An egg?” Against the light, Bea saw a small winged creature. ...

Listen to That Deep Ocean, produced by Play for Voices.     "Do you hear anything? Do you see any changes in the water?" (E.A.Poe) 0. Maelstrom I. Spring awakening II. Into the fire III. Abyss I IV. Into the air V. Intermezzo VI. The great flood VII. Abyss II VIII. Into the earth IX. Abyss III X. Return to Ithaca XI. Epilogue   Directions: Italicized text: male voice Scenes 0, III, VII, IX should sound similar to each other, and markedly different to the...

Giuseppe Berto finds a surprising motive for an infamous betrayal Rabbi, there were several of us with scabs of impurity in that little flock that was soon to be dispersed. Anyway, whether pure or impure, You washed all of our feet and You explained, “Have you understood what I have done? You call me Rabbi and Lord, and that is well, because I am. If then I, who am Lord and Rabbi, have washed your feet, you also must wash each other’s feet. I have given you an example.”...

Milanese journalist Gabriella Kuruvilla touches on the dynamics of motherhood and assimilation. I did it again today. I woke up, made breakfast, watched them eat and drink, bathed and dressed them, took them to school, returned home, got my sari, sandals, lipstick, kohl, makeup remover, rings, bangles, wrap, and Barbie. I put it all in my bag and went out. I always choose a different café on the long route from Lambrate to Bovisa. I prefer to walk, despite the time it takes....

Italian poet Giampiero Neri reflects on solitude and exile. It may seem odd that an episode recounted in a poem, as mere information, lends itself to being misunderstood. The episode is the Homeric one about the island of the Feaci and the misunderstanding is their so-called hospitality, by now almost proverbial. Dashed on the shore by the waves, miraculously safe, Ulysses is helped by Nausicaa, but must meet the Feaci and first of all their king Alcinoo. The prospect is dangerous and...

Indian–born writer Laila Wadia writes a letter to her newborn son. I love draping myself in words, wearing metaphors, allegory, irony—but since you entered my life, my love, my favorite outfit is a silk cloak, the color of a fiery sunset, made entirely of silence. The soft folds make room for my thoughts, thoughts of a woman, a migrant, a mother, to flow through the warm, liquid womb, where language melts and becomes a primordial soup, and the only sound is the smile of the...

Marco Truzzi dives into the daily life of a boy living in a Romani camp. What’s the point of stars If you don’t want to see? —Romani proverb My father stopped being a gypsy in the spring of 1987. As for the hows and whys that led to his decision—or, according to his point of view, how this simply happened to him—we’ll get to that later. For the time being, all you need to know is that my father stopped being a gypsy when I was seven years old and he was...

German–born Eva Taylor considers the process of inhabiting a new land and a new language. Kleidleid...

Playwright Lina Prosa follows an African refugee in Italy’s Alpine north. To an actor with powerful lungs, who is able to act in high altitudes with little oxygen. The reality. The source: the news. An African migrant, after having arrived in Lampedusa, is brought to a shelter in the Orobie Alps. He stays there for months waiting for his request for political asylum to be processed. The theater/one actor: The actor is seated on a chair. Next to him is an open refrigerator. The...

Algerian–born Tahar Lamri blends strands from Italian, Arabic, German, and other Mediterranean cultures in his story of “an immobile traveler, eternally traveling” in present-day Italy. My name is simply Samir. I am the fortieth direct descendant of Shams al-Din Abu 'Abdallah Muhammad ibn 'Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn Yusuf al-Lawati al-Tanji Ibn Battûta Ibn Hamid Al Ghazi, known simply as Ibn Battuta, born in Tangier in 1304 and died in Marrakesh...

In the following poem, Hajdari evokes Halil, the mythic character of the cycle of Albanian epic narrative poems (the Albanian Songs of the Frontier Warriors); Jutbina, a borderland between Albania and ex-Yugoslavia; and Bjeshkët e Nëmuna: the Cursed Mountains, as the northern Albanian Alps are called. I am leaving you Europe, corrupt old whore. Your ruins no longer enchant me, your mirrors and abysses have misled my exile, wounded my wretched body of the East in front of false...

