In Italy, no more than a handful of writers are worth reading at all, whatever they write, whatever the level of success of their work. Writers who in one way or another always put something important into their work, something – as they say – to take home. I can mention Aldo Busi, Walter Siti, Francesco Permunian and several others. Among them, without a doubt: Aurelio Picca.
When I read his first collection of short stories, La foam, in the early 1990s, I wrote in the legendary weekly Il Sabato that Picca was the best pen in Italian literature. And, even though the trend of his work is irregular, I have never changed my mind. The language is special, unique, full of an understated mood but without identifying it; it is a tuber, a rhizome that grows without sowing, now with a rather cool term we would say: prime number.
And it’s always there, even when the book doesn’t seem to live up to its content. Its power resists both successful and false goals, and this is why you should always read it. This is proven by his latest book about Roma mia, I will not die again (La Nave di Teseo, page 380, 22.00) following other books such as Arsenale di Roma destroyed (2018) or Rome’s greatest criminal is my friend (2020). This is not a true novel, but rather a book written based on a gross and false literary genre, somewhere between poetic fiction (or poetic narrative) and news.
My Rome, I will never die again initially appeared as a miscellany of writings that probably belonged to different dates and moments, which Aurelio, who discovered them before him, wanted (and knew how) to eliminate the differences due to the occasional emergency (an article, a diary page, a short text for a particular magazine) in order to build, brick by brick, a great and impossible portrait of Rome.
Here, as in the other books, Aurelio searches for Rome, that is, the world, setting up an all-out duel between real, cunning, cat-like Roma who reveal themselves by wandering through neighborhoods, houses, buildings and tower blocks, beauties and ugliness, corridors, rooms, smells, biographical fragments – in short, a Rome that we can define as something normal; and the Rome that Picca’s mythopoetic memory stubbornly developed by filling it with Maseratis, motorbike riders, boxers and jewel thieves. The result was a very long series of postcards, as he called them, in which the author moved through a kind of labyrinth. He didn’t have the ambition, or even the time, to do what Balzac did with Paris – although Picca had something that Balzac had, a tendency towards taxonomic and encyclopedic delirium. But in his frantic search across Rome (everywhere, in thrift stores, in apartment blocks, at gas stations, in old gyms) is his prey finally caught, or is it just an endless chase? My answer is that screenshots exist, but not of specific faces or objects or monuments: they exist in many “situations of style” or “language” that unfold over time, suddenly, heartbreakingly, movingly, often unexpectedly in the occasional visible text. It was a majestic door that opened wide into the hut, and its consistency was pure style, pure elegance. This is the reason why I say, and repeat, that Picca’s books should always be read, in every way, because in Picca’s books we find always, and often suddenly, the greatness of Literature. Reading a book by Aurelio Picca is like a hunting trip, or like a trip to Central Italy after your satellite navigator breaks down, and the most beautiful villages in the world appear before you (I don’t know, Sorano, Pitigliano…) suddenly, where you thought there were only forests, dense hills, she-wolves, lions and loins.
One final observation. I held before me the three Picca books containing the word Rome, and I understood that they were all spin-offs of a book that had probably always existed before, but had not yet been put on paper, and as time went on it was less and less likely to be born, because Rome, like Paris, eats you alive. I understand the importance of presenting us with a Rome that is still able to save Pasolini’s memory by distinguishing itself from other Romes (I think, no less importantly, of Sandro Veronesi). But to succeed in a similar endeavor, you have to be very young, arrogant, and brilliant.
Therefore, I allow myself to say that the great masterpiece that Picca promised us from his first lines could have happened
– I really believe – but far from Rome! We need a definitive metaphor. Go to Mexico City, Tokyo, Mumbai, put your great novel there, and we will finally discover Rome: not just part of it, but all of it.
