"The house," writes Ernesto Aloia quoting Gaston Bachelard, "is one of the most powerful integrating elements for human thoughts, memories and dreams". The house is the family home, built in stone in 1930, a village house. The family branches out into the past, gradually losing sharpness, fading 'into great forgetfulness'. Aloia's lofty writing moves between the dark chambers of the house and people's lives, presenting the reader with a fluid series of images that move like a dancer on a tightrope in a shrewd balancing act. The outcome of such a unique touch is writing that is as powerfully evocative as it is seemingly rough.

A disenchanted narrator, deeply nourished by great literature, gentle by class and not by shyness, Ernesto Aloia sets up an enchanted ambience and does so with the concreteness of stones, he presents us with a vaporous object of ghosts and does so with a keen gaze, he invites us to a lush concert and does so in mute.

Ernesto Aloia is a writer from Turin born in 1965. He published for Minimum Fax the collections Chi si ricorda di Peter Szoke? (2003) and Sacra Fame dell'Oro (2006) followed by the novels I compagni del fuoco (Rizzoli, 2007), Paesaggio con incendio (Minimum Fax, 2011) and La vita riflessa (Bompiani, 2018).

Various satellites are gravitating around Andrea Canobbio's major production, whose greatest achievement was the monumental La traversata notturna (La nave di Teseo, 2022): short, apparently simple texts which delicately touch on autobiographical points, aspects of the author's own character. This 'Portrait' is one of them. Canobbio's writing is probably the clearest and most transparent among those in our language, and this elegant but coy characteristic highlights and conceals at the same time a complexity of composition which is always ironclad and extraordinarily articulate. Beneath the veil of the declared autobiographical value, this 'Ritratto' is above all a game of concealment and discovery conducted on several levels: the author comments on his own diary written in his youth (the management of distance and proximity is exquisite), demolishing it, reconstructing it, fragmenting it and recomposing it. In this operation, Canobbio takes us inside his refined writing workshop and shows us some of his tools: the image, the photograph, the memory, the jigsaw puzzle, the box of precision instruments to apply to the confusion of chaos. This autobiographical satellite (not only 'auto' but also 'bio/graphic') can be described as a 'pearl'.

Andrea Canobbiowas born in 1962 in Turin, where he lives and works in publishing. His books are: the collection of short stories Vasi cinesi (Einaudi, 1989), with which he won the Grinzane opera prima prize and the Mondello opera prima prize; the novels Traslochi (Einaudi, 1992), Padri di padri (Einaudi, 1997), Indivisibili (Rizzoli, 2000), Strega prize finalist, Il naturale disordine delle cose (Einaudi, 2004), Brancati prize, and Tre anni luce (Feltrinelli, 2013), Mondello opera italiana prize; and finally the two short autobiographical texts Presentimento (Nottetempo, 2007) and Mostrarsi (Nottetempo, 2011). In 2022 he published the book La traversata notturna (La nave di Teseo), a finalist for the Strega Prize 2023.

Marta Cai's writing is difficult to frame: one can only be taken aback by the innovation of her style, of her thought, of her approach, and of the relationship between the word and the sense it makes. The unusual mixture of intelligence and sensoriality, the mirroring between syntactic development and perceptive gestures of this author give us these 'Brasilampi'. They are texts reminiscent of the so-called 'chronicles', short compositions without genre, epiphanies of the every day or reflections on the highest systems where everything is allowed, except the obvious, solidly present in Brazilian literature but not so codified in Europe. Marta Cai, who recently moved from Italy to Brazil,  does not tell us about Brazil, she does not force it into categories, into descriptions, into interpretations, but she allows herself to be permeated by it. She thus reaches a fascinating space, as much geographical as interior. She enters (and so we do) into an ancestral glade of non-understanding, of pre-verbal impact with what exists. She registers in its presence, like a highly sensitive seismograph, her own native illuminations, as if they were lullabies (when in fact they are vertiginous lexical and syntactic acrobatics). Thus from Brazil flash unexpected flashes, expertly set up in a hidden but powerful, circular, omnipresent structure. We cannot call them "short stories", although they are peopled by characters caught in peculiar moments; we cannot call them "chapters of a novel", although the author composes them in a unitary narrative arc; we cannot call them "sketches", although the writer also proceeds here, as in her previous works (Enti di ragione, SuiGeneris, 2019 and Centomilioni, Einaudi, 2023), with rapid angles, unexpected divarications, unpredictable coring into the depths. We can call them 'Brasilampi', and so we will.

