Author:
Gianni Solla
Publisher:
Einaudi
Date of publication:
02-06-2026
When Lorenzo stumbles upon the nursery where he spent his childhood – a place frozen in time on the former industrial outskirts of Naples – his life seems like a catalogue of everything he has lost: his father, his wife Arianna, who left him when their children were still young, his job, his youth. Under the greenhouses and in the green aisles, nothing has changed, and the few remaining customers still call the plants by the names invented by his father – capatosta, janare, scurnose – finding in the dialect a language capable of speaking to the earth. Today, Renato runs the nursery: a weary yet patient man who never misses an opportunity for a joke, with a past that perhaps deserves to be told. For Lorenzo, working with him feels more like an inevitability than a choice. Every day at the nursery – interrupted only by breaks for a swim at the local pool – becomes a lesson in attentiveness and measure, where memory alone is not enough: one must relearn what one already knew, embrace new actions and words, admit that something, though not everything, depends on us. And whilst his friendship with Renato – made up of many gestures and no few silences – takes shape in the plan to expand the nursery, just as his father had dreamed, Lorenzo sees re-emerging around him the delicate roots that bind him to others: to his daughter Roberta, a university teaching assistant with a well established career, with whom he communicates less and less; to his son Tommy, an emerging writer trapped in his adolescence; and also to Ester, the woman who teaches to swim to young immigrant girls at the local pool. Because the stories of certain families unfold like vines, tenacious and intertwining in surprising ways.