Gli ultimi eroi. Tutti i racconti

There is a pink house on top of a hill halfway between Varese and Switzerland, where stories so incredible have been born that it seems as if it were enchanted. In those rooms, or while walking through the nearby woods, its sole occupant has imagined, for over fifteen years, past and future times in which Austria wins the First World War by attacking the Italian army from behind through the Alps, parallel times in which the Pope leaves St Peter’s to move to the outskirts of Zagarolo, a planet Earth from which all of humanity – except for one – vanishes overnight. Between his fantasies of novels and the continuous rejections he received from the publishing world, Guido Morselli also composed dozens and dozens of stories: short and polished compositions, endowed with the same grace and beauty as the waters of the lake he looked at from his window. However, like the rest of his work, these texts remained for a long time in a culpable oblivion, locked away between the pages of his notebooks or between the pages of magazines whose names have turned yellow, condemned to not being read and feeding the melancholy of their author. Gli ultimi eroi (The last heroes) brings together for the first time all the stories of Guido Morselli, narratives in which, as only in his most outstanding works, his creativity is unleashed, giving life to alternative realities and moving human portraits: from a Mussolini who, for love, transforms himself into a democratic leader, to the meeting between Pius XII and Stalin who wants to replace him with a double; from the last grotesque resistance of a group of Nazi soldiers who escaped from an asylum to a comical attempt to get the Americans to finance the unification of Italy. Phantasmagoria projected on the wall by a magic lantern, whose light allows us to observe, once again, the dazzling talent of a hidden master.