Boccalone

A tale of love and friendship set in Bologna in the seventies, while students protest to reinvent their future.

Bologna, 1977. In the main university town of Italy it is time for creative rebellion and open protest against the establishment. Students flowing in the streets and squares, the police strongly reacting: a dramatic, violent time of hope and struggle.

It is also time for love: enrico and anna (written like that, with lower cases) navigate the city, make love, meet friends, discuss issues. And this true, honest love story, a story that is bound to change the people involved, is told with a voice that is at once excited, ironic, comical, depressed. The book has had a lot of friends in Italy, both from people of the literary and artistic world and among the public, and it is regarded as a small classic.

Carlo Rovelli has recently mentioned it in an interview in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/06/carlo-rovelli-i-remember-my-amazement-at-finding-a-whole-cosmos-inside-a-book) as the best book on youth of that generation. Rovelli appears himself in it, as he was friends with Enrico Palandri when they were students in Bologna.

Here the genesis of the novel in the words of its author:

I wrote and published Boccalone when I was 21, in 1979, and have never touched it in the four editions (1988, 1997, 2001, 2017) that have followed. To some of these I added and left out post-faces, but the text itself has remained unaltered. 

The narrator meets Anna after having looked at her for some weeks in Piazza, they fall in love, leave for a wonderful trip to Spain, return to Bologna, live together for another few months and eventually separate. What I think made the fortune of this novel is a poetic quality that is much indebted to the rhythm of the seasons. It’s not just the Seventies, it’s spring-summer-autumn-winter. How does it feel to meet in spring, with love growing secretly like the sap in trees, nourishing the new green of the leaves, to blossom and ripen in summer, to quarrel and fall apart in autumn, to grow colder, lonelier and pensive in winter? And it is written like a song, with songs everywhere in the text (from Bob Dylan to John Lennon to my own ones). The narrating voice is not simply telling the story, he’s singing it.