Books
1 February 2025

Malbianco

by Desiati, Mario
Malbianco

Marco Petrovici is a forty-year-old expat who moved from Apulia to Berlin. One day, he suddenly starts to faint. To heal and find some peace, he returns to his now elderly parents, who live near a forest of durmasts, oaks, and holm oaks in Taranto’s countryside.
Crushed by the guilt for not being the son that Use and Tonia had hoped for, Marco takes care of them. But he also realizes that the causes of his malaise must be sought in the buried memory of that strange surname, in that family tree that everyone seems to keep hidden from him. Basically, his fainting spells come from very far away.
With the help of Aunt Ada and a diary that he didn’t find by accident, Marco fights the Petrovici family’s malbianco, the powdery mildew, starting from a blurry childhood memory: a crazy beggar playing the violin under the snow in Taranto. Making his way through the silence, reticence and shame, he uncovers his great-grandparents’ secret lives. His great-grandmother Addolorata was an orphan and a donkey driver; his grandfather Demetrio and his brother Vladimiro were both war veterans: the former was imprisoned in a German prison camp after September 8, while the latter went missing in the Russian retreat.
Who are actually the Petrovicis? Where do they come from? And why is an old Yiddish lullaby they used to sing to him as a child still stuck in his head?
If Spatriati was about a generation that had to look far to find itself, now that same generation looks inward and goes to the origin of its own roots. Mario Desiati portrays the frenzy and turmoil of a protagonist consumed by the history he carries within him, delivering his most political, restless, ambitious, and mature novel.

  • Publishing house Einaudi
  • Year of publication 2025
  • Number of pages 400
  • ISBN 9788806264772
  • Foreign Rights Valeria Zito
  • Foreign Rights sold France (Grasset)
  • Ebook www.einaudi.it
  • Awards Premio Strega 2022 (Spatriati)
  • Price 21.00

Desiati, Mario

Mario Desiati is originally from Martina Franca. He published several books, including Vita precaria e amore eterno (Mondadori 2006; Einaudi 2023), Ternitti (Mondadori 2011; Einaudi 2023), Il libro dell’amore proibito (Mondadori 2013), and Mare di zucchero (Mondadori 2014; Einaudi 2024). He published with Einaudi Candore (2016 and 2021) and Spatriati (2021, winner of the 2022 Strega Prize, and republished in paperback edition in 2024).

Malbianco
treccani

Register on the Treccani Portal

To keep up to date with the latest news from newitalianbooks