Roberto Calasso evokes his childhood in Florence during the Second World War and the post-war period.
A beautiful evocation of childhood episodes in Florence during the war years and the immediate post-war period: a stuffed cat, the arrest of the father after the murder of the fascist intellectual Giovanni Gentile, the editor grandfather, the American soldiers seen from a window , the first reading of Proust at the age of thirteen, the secret links with Kafka and Pasternak, the discovery of eros in some illustrations of Orlando Furioso by Doré, a couple of cafés and a drugstore, the figurines of the manger in the living room, the smell of the dust from the rubble of Por Santa María, the childhood decision to be called Memè Scianca…
«Roberto Calasso is not just a scholar, he is one of the most original thinkers and writers of the present» (Charles Simic).
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