Io sono felice

Manfredi Banno of the Architalici is a down-and-out Roman nobleman and a failed middle-aged writer; Routh Baruch is an elderly Jewish-American scientist approaching her eighties, a mathematical genius who was robbed of the Nobel Prize in her youth; Tadeusz Krawczyk is a very young Polish prelate at the top of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, but with a ‘thorn in his side’ that torments him. Three very different characters, whose only common ground is a past experience that has marked them forever; and who now find themselves in a dilapidated and exhausted Rome, shaken by uncontrollable climatic events and beset by extraordinary phenomena that are difficult to classify. Each of the three is granted the chance to relive the defining moment of their lives, and the fate of the world – teetering on the brink of final conflict – will depend, to some extent, on how they react. With a style that hovers between news reporting and comedy, lyrical outbursts and grotesque touches, Vito Bruno presents us with a maximalist and rhapsodic novel: a reflection on a dystopian future dangerously similar to the reality we are currently experiencing. But it is also a portrait of a city so complex and contradictory, perpetually suspended between the sacred and the profane, between horror and supreme beauty, that it becomes the true protagonist of the book.