Author:
Fabio Genovesi
Publishing house:
Mondadori
Date of publication:
14-01-2020
You know when the radio plays the song you always listened to in high school, and you imagined yourself in the future, free and happy to do whatever you wanted–well, if hearing it makes your heart clench and you eventually have to change the station, it means that in that future something didn’t go the way you dreamed.
So it is for Fabio, who is 24 years old and studying law. The subject matter does not excite him at all, but a series of circumstances led him there, and he did not have the strength to oppose it. So he proceeds wearily, until–this is 1998–to avoid compulsory military service he is sent to a priest’s hospice on top of the mountains. Here the director is a rough and moody 80-year-old former missionary who does not leave his room because he no longer cares about anything, and he treats everyone badly except Gina, a girl who thinks she is a chicken.
Different as they are, something Fabio and Don Basagni have in common: a passion for cycling. So they start watching the Giro d’Italia together, and find in Marco Pantani the embodiment of a dream. A courageous, troubled and lonely man, who confronts colossal champions whose strength lies in prudence and control of the race. Pantani, on the other hand, does not make so many calculations; he listens to his instincts and makes immense efforts that allow him to move the boundary, “the terrible boundary between the possible and the impossible, between what we would like to do and what can be done.” Thanks to this wonderful folly, Fabio and Don Basagni will find buried audacity within themselves, and they will question the solid and reliable existence they had become accustomed to enduring.
More inspired than ever, Fabio Genovesi returns to make us dream with his unique writing, which sweeps us away and moves us like a rushing wave, makes us move, smile and then laugh to tears. And he tells us what it means to believe in something. Anything. Let it be magical, however, and ignite us, propelling us forward or anywhere, with no plans or directions already mapped out. There is a risk of falling, yes, but when they play the song of our adolescence on the radio then, singing it at the top of our lungs with the windows down, we will surely fly.