Italian Narrative
Matteo is eleven years old and lives in a small village in the Spanish countryside with a mother he has very little contact with and a father who is a pianist in a wheelchair and only pays attention to him when he sings with his miraculous, pure, angelic voice.
In the stagnation of the Spanish countryside, everything changes the day his father leaves the scene and his mother sends him to Naples, to his sisters-in-law, which he thinks is a holiday, when in fact she probably just wants to get rid of him. Protected by his two eccentric aunts, obsessed with botany, music and the numbers of the smorfia, and watched over by the shadows of the semi-ruined family palace, he soon discovers that he belongs to the lineage of the greatest Neapolitan singer of the late 17th century, the (semi) castrato Matteuccio.
Gifted with a talent for singing and a mysterious love for trees, whose language and gender he is convinced he can decipher, he embarks on a physical and intimate journey into the heart of his own identity.
Her goal is to inhabit a body that she no longer considers foreign and to feel part of a new family that accepts and shares her journey, especially if this family consists of her inseparable Cape Verdean friend Elisangela and the femminielli who populate the streets of the historic centre.
As in an opera, his voice is accompanied by a chorus of characters travelling between the underground worlds of the Neapolitan Camorra, Baroque opera and the mirages of two cities united by the same roots: Barcelona and Naples.
Always straddling music and literature, Italian and Spanish culture, with extreme attention to language, Alessio Arena is one of the great narrators of contemporary magical realism, capable of linking Neapolitan tragedy and Latin American visionaryism.
Source synopsis: Fandangolibri.it
Date of publication: 28 February 2025
Alessio Arena, born in Naples in 1984, is an Italian writer, singer-songwriter and translator. He lives between Naples and Barcelona and studied Ibero-American Literature. He has published award-winning novels such as “La notte non vuole venire” and “Ninna nanna delle mosche”, winner of the Procida-Elsa Morante Prize. As a musician, he has recorded albums in several languages and won the Musicultura Festival in 2013. His work blends fiction, poetry and world music, with a strong focus on identity and cultural issues. He translates Latin American authors and teaches in international academic contexts. His writing is cultured, sensitive and deeply contemporary.
