IL MARE DI PALIZZI

On the backdrop of a small Calabrian town in the 1950s, an unforgettable fresco of stories and characters, in the best tradition of 20th century Italian narrative.

Selling Points

- As in Lessico Famigliare by Natalia Ginzburg, passing through Michela Murgia and Mariolina Venezia, a moving story, colourful and filled with childhood nostalgia.

- The protagonist is a part of Italy, Calabria, increasingly loved by passionate readers, shown by the success of Carmine Abate's novels.

- A breakthrough 60 year-old with surprising talent, a classic and subtle style that will certainly be noticed by critics and press.

Adela returns to Palizzi, a bright town on the Ionic coast, after many years spent in the North. Suddenly she transforms back into Adelina, the wide-eyed little girl, who used to observe life from her balcony as it happened, the town square filling with people and colours, and the bright blue sea in the distance. The same little girl who used to chase her mother's evasive love through the large rooms of the house, seeking refuge in paternal arms and trotting through town: uncle Paolo's shop, with its smell of spices, her babysitter Barbera's gloomy cottage, the magic laboratory of Olimpia the seamstress. Today Adela has returned to put together the threads of a life spent far away and to shed light within herself. Because we are all our childhood.

The letter by Ada Murolo to the Booksellers:

Dear Booksellers,

Sometimes an image is enough to take us back to the magic of childhood, the bravest period of our life. For Adela, the main character, that image is the sea, sparkling and blue, that opened up on the horizon, when, as a child, she would look from the balcony of her large house, in Palizzi, on the Ionic Sea, in a Calabria made of colors, smells and strong flavours.

This story is born from that image, that I kept inside for a long time: the story of a woman that returns, after a long time, to watch the sea again, to relive that time, a time in which all the strongest affections are born, that life then breaks or dries up. The story of Adela is the story of all of us who, deprived of their emotions due to failures in adult life, have forgotten who we really are: children.

I wrote these pages with a heart full of emotion. I hope it will transmit to all the readers and that for them too, the sea of Palizzi will become the sea of memory, stormy and infinite.

Ada Murolo