Synopsis

Milan, 1936. A young director is filming the inauguration ceremony of Palazzo Vittoria, but he quickly becomes distracted by a beautiful, restless girl with whom he explores the still-untouched apartments and discovers a bloodstain on the mosaic near the elevators. The structure of this novel is simple: 1936 is only the first image, the first movement of life at Palazzo Vittoria. Once a decade, from the economic boom to heroin, from the 2000s to the near future, the narrator casts his gaze on those rooms where new protagonists intertwine their paths. Michele, Leda, Carlo, Chiara, Luca, Marco, Vittoria: we see them young, then mature, and finally old; children are born who resemble them as children; a hundred years of imaginary lives intertwine and unravel. A game of memories, mirrors, and projections begins, turning Palazzo Vittoria—a place more real than ever—into a dreamlike and revealing setting. Massimo Coppola constructs a multilayered book, experimenting with linguistic registers and framings, blending historical fiction and Italian comedy, and recounting the fear of living that pervades our time: "a small darkness" hidden in everyone's heart, yet always on the verge of expanding and swallowing everything, like a darkening screen. Above all, this novel gives character to a key place in modern life, the apartment building, which becomes the setting for a possible "nékyia," the ancient rite for bringing the ghosts of the dead back to earth: each of them offers us their fragment of public life and private destiny, forcing us to take stock of the century from which we come, and then leaves room for a future in which perhaps building something new will still be possible.