Journalist and literary critic Francesco Durante looks at migration from two angles: that of immigrant writers adopting Italian and that of native–born Italians who leave for other shores. 1. Italy is a country with an extremely variegated and troubled history. We’re accustomed to thinking that Italy possesses a distinct and unmistakable identity, but when we do so we overlook the elementary consideration that Italy has only existed as a single, united country for a...

Igiaba Scego takes on the troubled history of the popular Mussolini-era song "Faccetta nera" in an essay confronting Italy's history of colonialism and Fascism. “I was on a TV talk show the other day, and something curious happened.” Those are the opening words of a Facebook post that Maryan Ismail, an Italo-Somali political activist, published recently. The curious thing that happened occurred in a television studio. Maryan, who is a longtime political activist...

Now night comes—brings prayer. It opens the silence’s locks makes the sidereal map appear and we kneel facing that immense space between now and the rim of the beginning when spinal cords are all extended. *** I look down on ships as spreading light enlarges my vision. Other ships far off rise bearing gifts. We are leaning out over the heartbeat of waves on cliffs at the far end of the earth. Over there they collect corals, pearls, call on female deities, strew flowers. Within...

Author's Note: The following is an active, experimental dialogue with a beloved poet; texts are constructed around single verses from the German poet, distanced from the original context and used as crumbs to ignite a new poetic explosion.   Nights close inside my palm,                I touch...

My mother gave birth in December. Snow fell on the river. Water froze over the fish by month’s end.  She showed me to everyone since I hadn’t died . . . .  “We’ll take her out in pieces, an arm and a leg caught, maybe unformed.”           Only a sign like a silent hiss remains from that time: a return to that womb with my child, head down, body still forming, two loops of flesh around her neck. Step...

I neared a branch heavy with snow bending under the grip of one of the crows. I became that gray and black rocking. And an uncommon green (a mix of salvia and ice) that spread a tint of bruise on the clouds. I saw myself in that purgatory. Everything was landscape.  Anger: a cloud. Uncertainty—heaps: a hill. Estrangement: trees with shivering shadows. “Pay attention,” said shade from the bush closest to me, “fog swallows your pain. Learn in this earthly life...

Blue irises and garlic blossoms. The temptation is enormous, but I continue to resist. No more flowers, and no more excuses for either one of us. This ends here and now. The first time I saw you, it was early morning and I was out with the dog on the riverwalk alongside the Po. You were running—more a triumphal march than a jog, really. How could anyone have failed to notice you as you took possession of the world in your running shorts? There you were: focused, sweat on your...

This excerpt comes from Aldo Nove's recent novel, All the Light of the World, about the life of St. Francis of Assisi (San Francesco), largely as seen through the eyes of his nephew, Piccardo. The excerpt includes three non-sequential chapters from Part One, titled “Scandal.” As Aldo Nove writes in his note to the novel, "The existence of Piccardo is documented, but we know almost nothing about him. He appears in thirteenth-century Assisi notary...

The following are selected from Andrea Camilleri’s Voi non sapete (You Don’t Know), a Mafia dictionary of sorts, largely based on the typed notes of “the boss of bosses,” Bernardo Provenzano, who was captured in Sicily in 2006. Camilleri had access to Provenzano’s typewritten notes, his “pizzini,” which Provenzano used to communicate within his organization for over forty years. Proceeds from the sale of this book go to the families of police...

I remember the summer storms during the rainy season when the wind flung open the windows and lifted the contents of the rooms in a swirling dance. Streaks of lightening lit up the gray sky and the thunder was like the angry scream of the entire universe, unleashed right there, in that very spot. I remember, between the crashing of the thunder and the flashes of lightening, old Haimanot hiding under the ironing table in the living room, alternately shouting, "Wai! Gud reichiben! Oh God,...

The rain began that morning. Tana was coming home from school. Thursday afternoons they had sewing class, and now on the bus, she realized this was the first day she'd left school in the dark. It would go on like this for months. It was cold out, raining, and the bus, jammed with boys and girls, with students, was steaming hot. The windows were fogged up; someone had managed to pry one open, and Tana, already sweaty, was freezing. She thought: I might get sick, stay home a week. She...

