Settembre nero

The flower does not know it is a flower until it blooms. Settembre nero recounts the blossoming of a twelve-year-old boy, Gigio Bellandi, during a summer in Versilia in 1972: the discovery of music, reading, anxiety, desire, love – and then the unthinkable, sudden interruption of all this. He reconstructs with plastic precision the images, smells, colours and sounds that animated that lost life, and with vagueness, on the other hand, because suffered without much explanation, the irreversible event that overwhelms it. Around Gigio, victims and culprits mixed together, in a constellation of poignant and unforgettable characters: the father-triton, the mother-lioness, the heroic little sister and the two main perpetrators of his sudden blossoming: Uncle Giotti, mysterious, shy and very pure master of strength, and Astel Raimondi, the little girl with ‘black as onyx black’ pigtails, who just in time marks him with the indelible sign of love. But it is also a novel about the evocative power of words and about the seductive and salvific power of language, because it recounts the explosion of a pure and surprising talent, also destined to last forever: that for translation. The narrator’s voice is Gigio himself, from the windy mountain of his sixties, because he has evidently managed to heal the wound and go beyond it, that is, to ‘translate’ himself in the end, thus becoming the last of the ‘normal heroes’ so dear to Veronesi.