Il fuoco nella fossa

The setting for this book is both classic and contemporary: seven characters, very different in age and social class, gather in a farmhouse outside the city to wait out a terrible epidemic. And so, to gather courage and pass the time, they begin to tell and reinvent stories. As a skilled "stage man"—a face and writer in film, television, and especially theater—Massimo Andrei manages to capture in his writing all the liveliness of the "exchange"—of jokes, anecdotes, impressions, feelings—capable of enriching both the listener and the narrator. His stories, set in unusual places and times, and consistently animated by bizarre characters, have the ability to draw the reader into a fantastical whirlwind, where we laugh and cry, win and lose, and often between the lines we even stop to think about how we are (or should be) in the world. Because behind the apparent lightness of these stories lies a clever reinvention of a great tradition of popular "cunti," which has an essential point of reference in the work of Giambattista Basile, who from 17th-century Naples influenced literature across the world.