I’m thirty-nine. I’m a chemist, graduate of the university of ****. For the last twelve years I’ve been working as a lab technician for a pharmaceutical company. Practically speaking, I’m a hired hand, because the creative part of our work all belongs to our bosses, the illustrious professors and scientists who design our research programs according to the needs of the company. Among the eggheads who work with us there’s even a Nobel Prize winner who...

I study him while he smokes, lying back, arm behind his head. I watch him release the smoke, breathe it back in and out, thinner now. He’s focused on something in the room but I can’t tell what, maybe my family photos—my mother, my father, the twins—or maybe the cubist still-life painting Donatella gave me. Or maybe he’s not looking at anything at all, just as high as his eyes can reach in this room that’s only twenty meters square. I study him, study...

When I was little I watched a lot of movies, because my mother was always making shirts, my father was painting his pictures to sell, and so to let them work in peace, my grandmother, my mother’s mother, would take us to the Stadium movie house and keep us there, me and my brothers, for two movies back-to-back, the four o’clock and the six o’clock shows. I really liked watching my mother cut along the line to the paper pattern pinned to the cloth, and I liked it even...

Ravenna, October 15, 1963 Finally, after a year’s delay, we are in Ravenna. Just a week left before the first take. The Red Desert will be born after a long and difficult gestation. Those of us here with Antonioni: Di Palma, the lighting director, Poletti, the architect, Gianni Arduini, and myself. These are the last days of our feverish preparation. Setting: difficulties with Giuliana’s house. The place on the Candiano has the right kind of view of the ships, but the...

Marcello had just pulled up the last tent stake with a hammer and Monica’s ice ax when he saw something on the stake that left him stunned. The stake, like the others, was thirty centimeters long, metal, and pointed on one end and slightly hooked on the other, so it could be pounded down with the hammer. After he’d pushed the stakes through the elastic loops on all four corners of the nylon tent, Marcello drove them into the ground with the hammer, and now—exactly nine...

The match was held in an arena, semicircular in shape, behind the town hall. They set the table and chessboard at the center of the back line. The audience crammed in up front. Most people sat on wood and wrought-iron bleachers. The younger men stood at the back. The children took over the empty patch of ground between the first row of bleachers and the two challengers. But not one child moved or made a sound. This was the same place, two years before, that their fathers took them to...

After lunch, my grandmother always insisted we go take a nap. I would stretch out on the little bed with my eyes closed and as soon as her breathing slowed, I’d go downstairs and straight out the sea door. There was never anyone around. The road and the beach were empty, and the town seemed to be sleeping too. Occasionally the desolate cry of a seagull echoed across the water, frightening me. One day, as I was walking toward the beach, I spotted the man with salt-and-pepper hair...

In other words, the young man concluded, even an intelligent person can happen to say something stupid now and then! He paused briefly, then continued in the same self-assured tone of gentle pleasantry: My God, I suppose the inverse is probably true as well . . . He stopped himself again. But, he said, lowering his voice just slightly, we have yet to hear the opinion of Professor Berlingieri. The insult was so unexpected and brutal that numerous eyes from both sides of the...

during the summer months I help my father I work in the orchard and during these two or three months of summer I spend fifteen or twenty days at the fruit dump I drive my father's tractor to the collection centers the so called fruit dumps that the AIMA the Azienda di Stato per gli Interventi nel Mercato Agricolo the national farm support agency sets up in farming districts where there is an excess of production that might drive down prices in that case they have to destroy part of...

To Tonino, for the bracelet. Every time I cross this street, I always choose the same spot: I walk sort of kitty-corner from the traffic island, or straight as an arrow along the crosswalk, as if the cars had stopped to let me pass. Or else, stepping down from the trolley, without an umbrella, I run to take shelter under the awning outside the pharmacy. But I always cross Via Marina at this same spot, I don't do it on purpose—that is, I do it on purpose, but without wanting...

Monte Stella—Mount Star—is an artificial hill right on the northern outskirts of Milano, not far from the Meazza Soccer Stadium, located in the San Siro quarters of town. Mount Star was built with debris from W.W. II bombings and is the only truly green zone of the Metropolitan Area, together with Sempione Park, which opens onto the Sforzesco Castle. Seven thirty in the morning. My autumn heart is still beating slowly. Franco and I, we are getting ready to face the long...

