The sentimental and political evolution of a man between Capri and Naples during the years of the racial laws, World War II, and Eduardo De Filippo.
«The Blue Within» by Raffaele Messina, available online and in all bookstores in the «Vulcano» series (by Marlin Editore) and recently recommended by writer and screenwriter Diego De Silva among the proposals of the «Friends of Sunday» for the Strega Prize 2024, is a historical and bildungsroman as it narrates the maturation of the protagonist Domenico: his first love; the conflict with his father, a marshal of the Royal Carabinieri; his political and social formation.
«Messina writes with an ancient kindness - supported De Silva in his reasons - chasing recognizable literary models that however he has been able to make his own in a novel that is agile and aesthetically well-constructed. One follows it almost musically, with the affection of a record we listened to as children and one day pops up among papers, memories, and old photos that not even the yellowing of time has managed to fade».
The book will be presented for the first time in Naples, Tuesday, March 5 at 6:30 PM at the «Feltrinelli Bookstores» in via S. Caterina a Chiaia. After the greetings of the publisher Sante Avagliano, a literary-musical dialogue between the author and Leonardo Acone, pianist and professor at the University of Naples L'Orientale. The journalist Désirée Klain coordinates.
In the book, the concrete development of the narrative also presents aspects typical of the historical novel and the sentimental novel. The island of Capri is an ideal setting to develop and deepen both the initial stirrings of Domenico and Anita in the Piazzetta and the surrounding alleys, and the more mature unfolding of their love passion between the Blue Grotto and the Faraglioni.
In Naples, instead, based on a rigorous historiographical excavation by the author, the central part of the story takes place: the epic of a city first deceived by the myths of race and easy victory, propagated by the regime; then bent by over eight hundred Allied bombings; and finally, humiliated by the fierce Nazi occupation.
An extraordinary city, which finds in pain the strength of redemption with a popular anti-Nazi uprising (the Four Days) aimed at protecting urban infrastructure and saving its children from deportation to Germany.
Striking and intense pages are then dedicated to the condition of the Jews transferred to the forced labor camp in Tora, in the Caserta area, and to the figure of Eduardo De Filippo, who permanently returned to the city in 1944 with his own load of professional successes and private sufferings.