Michele Mari
Tu, Sanguinosa Infanzia

Childhood is a wound that we spend the rest of our lives healing. This is the essence of the matter. That magical, cushioned, innocent period that everything contributes to snatch away from us traumatically; that piece of original innocence, of true fantasy, of pure love, of unawareness that is taken away to make room for the "real" world, the "serious" world, the "adult" world, this is the point.

So we are forced to reject, to deny the teddy bear, to abdicate from puzzles; goodbye, old nursery rhymes, beloved yellowed comic book covers; goodbye alpine songs sung by mom for us to fall asleep. Welcome to the arid reality, without dreams, of adults.

But that child remains inside us, we are the ones to preserve it, strongly anchored to our veins, our nerves, our heart. And it's enough to recover the old comics, never lost, to melt once again with emotion, to abandon ourselves to tears - sweet, sacred tears - to return, even if only pretending, to that original sincerity. What we have loved, even for a second, with that sincerity is something to hold tight, never to abandon.

Autobiographical, without a doubt: the episodes recounted actually happened and yet, reality is hyperbolically distorted - tending to exaggeration, to magnify certain details while neglecting others - as if observed through the eyes of a child, but recounted by the pen of an adult.

Touching: facing this reading is not easy, just as anything that delves into that kind of past which represents a shock, a trauma, a fracture for us, is not easy. That dawn-like sap - that VIVID sap - which is childhood, gradually coagulates, sublimates, becomes sclerotic in the personality of the adult man: this is the choice, this is the damage, this is the betrayal.

Michele Mari, exceptional contemporary writer, sophisticated literary figure, erudite professor, plunges headlong into one of the most delicate themes of the human condition, probing the origin of that wound, unearthing that unique moment of happiness in existence. It's not about Pascoli’s young lads, as he himself remembers. It's about digging, getting your hands dirty up to the elbows, within oneself, in the flesh, in the blood. And he does this with his unmistakable style: extremely direct and concise, yet simultaneously profound and unsettling, Mari offers us eleven short stories, eleven unforgettable pearls of emotion. Clear in addressing the topics, his pen becomes more elevated, cultured, and challenging the closer the topic is to him, offering the reader pages of extraordinary beauty. You can be sure that encountering a Latinism or an archaism means slipping into those more visceral and intimate zones of the author. Paradoxically, where the language becomes more difficult, there you will find the true, authentic Michele Mari.