A woman returns to Ethiopia after years living in Italy in this piece of short fiction from Gabriella Ghermandi. As often happens in my life, gifts, the things I wish for, always materialize when I am thinking of throwing in the towel, when I give up and let life pass through me. For seventeen years I had dreamed of what my return to my country would be like, the places I would visit, the people I would meet, how I would feel, and certainly that indescribable smell of home that would...

It was the night before Christmas Eve. The clock had just struck midnight, and a thick blanket of damp air hung over Villaggio Coppola. The towering cement buildings, crowded as beehives, were barely visible, and the murmur of the sea reigned over an otherwise tomblike silence. But every so often, the pop of a firecracker or the roar of an engine broke the calm in the streets. The schoolteacher Antonio Castrese, leaning against the windowpane, concluded that this was no longer a...

I'm fifty-nine years old. I live in the country, in a locality pretty far removed from the places where the destinies of people living in this era are decided. I work as a writer in a peripheral language. (Spoken by around sixty million people, or about one person out of a hundred in the entire world. I have a garden with a few fruit trees and a lot of rose bushes. I have two dogs, a cat, and a porcupine. I was married and now I'm not anymore, but my solitude is crowded with...

I'll tell you about Mario the Neapolitan some other time. Now you want to know everything about Amedeo—that is, start dinner with dessert? As you wish. The customer is king. I still remember the first time I saw him. He was sitting at one of the desks in the first row near the blackboard. I approached; there was an empty seat near his, I smiled and sat down next to him after saying the only Italian word I knew—"Ciao!" This word is really helpful, you use it when you're...

Algeria was imploding into civil war in 1993 when Amara Lakhous, born in 1970 in Algiers, wrote his first novel. But no bombs go off in The Bedbugs and the Pirate, the inner monologue of a Gogolian forty- year-old post office clerk who is about to lose his job, having already lost his fiancée, his apartment, and his prospects for a life worth living. Sad stuff, but the book is laugh-out-loud funny. On his way to the brothel he visits every Thursday, religiously , the...

The window of the one bedroom in our tiny house looked out onto the street. Opposite, on the other side of the street, there was a large building known as "the kids' house." It was a long, two-story yellow building with green door and windows, where a mix of foreign teenagers lived. The Italians called them "deviant kids," meaning problem kids that risked turning into delinquents. But we called them "our kids from the big house." In the house there also lived a series of tutors...

(Pescasseroli, Easter 2005) To meet with Dacia Maraini and speak with her in peace means going up to the bitter and severe lands of Abruzzo where the writer, who lives in Rome, takes refuge during holidays and in summer. This March, Easter concludes a winter of polar temperatures and the snow in the National Park of Abruzzo remains plentiful. Dacia Maraini loves cross-country skiing and walking in the woods; this is her natural realm, and she settles here to write her books in solitude...

A character knocked on the door of the woman with short hair. Tapping timidly with her knuckles, the character entered the room without making a sound. She's a modestly dressed mountain woman. On her feet she wears sturdy little boots. She sat down on the edge of the seat and stayed there in silence, letting the coffee cool on the table in front of her. She seemed embarrassed and ashamed but determined to stay. Then slowly, toward evening, after eating a bowl of soup and drinking a...

One morning when she and her mother were making the bed--she was on one side, her mother on the other--Cecilia showed the first sign of madness. She suddenly said, "The plain is moving. There will be a disaster." Her mother looked at her uncertainly. "What did you say?" and Cecilia answered, "What?" in such a way that it was clear she didn't remember speaking the sentence. Her mother repeated it to her. "The plain is moving. There will be a disaster." But seeing the look of total...

The departure came in the month of March, when the thaw opened up the passes, which in our mountains were like gateways toward the countries of central Europe. They would go on foot, with the tools of their trades in a sack slung over their shoulders with two pieces of rope, or with the other essentials in a wheelbarrow that they pushed along. That's how our mountaineers started on their way to Prussia, Austria or Bohemia to work in exchange for marks or coronas which then gave them...

