“I took two elderly couples and a widower – all suffering from varying degrees of physical ailments – from the region of Lombardy, on holiday in Nice. In a Jaguar. To a four-star hotel with a list of luxury restaurants in my hand and an unlimited-account American Express card in my pocket. Amidst the gardens of Cimiez and a private clinic directed by a Daniel Auteuil lookalike, with the help of an unpublished novel by Frederic Prokosch and a magical sphere of hashish, Cesare, the story-teller, follows the tracks of Leo Meyer, the writer who discovered him in the 1980s and supported him as literary director of a famous publishing house. Leo, his lifelong friend who, after years of being mysteriously at large reappears there, in Nice, his eyes sunk into an ill-looking face, on the back seat of a taxi in transit”. This is what Piersandro Pallavicini wrote about his novel “Romanzo per signora” (2013, Feltrinelli). The text will be at the heart of the Italian-German literary meeting scheduled for Tuesday February 9 (at 7 pm) at the Italian Cultural Institute in Hamburg.
“Romanzo per signora”
The event has been organised by the Italian Cultural Institute itself, in collaboration with the publishing houses Folio Verlag and Feltrinelli. “Do you like reading? Do you like talking about literature?” – reads the invitation from the Italian Cultural Institute in Hamburg – “then it gives us great pleasure to welcome you to our literary café. Once a month, we exchange impressions, ideas and personal experiences about one or more books on the subjects chosen for each event – in Italian and in German. This time, we will be talking about `Romanzo per signora’ (German edition ‘Ausfahrt Nizza’ of Folio Verlag)”. Pallavicini’s novel is a tragic-comic tale of five elderly people who head off for a holiday in Nice in a bid to resuscitate their happiness of the past, in the present. And Pallavicini himself is expected a few days later, on February 19, at the Italian Cultural Institute, for the presentation of another book, “Una commedia italiana” (moderation and consecutive interpreting by Francesca Bravi): his latest novel (Feltrinelli, 2014).