Marta Cai was born in Canelli in 1980 and has lived for some years in Curitiba, Brazil. Some of her short stories have been published in magazines ("inutile", "il Reportage"), in anthologies (Ti racconto una canzone, Arcana 2022; Overlook loop, Collana Trema Edizioni Arcoiris 2023; Splendere ai margini, Oligo Editore 2023) and in 2019 in the collection Enti di ragione (Edizioni SuiGeneris). For Einaudi, he published Centomilioni (2023), premio Campiello finalist, and for Tetra Edizioni Tipopsicanalisi (2023).

In the monologue "Clic", by the unforgettable author of "Code", the scene is hinted at as a hospital. He exists, evoked by a mere name, which makes him a very powerful character, a certain Dr. Dickmans. The monologue speaker apparently freewheels about various themes and issues, produces his own reflections on himself, the world, the situation he is experiencing. But we follow this voice with growing disquiet, as it becomes clearer and clearer to us at every step that the narration itself is the story, not what the voice says. Indeed, the voice is often interrupted by a sign/sound, i.e. a 'click', which breaks its course just as it simultaneously breaks our mental reconstruction of the scene.
The continuous fractures are thus as much of the monologue-giver as of the reader/listener. This simple but ingenious 'click' binds us to the monologue more than any other empathic, or narrative, or visual, or experiential gimmick.

Mario Giorgi was born in Bologna in 1956. He has written texts for radio, theatre, TV. He has published "Codice" (Bollati Boringhieri 1994), "Biancaneve" (Bollati Boringhieri 1995), "Sulla torre antica" (Portofranco 1998), "23 : 59" (Rai Eri 1999), "Torpore" (Portofranco 2001), "Alter E" (Un fagiano) (:duepunti 2010), "Società del Programma Spaziale" (CS_libri 2016), "Configurazione Alieno" (CS_libri 2019), "Fiori" (Tiemme 2019).

Since her recent literary debut, this author's stylistic maturity and ability to structure the narrative in time has attracted literary attention. Francesca Zupin constructs a limpid tale in perfect balance between pain and grace. Recomposing in a kaleidoscopic sequence a forty-year period of lives, Zupin draws up a story of undercurrent loves, almost friendships, silent deaths, disenchanted relationships. However, the enchantment is actually all profound and it is made up of powerful feelings and disillusions which move beneath the characters' lives like distant, invincible magnets. The fulcrum lies in the character of Nina, a figure who will remain in the considerations she causes in readers and in their hearts. Zupin elegantly sketches the places that host these small and intimately grand affairs, the seaside town, its gentle and poignant meeting places, two balconies, a pastry shop, certain steps. With equal finesse she conjures up distant places - the United States, Germany - with departures, returns, a sailing ship, arriving letters. The confident tone of this writer's voice, a singular blend of sumptuousness and sobriety, is a new and beautiful presence in our Italian literature.

Francesca Zupin was born in Trieste. She graduated from Milan's Bocconi University and completed a master's degree at the Holden School. She works in an international scientific university in the Middle East. Her first novel Salvamento (Bollati Boringhieri Editore) was published in 2022.

Bodo lives with his mother near the Lorettoberg. Bodo and Mom work in their workshop: washing, ironing. Bodo likes ironing very much. Whenever possible, before going to sleep, he looks out of the window and the breeze coming down from the Lorettoberg comforts him. Bodo falls asleep melancholy and serene. He is simple-hearted, but has sometimes unsettling enthusiasms, kept calm pharmacologically. Bodo loves Mom. Bodo falls in love with a customer. When she and her family return to her country just over the border, Bodo's love takes over.

Franco Stelzer's mastery gives us a marvellous character, a presence that is not to be forgotten. The text, with Central European veins, is inlaid with a profoundly Italian language, as beautiful as a snow crystal. A tale whose precise and measured dose of enchantment makes the prose and its rhythm capable of painting such a creature, Bodo, adhering to her delicate dementia with all the complexity and intelligence of the voice that narrates it. His empathy towards the figure he is inventing is total, with a hint of cruel harshness that concerns Bodo, but above all, exemplarily through him, all of us. This love story is a powerful whisper. The absolute pain that runs through it, however, only comes in second, because the winner, on a knife's edge, is instead a mysterious and inalienable happiness.

Franco Stelzer was born in 1956 in Trento, where he returned to live in 2002, after long stays in Bologna and Germany. He worked for many years as a teacher of Literature at a linguistic high scool. He was a translator from German (Perutz, Ungar, Tumler, Gruenbein), he writed the volumes of short stories Ano di volpi argentate (2000), Il nostro primo, solenne, stranissimo Natale senza di lei (2003), published by Einaudi, and the novel Matematici nel sole (2009), published by Edizioni Il Maestrale. In 2018, Einuadi published his last novel Cosa diremo agli angeli.