When they reached Via Merulana: the crowd. Outside the entrance, the black of the crowd, with its wreath of bicycle wheels. "Make way there. Police." Everybody stood aside. The door was closed. A policeman was on guard: with two traffic cops and two carabinieri. The women were questioning them: the cops were saying to the women: "Stand aside." The women wanted to know. Three or four, already, could be heard talking of the lottery numbers: they agreed on 17, all right, but they were having a...

More than the snow he had to tramp through during the day, it was the cold of the night that made that time hard for him. He would leave when the glow of dawn shone on the rocky face of the mountain with the pretty name that stood across the way; the wave of sunlight then moved on to touch all the other mountains around it. Some of the slopes, however, were left in the shade all the time, as were the valley floor and the woods lower down, where the sun would not arrive until March....

Thursday, 1 April 1993, 7:30 p.m.- Friday, 2 April 1993, 2:30 a.m. Hearts do not grieve and can suffer Hour by hour, even for an entire life, Without any of us ever knowing, With too much certainty, what is happening. --Camilo José Cela, La Colmena In the parabolic mirror, he sees the silhouette advancing. He holds his breath. Then the man takes another step, and Francesco breathes again, relaxing his shoulders. For an instant, he was afraid it was the Bear. But though the...

1 You never quit smoking. You give up for a while. Days, months, years. But you never quit completely. Cigarettes are always there, lying in wait. Sometimes they appear in the middle of a dream, even five or ten years after you've "quit." You feel the touch of the paper on your fingers, you hear the soft, dull, reassuring noise it makes when you tap it on your desk, you feel the touch of the ochre filter on your lips, you hear the scrape of the match and you see the yellow flame...

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE:"Una grossa frittura" is a very recent story by Leonardo Gori, and it is about to be published as part of an anthology entitled Giallo Uovo (Mondolibri, April 2006). It is a very different type of crime story that includes a dash of humor and has an almost Dickensian flavor: a change of pace from the typical noir. The story is unusual for several reasons. Its setting is Florence in the year 1880, a city that one of the characters says lends itself well to "dark...

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Sicily has been to Italian what Ireland has been to English. The Mediterranean's largest island, with a population of around five million people, it has produced over the last two centuries a disproportionate number of great writers: De Roberto, Verga, Pirandello, Vittorini, Sciascia, and, far and away the best-selling Italian writer for the last ten years, Andrea Camilleri. Born in 1907 in the small town of Pachino on the southeast corner of Sicily--a bit...

When I was eight years old I decided to run away from home. There's no sense explaining why right now. Maybe some other time. Let's just say that where I used to live, on via Vincenzo Gemito 64, staircase B, apartment 12, my childhood fears were so real that they chased away the storybook fears I would have gladly braved—a shipwreck, a leap over an abyss, a fire-breathing dragon—which would make a brief appearance, subside, and sneak away. So I made my plans. Basta! I...

I'm at Laila's door again with a bottle under my arm and a thought which I blurt out at the entrance. I tell her immediately that it's the end of February, and the apricot tree is already starting to bloom. The cold will dry its sap, and it won't give fruit. As a joke, she asks whether the garden's owner will mind having no apricots. "No," I say, "but I can't stand my powerlessness to restrain the tree. I'm a gardener, and I don't know how to keep it from...

"No, we can't do it with a military airplane because the commander of the base says he doesn't want trouble, but I think I found a solution. It's risky, but so is your situation." "Explain it to me." It hadn't been difficult to enter the base; they had recognized him right away. The difficult part was figuring out how to get out. Since his arrival, Terracina had felt more calm. Like an animal hiding in its den, breathing more freely but never forgetting that the enemy...

The house stood alone, facing the sea, a modest little cottage that was getting on in years, on a small dirt lane bordered by tamarisks twisted by winter winds. She had noticed the sign affixed to the front door as she walked slowly along, following the setting sun that was lighting up the sea. It seemed like a sign from destiny. At the pension Sorriso, the overly loud voices of the guests and the children's shrill cries shattered the quiet and made her temples pound: as the years go...

