La memoria delle foglie

Tucked away amongst the blocks of flats on the outskirts of Naples lies a nursery that seems to hold its breath. Lorenzo returns there after many years, at a time when his life is measured solely by what is no longer there. There he finds Renato, who, asking for nothing in return, offers him the two things he needs most: work and friendship. Amidst geraniums, bonsai, ivy, begonias and orchids, Lorenzo discovers that a severed stem never returns to its former state, yet retains a memory of it, and that life can spring anew from those very cuts. His own life, too. Gianni Solla skilfully portrays the fissures of adulthood as passages to be crossed, and unexpected opportunities as flowers that bloom in winter. Because caring (for plants, words and others) can become a new way of being in the world. When Lorenzo stumbles by chance into the garden centre where he spent his childhood – a place suspended in the former industrial outskirts of Naples – his life seems like an inventory of what he has lost: his father, his wife Arianna who left him whilst their children were still young, his job, his youth. Under the greenhouses and amongst the green aisles, nothing has changed, and the few customers still refer to the plants by the names his father made up – capatosta, janare, scurnose – for which the local dialect provided a language capable of speaking to the earth. Today, Renato runs the nursery: a weary yet patient man who never misses an opportunity for a joke, with a past he might perhaps do well to recount. For Lorenzo, working with him feels more like an inevitable step than a choice. Every day at the nursery – interrupted only by breaks for a swim in the neighbourhood pool – becomes a lesson in attentiveness and moderation, where memory alone is not enough: one must relearn what one already knew, embrace new actions and words, and admit that some things – though not everything – depend on us. And whilst his friendship with Renato – made up of many gestures and no few silences – takes shape in the nursery’s expansion project, just as his father had dreamt it, Lorenzo sees the very fine roots that bind him to others re-emerging around him: to his daughter Roberta, a university lecturer with a well-established career, with whom he communicates less and less; to his son Tommy, an emerging writer trapped in his adolescence; and also to Ester, the woman who teaches swimming to young immigrant girls at the local swimming pool.For the stories of certain families unfold like climbing plants, tenacious, intertwining in surprising ways. Gianni Solla has a knack for putting things into words and capturing the subtleties. His characters are imbued with a beautiful melancholy and a discreet grace. Above all, they possess the tenacity to cultivate where everyone says nothing will ever grow.