Memè Scianca

Roberto Calasso evokes his childhood in Florence during World War II and the postwar period. A beautiful evocation of episodes from childhood in Florence in the war years and immediately after the war: a stuffed cat, the arrest of the father after the murder of the fascist intellectual Giovanni Gentile, the publisher grandfather, the American soldiers seen from a window, the first reading of Proust at the age of thirteen, the secret links with Kafka and Pasternak, the discovery of eros in some illustrations of Orlando Furioso by Doré, a couple of cafes and a drugstore, the figurines in the crib in the living room, the the smell of dust from the rubble of Por Santa María, the childish decision to be called Memè Scianca...