Boom!

Ricciotti Chiusoli went to war and came out alive. His brother Candido died collaborating with the Resistance, his uncles had to emigrate because they were Jewish, his best friend, the father he did not have, was the fascist Podestà of Bologna, Leandro Arpinati, and he was executed. But life is paid for by living, and Ricciotti, for whom joy is the feeling of reality, sold the family farm to his Jewish uncle, who had returned home, and decided to follow an old passion for engines, opening the first Alfa Romeo dealership in Emilia-Romagna. The man is capable, cheerful, well-connected and happy at home: he has a wife, three children and there is no shortage of food. Thus, at the beginning of the 1950s, the Chiusoli car dealership became the centre of a world – ours – in full economic expansion. As the bourgeoisie begins to structure itself, paper consumption increases, children are sent to university, red meat consumption – never in short supply in Emilia-Romagna – and infrastructure costs rise. Modernity and speed lead to comfortable houses and palaces, to railways and roads. And once you have built roads, you need cars to travel on them. Perhaps one for every family. In this novel, Marcello Dòmini recounts the adventures of the Chiusoli family during the “boom” that gives the novel its title, from the fifties to the seventies, highlighting the adventures and contradictions inherent in each man and each family: fascism never put to the test, industry that never really became culture, the desire to build a new world accompanied by nostalgia for the old one.