BOOK CLUB
« A book is a garden you can carry in your pocket »
« Un libro è come un giardino che puoi custodire in tasca »
Umberto Saba
Are you a reader? Are you passionate about Italian Literature?
If so, join our Book Club! We will meet monthly to read and discuss books written by Italian authors and translated into English. No Italian language knowledge is required; the discussions will be in English.
We will be exploring Italy through stories, characters and narrative styles, we will share our thoughts, impressions and interpretations, widening together our comprehension of the book. Marisa Castagno and Emanuele Capoano will be our guides throughout this journey.
The reading sessions take place in our splendid library, named after Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s librettist and the first professor of Italian Literature in America.
You don’t want to miss it, register below!
The reading of this month will be
The Book of Homes by Andrea Bajani
Andrea Bajani’s most recent novel, translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris, takes as its structure a list of seventy-eight “homes” (repeats allowed), each the title and premise of a brief chapter. The book flits between years, between Rome and Turin, between our protagonist’s childhood and his middle age. Throughout Bajani’s pages, architecture proves paramount. Photos of digitized floor plans float between passages. The prose looms delightfully over rooms and walls in close detail (by comparison, Bajani rarely describes a human face). But home, the book contends, is not always a place with walls. Here are some of the “homes” to which Bajani devotes a chapter: a bank account, a wedding ring, a white Fiat Panda, a soccer field whose white boundary lines have long ago faded from sight.
A finalist for Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize, The Book of Homes is a remarkable achievement: a sprawling story that unfolds across much of Italy and yet that is told within the confines of the homes of its characters-and often from the point of view of the homes themselves: the many homes that shaped our main character named “I,” though the novel is in third-person; the home of I’s childhood companion, a turtle in her shell; the final homes of two figures whose murders shattered a country: a kidnapped, murdered politician; a poet dead in the street, run over by his own car. . . Both chilling and touching, The Book of Homes is an ambitious coming-of-age story unlike any other. One that jumps from home to home, upstairs to downstairs, decade to decade, and slowly reveals the blueprints–the puzzle pieces–to a life’s story.
It is not possible to make multiple reservations with the same email address.
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