The Foundation recommends

A Matter of Money

Lolita Lobosco has gained renown through her TV series Le indagini di Lolita Lobosco, aired on RAI 1, with Luisa Ranieri in the lead role. In this new novel, the commissioner finds herself entangled in a perplexing case that has some deeply disturbing personal implications for her. The victim, Margherita Colonna, is a strikingly attractive bank manager. But what leaves Commissioner Lobosco most shaken is an eerie detail—Margherita looks remarkably like her, almost as if they were doppel-gängers. At first glance, it appears she jumped from her balcony, but the suicide theory is swiftly dismissed. As Lobosco delves into the victim’s past, a web of ill-fated relationships, murky connections, insatiable greed, and an obsession with luxury shopping begins to unfold. The investigation leads the commissioner to discover that lots of people may have had a motive. It may be a crime of passion or, indeed, “a matter of money”. Once again, the novel is set in the mesmerising city of Bari, with its rich culinary heritage and, of course, its famous spaghetti all’assassina.

Una questione di soldi
Gabriella Genisi
Sonzogno Editori, 2025

The Problem of Human Time

The factory libraries introduced by Adriano Olivetti from the 1940s onwards, along with the Cultural Centre in Ivrea, were truly revolutionary, bringing culture into the workplace. This paradigm shift reimagined the spaces of production, recognising workers’ time and transforming these settings into real community centres, fostering cultural exchange and interaction. Olivetti’s vision challenged the notion of culture as a privilege for the elite, interpreting it as a form of common knowledge to be shared. Although company libraries were not unheard of—a notable precedent being the Pirelli library set up back in 1928 for members of the company’s recreational club—Olivetti’s innovation lay in placing books and culture at the heart of a broader reflection on time and human development. Chiara Faggiolani’s book retraces the story of the Olivetti libraries, underscoring the idea that books have the power to change lives. Such was Olivetti’s conviction that he included culture and education as part of the factory’s social services, viewing it as an essential part of workers’ overall remuneration. The author questions the power that this idea may, or may not, have on the present as well as on a future in which we may still plan and design libraries as spaces for our curiosity, imagination, dialogue, and reading. The Pirelli libraries, now present at the Bicocca headquarters and in the factories in Settimo Torinese and Bollate, are present-day examples of company libraries in Italy. These are currently enjoying a renaissance, and are part of an on-going discussion about the work-life balance—a theme on which Olivetti was a pioneering spirit.
Il problema del tempo umano. Le biblioteche di Adriano Olivetti: storia di un’idea rivoluzionaria
Chiara Faggiolani
Edizioni di Comunità, 2025

What I Know About You

When Nadia Terranova finds herself in front of her new-born daughter, a profound realisation strikes her: she can no longer afford to go out of her mind. It is not a thought unrelated to her experience, but something that happened to her great-grandmother Venera, who was hospitalised for a time at the Lorenzo Mandalari psychiatric hospital in Messina, following a bout of depression caused by the loss of her third daughter during pregnancy. These thoughts lead her to delve into her family’s past, into a mythology made up of stories that are handed down and that recount a narrative that ultimately becomes commonly accepted but that is actually full of unreliable details. Quello che so di te is a poignant and intimate novel, a work of autofiction in which the author confronts memory and the delicate boundary between reality and imagination. Digging into the Mandalari archives, she pieces together the fragments of Venera’s life, creating a continuous dialogue between past and present, where historical records, recollections, and inherited narratives all intertwine.

Quello che so di te
Nadia Terranova
Guanda, 2025

Owls of the Eastern Ice

Jonathan C. Slaght is an American biologist, researcher and writer with extensive field experience in the remote regions of the Russian Far East. It is here that he takes us in his Owls of the Eastern Ice, originally published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book chronicles four years of research on Blakiston’s fish owl, an endangered species that inhabits Primorye—a narrow stretch of coastal land on the border between Russia, Japan, China, and North Korea. This is a land of vast coniferous forests, blanketed in snow and ice for much of the year, harsh and inhospitable. But this is not a treatise on ornithology. It is a captivating story, in which one can lose oneself as in a grand adventure, with its vivid naturalistic descriptions and tales of the people who call this extreme environment home, seen through Slaght’s keen anthropological eye. We encounter this “dishevelled mass of wood-chip brown”—a colossal owl, “almost too big and too comical to be a real bird”—but also fishermen stranded at sea, the hushed wilderness where deer, Amur tigers, and giant salmon roam, and the scattered human outposts where the author meets an eclectic cast of characters in search of refuge or adventure: former KGB agents, hunters, hermits, and criminals on the run. A thrilling read, Owls of the Eastern Ice invites us to reflect on the delicate balance of nature and the impact of humans on fragile ecosystems.

Owls of the Eastern Ice
Jonathan C. Slaght
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020