La condanna

Walter Veltroni returns with an intense novel, capable of telling a still current past, in which we can read against the light - and perhaps decipher, step by step, together with Giovanni - the present in which we live.

Giovanni is twenty-four years old and has crowned his dream: working in the editorial staff of a newspaper. Around him, however, there are only older colleagues, now apathetic, stunned by a profession increasingly in crisis. Except for one, Sergio Fabiani, head of the culture section, who entrusted him with the task of writing a piece on Donato Carretta, director of the prison of Regina Coeli, lynched in a wild way by the crowd in September 1944. The young journalist then immerses himself in research and excavation: under the paternal guidance of Fabiani, Giovanni takes us to the places that were the scene of the event - the Palace of Justice, the Tiber river, Regina Coeli -, shows us the testimonies of those who saw and documented that massacre, and returns it to us in a vivid, raw, real story. Who was Carretta? A fascist or an anti-fascist? Or one of the "grey zone"? With the accuracy of the reporter and the skill of the writer, Giovanni reconstructs the story of a controversial, brutal, certainly unjust condemnation. Investigating the impulses and anger that agitate the crowd of that September 1944 he sees, in Rome liberated from fascism and the Nazi occupation, the roar and hatred that move, poisonous, in today’s relationships, in communication, on social media.

Details +

Publication date: 19.03.2024
Publisher: Rizzoli
Number of Pages: 224
Country: Italy

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