New edition.

"Every now and then I pass under his house, and I always have the feeling that it has just rained. I don't know who lives there now: it is now a walled place. "Grandma open up, it's me." "Me who?" "Me." As a child, for me, Rome was her. Rome was Grandma's house."

At the center of this novel, the first written by Margaret Mazzantini, is the dramatic existence of a consistent and strong-willed woman who always manages to preserve her inner independence with courage and tenacity. She is Antenora, a character of great strength, the protagonist of an extraordinary and dramatic existence that begins in the early twentieth century and reaches the end of the century. Living in a male-dominated society, locked into the roles of daughter, sister, wife, mother and finally grandmother, Antenora is actually the heroine of an archaic world in which, although confined within walls, she exercises an energetic and unquestioning matriarchy. Clear and simple values, strong and exclusive feelings will make her able to face dictatorships, wars and the difficult reconstruction, never losing heart, never losing her way, indeed asserting her own primacy. Facing her death on a cold winter morning, a woman from another generation - her granddaughter - sketches a superb and evocative portrait of her. Il catino di zinco is a woman's book about women, a novel that reckons with feminism and post-feminism without mincing, without sentimentality, even with some harshness. An intense and engaging novel built around a woman who is always able to be herself despite the hostility of the world and history.