Matteo Righetto
Savana Padana

LA RECENSIONE

"Savana Padana" gives you the same effect as a glass of grappa downed in one go after a great dinner with friends in the Euganean Hills, those dinners where you gorge on bigoli in sauce, fried chicken, polenta, and fasoi e sioe. And I'm talking about the first glass of grappa of the evening, the one that goes down pleasantly but burns a little in your throat at the same time. But never mind, it's always like that with the first glass. Then it passes, and you don't care.
The plot of the novel, or long story, if you prefer, by Matteo Righetto, is the child of a Joe Lansdale drunk on grintòn, and owes much to Guy Ritchie’s first two (wonderful) films: a gang of gypsies, four ragtag goons from the Brenta underworld following an anthology-worthy boss, a strictly teròn carabiniere who goes where he shouldn't, a Chinese mobster called "the Tiger," and a statue of Saint Anthony that disappears shortly before June 13th, just when the humid and stifling heat of the Po Valley becomes unbearable. All in anticipation of a godforsaken storm.

Anyway, this book couldn't care less about the many putative fathers we could attribute to it; it's a child that's had it with the glossy worlds we see in movies and read about in books blessed by marketing, and that's why it tells everything and everyone to go to hell, or rather, in mona. For this reason, every page has something new, even when it might seem already seen or heard, for this reason, the Veneto that emerges from Matteo Righetto's pages is absolutely unprecedented and, above all, very much alive. What elevates this story with its irreverently sugarpulp flavor (a literary movement of which Righetto is one of the founders) is the emotions that arise from the many small details, inventions, characters, and situations that surprise you page after page. And then the irony, that irony that respects nothing and no one and makes you laugh heartily.

A book to be read as you would drink a glass of grappa after a great dinner with friends, as they say: quickly, without thinking too much, and having a crazy good time. And then, damn it, you tell me if old Nane isn’t right when, sitting in his usual spot under the Fausto Coppi poster at Bar Sport, he repeats desolately, "Ah, poor Italy. Ormai ze 'nda tutto ramengo!".