Through the story of the tarantella, a passionate and ancient dance of celebration, courtship and healing, Gilda Policastro engages in a pressing exploration and reflection on her own evolution, a cultural, sentimental, sexual and existential evolution. In La ragnatela, each sentence encapsulates and demonstrates the writer's skill and intelligent mastery. Because it is the way it is written (the rhythm, the astonishing mixture of lexicons derived from spheres that are in themselves distant, which in her hands collide and flourish in the same paragraph, the essentiality of the writing) that makes the text astonishing: how the author managed to find an unexpected USB port in our cerebral circumvolutions is unknown, but the fact remains that the download we manage to make of so many third-contents is as quick as a spider bite.

Gilda Policastro has published, among others, the novels Il farmaco (Fandango, 2010), Cella (Marsilio, 2015), La parte di Malvasia (La Nave di Teseo, 2021) and the poetry books Non come vita (Aragno, 2013), Inattuali (Transeuropa, 2016) and La distinzione (Giulio Perrone, 2023). A lecturer in Italian Literature, he collaborates with the Molly Bloom Academy of Creative Writing in Rome and the cultural websites Le parole e le cose. Literature and Reality and Snaporaz. He has published essays on contemporary authors, including L'ultima poesia: scritture anomale e mutazioni di genere dal secondo Novecento a oggi (Mimesis, 2021).