In his Materiali onirici di un somarello marino ("Dream Materials of a Seahorse"), the author gives us what is so far his most mysterious book, an unexpected underwater tale. With fairytale-like movements, aquatic beings meet and turn away: a blue goldfish, a Pippocampo hippocampus, sponges, crabs, prawns such as Lucio, and an enigmatic seahorse named Italia. These beings move through scenery of abandoned wrecks, seabeds, tuffaceous stones, corroded metal railings mixed with molluscs, and corals. However, the tale has a painful soul, every character swim in a nightmare full of dangers (including us humans with our nets and aquariums), and nobody is master of his own direction. This is an important text to penetrate the writing of this narrator of ours, a Ligurian of hinterland and steep stones who here descends directly below the surface of the sea and shows us in the form of an apologue what moves beneath the earth's crust of stories.

Marino Magliani was born in a Ligurian valley and has spent most of his life outside Italy. Today he lives between Liguria and the Dutch coast, where he writes and translates. Writer, translator, comic book scriptwriter, his latest novel is Il bambino e le isole (66thand2nd, 2023), while his latest translation is Islario fantastico argentino (TARKA editions, 2023). Perhaps, he would never have written "The Speech of a Hippocampus" if he had not called himself Marino.