I go back to the "hole." I haven't stopped thinking about it since the first time I went there. I want to slip myself into that crack in the wall, find out what they do in there, how they spend their time, what they talk about, what a life of starvation and ugliness is made of, where they get the strength to go on hoping. The unconscious? The unwittingly religious or fatalistic acceptance of the life they've been given? The deferred gratification typical of dreamers?...

Chokora. Garbage. Now I know why they call them that. They are of the same color as the street, a noncolor, one that time, wear and tear leave on things like an indelible patina, a distilled filth, that amalgamates and stains hands, heads, shoes. They are walking rags. Their bodies are coated with layers of filth, they are lost, emaciated, rachitic, inside their shapeless jackets, beat-up overcoats, sweatshirts that the passage of days and months have totally faded into oneness with the...

I Let's slip into that last evening, the pharmacy where her pale restless face didn't register the greeting, the nightguard's: hungry face, I can't get past it, in the fog, the very face I once called love. We walk back to the glass. Then she tosses the timetable into a bin along with her eyeglasses, strips off her blue sweater, and hands it to me, lips sealed. "Why are you doing this?" "Because this is the way I am," she replies...

It was Bakarak himself who fired me. Bakarak, the Swiss doctor who directs the dietetics institute named after him. I'm standing here in the middle of the street and my thoughts climb up to the third floor, penetrate the window, and reach Bakarak's office, where at this moment-I'm certain of it-he sits before his computer terminal surfing through porno websites. Can one be an orderly with eighteen years' experience and develop a theory of diet? It wouldn't seem so,...

Nonna has always invented words, Mama does too, and so do I. Nonna invented nicknames and, by rebaptizing certain individuals, ennobled them in my eyes, making them into figures of distinction. Nonna has jumbled together the words of all the places she has known. They aren't worldly words-she never traveled much-but words of the Marches, and they were enough for her. More than enough, so that Mama too, and I as well, still feel her words on the tip of our tongues. They are words...

I am Napoleon. I am Marilyn Monroe. I'm the Pharaoh. Every morning I choose one of my costumes. I go out. Then I take up my position in front of the gates of the Piazza Duomo. If it's raining, I install myself under the gates. And there I stay. People pass and raise their eyebrows, they smile. One in a hundred tosses me a coin. So many people pass in the Piazza Duomo, I can't complain. Children come up close to touch me, they want to see if I'm a statue or a living...

You have to be away from Italy to see Italy. Or maybe just slightly displaced within its borders—on one of the islands, for example. I was in Favignana a few years ago, and late one afternoon, on an old rented bicycle, I came to a cliff behind the island's little cemetery. I sat up there, gazing at the distant coast of Sicily, until I lost any sense of time. Someone had told me—or maybe I had only imagined it—that what one saw from that point was the part of the...

I Insane asylum is a word much bigger than the dark vortex of dreams, yet it used to come once upon blue thread or a distant nightingale's song or your mouth opened, biting at the blue the fierce untruth of life. Or an invalid's ruthless hand slowly climbed your window syllabifying your name and when the foul number was finally loose you rediscovered all the seriousness of your life. II Affori, a distant town buried in filth, here you know beams and bolts and...

I gave up on changing my clothes, and stayed in my dusty, wrinkled dark dress. I could barely find the time to change my tampon. Uncle Filippo, with his attentions and his angry outbursts, didn't leave me alone for a minute. When I said that I had to go to the Vossi sisters' shop to buy some underwear, he was bewildered, and remained silent for a few seconds. Then he offered to go with me to the bus. The day was airless, and getting darker, and the bus was crowded. Uncle Filippo...

What is the particular sadness felt by anyone who attempts, after years of absence from a region where he once lived for a long time, to stop and observe-without being seen or recognized-the ordinary unwinding of life? I am trying to understand this particular sadness, while contemplating the heap of gray and black houses of my native town from the top of this hill. I got off the train a little while ago and, not having any luggage, was able to leave the station quickly. Upon arrival,...

He knows that every published book is an imperfect representation of the book one imagined writing, its final shape determined by painful exclusions, second thoughts, and corrections that mercilessly cut out its best, most difficult parts; sometimes he thinks back on what his book could have been, or it would be more accurate to say the thousands and thousands of books he could have written which have remained hidden in a folder in his computer called "rejects," where these different...

