The voice of a great actor to rediscover one of the key works of twentieth-century Italian narrative.
It was in fact Toni Servillo who suggested recording in the radio studios of Naples what George Steiner defined as “one of the masterpieces of solitude in modern literature, if not of all time”, a novel of which the actor is passionate and an expert, so much so as to push him to intense explorations, if not real literary pilgrimages, “in that crows’ nest that is Nuoro”, on the trail of the world described by Satta, among the shadows of his characters, the destinies of young and old, rich and miserable, intellectuals and madmen that make up this powerful story, halfway between Spoon River and The Leopard.
A book that had no success when it was published in 1977 after the author’s death, by a publishing house specialized in legal works (Salvatore Satta was a great jurist, his monumental commentary on the Code of Civil Procedure educated generations of students), but instead aroused the enthusiasm of Giuseppe Calasso who republished it three years later. A literary case was born, translated into 17 languages.
A journey into a vanished world, in an inexorable time, suspended between archaism and modernity in which the voice of Toni Servillo guides us, on his special journey through the Italian classics of the twentieth century, which led the great actor to propose in past years the radio reading Ad alta voce of Gli indifferenti by Moravia and Il giorno della civetta by Sciascia.
