Lo stradone

After an absence of five years, Francesco Pecoraro returns to writing with his vitriolic pen that etches on the paper a novel that is unforgettable, digressive, moving, ruthlessly funny and deeply painful: a precise depiction of the socio-moral decline of our times.

The protagonist is a seventy-year-old retired man, a former Art History researcher with a modest civil service career behind him. From his 20th-century, middle-class, physically declining viewpoint, he tells us about his own mediocre existence and also the current life and story of a district in the City of God (Rome, although it is never mentioned): the “Road”. Within its complex social and anthropological make-up, the “Road” actually contains all the specific factors of the “stagnation” of contemporary society: social immobility, the impoverishment of the middle classes, the arrogance of politics and the nouveaux-riches, the search for status even in poverty, the war among the poor, the collapse of community values, the end of the Left and of political commitment. A decadent, feverish place where the ongoing economic crisis of the “terrible 2010s” seems to have undermined the foundations of the late-20th-century social truce and rekindles new egotism, new barriers and a new danger of totalitarianism. A novel in which practically nothing happens – the way nothing happens in our cities anymore – and yet the great story of a century of utopias and disillusionment that did happen.