The evening heat was humid, heavy. Henri stopped for a moment to examine, one by one, the reproductions of photographs he had clipped from various sports newspapers and pinned on the walls, after going over them in color: brawls among soccer players, red lines against cerulean lines, mustached pugilists, rectangular fields crossed by a rugby ball's path. Henri often used photography to work on his paintings. For example, every detail of the grocer's family portrait, which was...

"Kissed by Kylie!" proclaimed the T-shirt Marco was flaunting as he pushed through the revolving door of the mini-mart. A week earlier, at the Milanese concert of his number-one music idol in the world, while he had been waving his arms in front of the stage, the miracle occurred that he had been waiting for his entire life (God!—his entire life?—let's say, since the time of the release of "I Should Be So Lucky"). Kylie Minogue, during the performance of "Your Disco Needs...

Once upon a time an angel lost a feather. It hardly ever happens, only once every two or three hundred years, but it does happen. The angel was flying over a solitary lake, through the bluest waters of the sky; forests and blossoming meadows stretched as far as his eye could reach. He was enchanted to see such radiant beauty and descended to skim the water. It was then that he lost the feather. The water shivered as he passed, and when the angel rose towards the sky, the feather remained,...

In the noble city of Burgfarrubach, a small, malicious spirit had been playing a curious prank for quite some time. Whenever a priest was called in to expel him from the house he was turning topsy-turvy, he would dupe the exorcist by fleeing the premises before his exorcism was complete. And no sooner was he in a new location when another priest would arrive with benedictions, maledictions, and conjurations, then—poof!—he played the same trick. So it was that no one had ever...

In principio diviserunt Elohim coelum et terram and the land was left barren et les ombres noires enveloppaient les profondeurs bade korgolœdei dar ruie oghionusoh parmisad (et aura divina super oceani undas) The author thanks Liliana Lo Giudice, Rosa Maria Costa, and Sepidè Akhavanabiri.

Two brothers, the first two brothers. Conceived on the threshold of paradise, so to speak, when Adam and Eve, driven out by the cherubim with the flaming sword that turned every way, took up residence in this our world. Such an origin undoubtedly represents a great mark of distinction compared to subsequent generations. Nevertheless, it carries a side effect, a certain inexperience, a naïve ignorance of what would later become the most common human sentiments. Thus Eve coupled with...

It had been a good year for olives, too, that year. The farm trees, loaded with buds the year before, had all produced ripe fruit, despite the fog that had threatened their blossoms. Zirafa, who had a good number of them on his farm Le Quote at Primosole, foreseeing that the five old glazed ceramic jars stored in his cellar wouldn't be enough to hold all the olive oil from the new harvest, had already ordered a sixth bigger one from Santo Stefano di Camastra, where they made them;...

ITALIAN SOLDIERS! The Communist Party of Slovenia appeals to you: Do not carry out your superiors' orders, do not fire on the Slovenians, do not persecute the partisans, but surrender to them, do not stand in the way of our liberation struggle! Attack and disarm the fascist militia, the agents of OVRA and all those who are forcing you to fight against the Slovenian people. Destroy the Italian armed forces, the stores of weapons and food, unless you can give them to the...

Dante and Philosophy Philosophy contracted a well-trained muscle and lifted her bosom invitingly toward Dante. He leaned forward and snatched a sliver of onion in his teeth. "The sauce too," she murmured. "Infernally delicious." At this point Dante pounced, Philosophy fell back on the carpet, and a steaming sausage was imprisoned betwixt their bodies. Dante let loose a childlike yelp, but she mashed the sausage with a single thrust of her hip, destroying it with the desperation of...

The kid who sells roasted chestnuts at the end of the Ponte Garibaldi gets down to work. He sits in a groove in the parapet of the bridge with a small stove between his legs, looking no one in the face, as if his relationship to the rest of humanity were at an end, or as if he had been reduced to only a hand, not the physical hand of a small boy or an elderly lady, but an abstract hand, a mechanism for accepting payment and delivering merchandise in a rigidly calculated and predetermined...