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Narrative Non-Fiction

Razza di zingaro

(Just a Gypsy)

Chiarelettere editore, January 2016, pp.176

How can a German boxing champion of Sinti descent represent the great Reich at the 1928 Olympics?

In 1914, when Johann Trollmann, a young boy aged 8 from Northern Germany enters a club for the first time to watch a friend training, it is love at first sight.
Johann emerges immediately as a natural, transforming boxing into an art; after a series of victories, success finally arrives. Unfortunately in the political climate that is taking over Germany, Johann has two major defects: the first is his fighting technique based on a series of small bounces and a continuous movement across the ring, almost as if it were a dance; not very virile to say the least and therefore not very Germanic. But worse than that, Johann is a Sinti, a gypsy.
When he is forced to box like an Arian, Johann turns up on the ring with his hair tinted blond and his amber skin covered in talcum powder. It will mark the end of his career.
Hitler’s racial laws prevent him not only from boxing but will also lead him to be sterilized then deported to a concentration camp where, reduced to a ghostly figure, he is forced to fight. Until the day he finds the courage to defeat a kapo’ to reclaim his dignity, and is then killed in a vendetta.

Chiarelettere editore, January 2016, pp.176

  • “Razza di Zingaro hides a lesson in dignity which comes from an unexpected place, from a tradition of people of which we know almost nothing, and which we still tend to discriminate against today.”

    Il Fatto quotidiano

  • “The author describes the daily life of the Sinti, their rituals and dances, a useful lesson about their origins and traditions that discredits the resistant and dangerous prejudices that we still believe in nowadays.”

    Corriere della Sera

  • “Dario Fo makes use of oral memory, re-elaborating the story with the tone of a clever narrator which suits him so well.”

    La Repubblica

Rights Sold

World Arabic: Mahrousaeg; World Spanish: Siruela (Castilian)  / Bromera (Catalan).

Dario Fo

Dario Fo (1926-2016) graduated from the Accademia delle Belle Arti di Brera in Milano, and emerged in Italy’s cultural circles, especially those linked to the theatre, where he became a great maestro thanks to his strong satirical skills and the farcical nature of his texts. This signature style characterized his entire career, which culminated in 1997 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The public in Italy and abroad has always welcomed the political satire and the folk backdrop that dominated all of his works.

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