Description
Matteo is eleven years old and lives in a small town in the Spanish province, with a mother he has very little to do with and a father who is a pianist in a wheelchair who only pays attention to him when he sings with a voice that seems like a miracle, white and angelic. In the stillness of the Spanish countryside, everything changes the day his father exits the scene and his mother sends him to Naples, to his aunts, he thinks on vacation, when instead, she probably wants to get rid of him. Protected by those two bizarre aunts, obsessed with botany, music, and the numbers of the Neapolitan smorfia, and watched over by the shadows of the half-ruined family palace, he soon discovers that he belongs to the lineage of the greatest Neapolitan singer of the late seventeenth century, the (semi) castrato Matteuccio. Gifted with a talent for singing and a mysterious love for trees, which he is convinced he can decipher the language and sex of, he embarks on a physical and intimate journey into the heart of his own identity. His goal is to inhabit a body that he no longer considers foreign and to feel part of a new family that accepts and shares his path, especially if this family is made up of his inseparable Cape Verdean friend Elisangela and the femminielli who populate the streets of the historic center. Like in an opera, his voice is joined by a group of characters in transit between the underground worlds of the Neapolitan camorra, baroque opera, and the mirages of two cities united by the same root: Barcelona Naples. Always straddling music and literature, between Italian and Spanish culture, with extreme attention to language, Alessio Arena is one of the great narrators of contemporary fantastic realism, capable of linking the tragic Neapolitan and the visionary Latin American.
