It all began in September 364 AD, with what the Greek governess Baubo dared to tell the Roman emperor Flavius Valentinianus before going to sleep. Between imperial Milan and the mysteries of Eleusis, while the Germans were being fought off at the border, in the feverish emperor's room, stories dedicated to the mysteries of the goddess Demeter and Persephone, Mother and Daughter, stories that are still unknown, were whispered. Francesca Sensini, opting for the ancestral tone that moves the act of laughter, brings its resonances to deeply sabotage our vision of the Western epochal transition from paganism to Christianity, helping us to see our cultural and anthropological continuity with the primordial world of myths from a different perspective. The combination of the feminine generative principle, universal fertility, and the tension that emerges between the darkness of power and the brightness of laughter are actions that the author performs with skilful simplicity and lightness, masterfully suggesting a fundamental and very complex shift with far-reaching emotional and cultural effects.

Francesca Sensini, writer, lecturer and researcher, is currently an associate professor of Italian Studies at the Université Côte d'Azur in Nice. Trained as a classicist, she devotes most of her research to Italian literature between the 19th and 20th centuries, studies of classical reception and gender studies in literature. Born in Genoa in 1974, after graduating in Classical Literature, she moved to France, where she continued her studies, obtaining a PhD in Italian Studies at the Paris-Sorbonne University and teaching at various universities, living first in Paris for ten years and then in Nice. Her publications include La guerra è stupida (Gammarò, 2020), Pascoli maledetto (Il Nuovo Melangolo, 2020), La lingua degli dei. L'amore per il greco antico e moderno (Il Nuovo Melangolo, 2021), La Trama di Elena (Ponte alle Grazie, 2023) and Afrodite viaggia leggera (Ponte alle Grazie, 2024).

A particular game is packaged in ‘I due’ (The Two), in which a writer and his translator clash and their miserable and admirable deeds are recounted.

An absurd and heated confrontation that germinates and proliferates in a scatological and foul-mouthed mixture: from the outset, they are opposites, yet at the same time inseparable. Two assholes desperately trying to separate, but ending up being each other's shadow, in dizzying duplications and gravitational collapses.

Dedicated by Moresco (with defenceless tenderness) to his French translator Laurent Lombard, the text, as foul-mouthed as it is metaphysically unrestrained, depicts the two through their relationship, publishing life, life in general and the afterlife, right up to the presence of an unforgettable creator, an arsehole like them, and like them grandiose in the dirty and childishly free setting that stinks and ferments here.

Antonio Moresco was born in Mantua in 1947. He has been translated into numerous languages and has established himself as a uniquely singular author on the national scene. Among his vast body of novels, essays and plays, we recall his trilogy Giochi dell'eternità (Games of Eternity), consisting of Gli esordi (The Beginnings, Feltrinelli, 1998), Canti del caos (Songs of Chaos, Feltrinelli, 2001; 2003; 2009) and Gli increati (Mondadori, 2015). His latest works include Canto di D'Arco (SEM, 2019), Chisciotte (SEM, 2020) and Canto del buio e della luce (Feltrinelli, 2024).

It all begins with a trip to Latvia. An aeroplane, a wait, a very long sentence that does not stop, made of images and sounds, of places and thoughts, of uprooting and taking possession of the alien, this sentence that sings while it tells, that sees while it closes its eyes, that takes us with it and never leaves us alone, never behind, never distracted, that however relieves us from the present and invites us to the fun of the journey, of the unexpected encounter, in a Latvia that like a sphere reflects the whole universe on its chrome surface.

Sara Fruner, born in Riva del Garda, graduated in English and specialised in literary translation. She has lived in New York for the last nine years, where she taught Italian at New York University and the Fashion Institute of Technology. Since 2025, she has been living in Florence, where she continues to teach Italian. Her debut novel, L'istante largo (Bollati Boringhieri, 2020 and 2022), which earned her second place in the 2021 Severino Cesari Opera Prima National Prize, was followed by La notte del bene (Bollati Boringhieri, 2022) and La luce laggiù (Neri Pozza, 2025). In poetry, she alternates between volumes in Italian and English: Bitter Bites from Sugar Hills (Bordighera Press, 2018), Lucciole in palmo alla notte (Supernova, 2019), La rossa goletta (Crocetti, 2024). Her articles on cinema, art and literature have appeared in the magazines La Voce di New York, CinematoGraphie, Magazzino 23 and Brick, and since 2024 she has been writing “Cine-gate”, a film review column on the culture page of Gate. Her translations of prose and poetry include works by Dionne Brand, Monique Truong, Sello Duiker, Raj Rao, Marie-Helene Bertino, Jane Hirshfield, and W. S. Merwin. She has been accepted into numerous residencies for writers and translators, including the Bogliasco Foundation, the Emily Harvey Foundation, The Studios of Key West, the Banff Centre for the Arts, Übersetzerhaus Looren, and Casa delle Traduzioni in Rome.

