Peccati di vecchiaia. (Pagine sparse in tempo di pandemia)

The illustrious literary format of the ‘scattered pages’, from Edmondo de Amicis to Benedetto Croce, from Italo Svevo to Primo Levi, has sprouted again in times of pandemic among writers of all categories and qualities, to the obligatory stay behind the keyboard of the computer. Long-lived man of the pen, between professional journalism and books, but also an active music organizer – he managed as superintendent for twenty years and until the threshold of this century the Teatro San Carlo in Naples – Francesco Canessa tells in this singular anthology – one page leads to another – different facts and characters encountered, from Ingrid Bergman to Nicolò Carosio, from the Neapolitan doctor in Thai jungle to Vittorio Viviani, by the porter of Palazzo Scarpetta don Peppino, which Eduardo reproduced as such and such as in Don Raffaele, the “black soul” of These Ghosts, to the anonymous (but not too much!) old-fashioned television presenter who presented a pure Toscanaccio of Dantesque birth as a Neapolitan. Or evoked or dreamed of, from Gioachino Rossini to Ferdinand I of Bourbon, to Wagner traveling by tram in late 19th-century Naples.