The Foundation recommends

The Panettone Was Never Enough

Dino Buzzati was no fan of Christmas. He disliked the festivities, the sham goodwill dusted off for just one day a year, and the consumerism that had increasingly become a feature of this “holiday” since the post-war economic boom. And yet, despite this aversion, he devoted many writings to Christmas. The posthumous collection entitled Il panettone non bastò, first published by Mondadori in 2004, brings together thirty-three such pieces, which originally appeared in the Corriere della Sera and other newspapers from the 1930s onwards. Edited by Lorenzo Viganò, the anthology features a series of articles, fairy tales, stories, and poems. These include Buzzati’s childhood recollections, wartime correspondence, an illustrated fairy tale, a poem about Baby Jesus, musings on spirituality, reflections on gift-giving, and insights into the importance of children’s imagination. The title story is set during the war, where the protagonist attempts to arrange a dinner on Christmas Eve as a brief reprieve from the horrors of the outside world and of the war. This fragile hope is shattered when he realises that “despite the panettone, it turned out to be just another day, with the same awful, wretched, resigned, and neurasthenic expectancy, just like all the other days of the war.” Buzzati’s writings are always intense, sometimes tender and sometimes bitter, and they capture the magic of Christmas in spite of all its contradictions.

  Il panettone non bastò
Dino Buzzati
Mondadori, 2004

Two

Jack Frusciante Has Left the Band is a novel that defined a generation. The generation of those who came of age in the 1990s and who fell in love with the story of Alex and Aidi, first in the pages of the book and later on the big screen. Enza Negroni’s 1996 film adaptation featured a soundtrack filled with pieces by some of the most iconic Italian bands and musicians of the time, including C.S.I. and Marlene Kuntz. Now, thirty years after the novel first came out, Enrico Brizzi has penned a sequel that picks up the threads of the protagonists’ lives. Alex is picking up the pieces of his life as he grapples with his friend Martino’s tragic suicide and Aidi’s departure. She is now in Pennsylvania, on a year-long cultural exchange. Brizzi takes us back in time, evoking nostalgia for those who lived through those years and piquing the interest of those who came later. The sequel revisits the days of the Tangentopoli “bribesville” inquests and the mafia massacres, InterRail journeys across Europe, and slower forms of communication, when one waited weeks or months for a reply to a letter. And, once again, music plays a pivotal role, reverberating to the characters’ emotions. Manu Chao—who makes a cameo in the book, meeting Alex in Paris—joins The Cure, Nirvana, and others in forming an accompaniment that plays in readers’ minds as they turn the pages.

Two
Enrico Brizzi
HarperCollins, 2024

Bambino

Mattia Gregori, known in Trieste as “Bambino”, is a former fascist and the city’s most brutal Blackshirt, who left a trail of death in his wake. Alongside Mattia, at the centre of Marco Balzano’s latest novel is Trieste, a city on the margins, a place that shifts identities fluidly, and one that endures years of relentless upheaval and violence, from Fascism to Nazism, followed by a brief period of Communism. Born in 1900, “Bambino” experiences a childhood scarred by abandonment: his brother leaves for America, his closest friend deserts him, and he learns that the woman who raised him is not his biological mother. A relentless fury rises up within him, an intense anger not easily subdued. Drawn into the ranks of the Blackshirts, he is swept along by a chain of events that spiral into the Second World War, the Nazi occupation, the Yugoslav takeover, and ultimately, the tragedy of the Foibe massacres. After Resto Qui, Balzano returns to historical fiction, probing the limits of the human soul, as well as of history and the effect it has on individuals and on their personal choices. And to do this, he creates a fierce, hardened protagonist who creates an indelible impact on the reader.

Bambino
Marco Balzano
Einaudi, 2024

Broken Truths

Le verità spezzate is Alessandro Robecchi’s latest novel, published by Rizzoli. The title is also to be that of the best-known film about its protagonist, Manlio Parrini, a seventy-year-old director embarking on a new project after years away from cinema. The film he hopes to make, for which he is seeking a producer, is a true story based on the life of Augusto De Angelis, an Italian crime writer in the 1930s, who was violently killed under mysterious circumstances, suggesting a link to fascist squads. Parrini is drawn to this important mystery—the story of a free-thinking man whose life likely ended for political reasons, suppressed by the regime’s heavy-handed censorship. While Parrini is still scripting the film, a new mystery breaks into his life: the murder of his neighbour, the widow Bastioni, a case that echoes the dark tales in De Angelis’s crime novels. Here we have a double investigation into past and present mysteries that bring up themes of freedom and influence, narrated with Robecchi’s characteristic wit and lightness of touch. Le verità spezzate Alessandro Robecchi Rizzoli, 2024