Approximately where the 44th parallel North intersects the 8th meridian East, there is a place of memory that Marco Drago brings to life on the page with masterly skill. Drago summons his human beings into a kind of living nativity scene that has a Brewery instead of the Child. As much as this author's writing has an immediate grasp on the reader, skimming in its snappy journeys, concrete to the point of being decoded first by bodies and only later by minds, the outcome of each of his texts contains a compressed and compact worldview and a vision of life that is painful but amused, desolate but sumptuous, sarcastic but passionate - desperate and mystical.

Drago (like all those with a pure talent for writing) is inimitable in many ways. In particular, he has a mysterious ability that allows him to totally overturn the relationship between what we mean by ‘person’ and what we mean by ‘character’, i.e. between his pages live and meet people who everything suggests were in real life (beautiful) characters. Each one with a tic, or a fantasy, or an unmentionable disappointment, or a weakness, or a stigma, or an identity adherence to transient social roles, or an invincible drive, an artistic talent to dissipate, a falling in love.

In his nativity scene, people of beautiful interiority coexist with the more drifting outcasts. All in the bowl of life and time shredder. All loved and mocked in a single gesture by the author. We readers also converge around the brewery, because we feel that there is a buried pulsation there and perceive that only a writer like Marco Drago can make it so immediate.

Dry, poignant, definitive is the finale of this small and universal Bohème.

Marco Drago is a writer, translator and radio presenter. He has published: L'amico del pazzo e altri racconti (Feltrinelli, 1998), Cronache da chissà dove (Minimum Fax, 2000), Domenica sera (Feltrinelli, 2001), Zolle (Feltrinelli, 2005), La vita moderna è rumenta (Feltrinelli, 2012), La prigione grande quanto un paese (Barbera Editore, 2013), Baladin, la birra artigianale è tutta colpa di Teo, with Teo Musso (Feltrinelli, 2013), Sesso calcio e rock and roll (Feltrinelli, 2014) and Innamorato (Bollati Boringhieri, 2023). He has translated many books from English for major Italian publishers. Between 2000 and 2025 he wrote and hosted radio programmes with Gaetano Cappa for RadioRai, Radio24 and RSI. He is part of the artistic factory Istituto Barlumen.

This is the enchanting story of a friendship between an adult and a child that begins with a shared love of comic books (Asterix, Alan Ford, Tex Willer). The adult is the author, the child is Bill Clinton, i.e. his first name is Bill Clinton (surname is another).

The story told here already in itself attracts the reader's sympathy: it is curious, original in its quiet everydayness, simultaneously and inseparably funny and serious. But since (we always tend to forget) no story exists if it is not told, it is especially important to say that it is Ugo Cornia's way of narrating that generates the enchantment. His voice, inimitable, sounds in every sentence, in every juxtaposition, in every concealed burst of intelligence. His writing, in all his texts, is a kind of song that resonates with discretion but infinite precision in our literature. It is made up of such personal timbres, melodies, prosodic trends and rhythms that this author is more identifiable than his fingerprints. It grabs you without you realising it, lulls you, leads you, bamboozles you.

Writing and voice are one and the same in Cornia, the same breath, and always when read at the same time heard. With an absolute degree of subtlety and purity, an indefinable humour little by little, unhurriedly, even wistfully, he offers us a further lens through which to observe life and experience, as if it were the precious gift of a gentle hypnotist.

Ugo Cornia was born in Carpi and lives in Modena. A graduate in philosophy from Bologna, he has taught in various high schools and has taught Italian for many years at I.I.S. Venturi in Modena. His debut novel Sulla felicità a oltranza, published in 1999 with Sellerio, placed him among the most interesting contemporary Italian narrators. His works include: Modena è piccolissima, illustrated by Giuliano Della Casa (EDT, 2009); Autobiografia della mia infanzia (Topipittori, 2010); Il professionale. Avventure scolastiche (Feltrinelli, 2012); Sono sociavole fino all'eccesso. Vita di Montaigne (Marcos y Marcos, 2015); La vita in ordine alfabetico (La Nave di Teseo, 2021) and Le storie di mia zia (Quodlibet, 2023).