Sogni e favole

The illusion of love, of poetry and of modernity are the protagonists of a novel that is cultured and moving.

English sample available

Rome, 1983. The 20th century is still in full bloom. Emanuele Trevi, a university student – not even twenty yet – works every evening in a film club in the city centre. One night, at the end of a film by Tarkovsky, he comes into the auditorium and finds a man alone and in tears. He is Arturo Patten, an American who has relocated to Rome, and is one of the greatest portrait photographers ever. For the brief rest of the century, Emanuele will listen to the lessons of his friend – a cross between Candlewick and Talking Cricket – who leads a life of enviable intensity, and, thanks to him, will meet intellectuals and artists who will lead him to research 18th-century highly-acclaimed librettist and court poet Metastasio, author of the sonnet Sogni, e favole io fingo (Dreams and Fables which I often feign). And so these tales “fancy” the entirety of great modern literature conjured up here, from Pushkin to Pessoa and even the prominent 20th-century Italian poet Amelia Rosselli, who lives on the same street as Arturo and who, like him, will end her life by choice.

Together with Arturo, she and her heritage are the other protagonist of the “strange book” of Trevi’s: at the same time an autobiographical novel and a digressing essay. Arturo, Amelia and Metastasio lead him and us into the heart of a rainy, archaic Rome, into the symbolic circle of depression and senselessness, towards the essential port of illusion: if, as Metastasio writes, imaginary stories arouse in us the same emotion as true events, then perhaps real life is made up of dreams and fables.