Author:
Monica Acito
Publishing house:
Bompiani
Date of publication:
22-02-2023

He was born with a birthmark under his left eye, like a pale fruit embedded in his skin-Uvaspina soon became accustomed to being called by the name that identifies him with his spot. To almost everything, after all, he is able to get used to: to his father, the notary Pasquale Riccio, who is ashamed of him; to the Spaiata, his mother, who after framing Pasquale Riccio with her arts of malafemmina and chiagnazzara does not rest assured that she has lost her charm and pretends to die every time he leaves the house. But above all, Uvaspina is accustomed to his sister Minuccia, inhabited since childhood by an energy that holds her brother in check with her unpredictable outbursts, reprisals, and the ferocity of one who knows how to strike at the point of maximum fragility, as when she tells him, “Your comrades were right, you really are a femminiello.” Yet, only Uvaspina knows the trigger that makes her sister a strummolo, a spinning top capable of wounding with its swirling metal tip. And only Minuccia senses Gooseberry’s dreams, when the strummolo keeps her awake and she can peer at her fine features in her sleep. Around them, Naples: the city of seething bowels, of neighborhoods reaching toward the sky, of tentacles immersed in that sea that faces and penetrates it. It is precisely on the border between the city and the sea, between history and myth, that Uvaspina meets Antonio, the fisherman with eyes of different colors, who reads books and is not afraid of blood, who knows how to sail to Procida and put a self-doubting cryuro back into the world. The purity of their meeting, however, will not be able to hide for long in the caves of Donn’Anna Palace: the city draws them to itself, the strummolo turns, and its lace will forever unite their destinies. A passion besieged by mockery and scorn. The ambiguity of brotherly love, the necessity of shadow for there to be light. Finally, a writing, that of the young Monica Acito, that knows how to insert itself with originality into a great literary tradition and, mixing the telluric force of the vernacular with the freshness of a tale about youth, invokes the hunger for happiness that inhabits each of us.