Between 1932 and 1936, Carlo Emilio Gadda embarked on the project of writing a novel set in Milan that would be called Un fulmine sul 220, where he intended to narrate the forbidden love between Elsa, wife of the wealthy Gian Maria Cavigioli, and Bruno, an assistant Butcher's Finally, dissatisfied with the project, he decided to abandon it.

A few years later, this failed novel would become his masterly book of stories La Adalgisa, a satirical and burlesque portrait - and, at the same time, a motley and encyclopedic fresco - of the Milanese society of the time: fraudulent bankers, naive entrepreneurs in trouble , engineers who build crumbling bridges, old Goyesque witches who embody the decadent local aristocracy, bourgeois obsessed with having male offspring ... and women who throw themselves into the arms of friendly pimps who, for their part, prefer the newly arrived maids of the field . A chaotic human maelstrom passed through the filter of derision.

But as always with Gadda, we will also find portraits of great delicacy and tenderness, particularly that of Adalgisa, who, after his impressive debut in La traviata - an impact more for the eyesight than for the ear -, must be seen as a widow and cleaning the dust of the tombs of the Monumental cemetery. The Adalgisa is also, and above all, a tribute to Milan - a tribute that oscillates between veneration and blasphemy - a city whose thousand faces appear at the same time in this dazzling book.