Nuestros antepasados

"In this volume I collect three stories that I wrote in the decade of the fifties and sixties and that have in common the fact that they are implausible and that they occur in remote times and in imaginary countries. Given these common characteristics [...], they are thinks that they constitute what is usually called a "cycle", better said, a "closed cycle" [...]. It is a good opportunity for me to read them again and try to answer questions that until now had eluded each time I had asked myself: why have I written these stories? What did I want to say? What have I actually said? What sense does this type of narrative have in the framework of current literature? [... ] I wanted to make a trilogy of experiences about how to realize oneself as human beings: in The Nonexistent Knight, the conquest of being; in The Demediated Viscount, the aspiration to feel complete above the mutilations imposed by society; in The Baron rampant, a path towards a non-individualistic plenitude achievable through fidelity to individual self-determination: three degrees of approach to freedom. And at the same time I wanted them to be three "open" stories, as they say, that, above all, stand as stories, due to the logic of the succession of their images [...]. I would like them to be seen as a family tree of the ancestors of contemporary man, in which each face hides some feature of the people around us, of you, of myself".